Yet her charisma passed down the family tree to her granddaughter. Scott has noted several similarities between his mother-in-law and Taylor. ‘The two of them had some sort of magic where they could walk into a room and remember everyone’s name,’ he said. ‘Taylor has the grace and the same physique of Andrea’s mother. Andrea’s mother had this unique quality: if she was going into a room, literally everybody loved Marjorie.’ Taylor, who remembers the ‘thrill’ of hearing her grandmother sing, also noted Marjorie’s charisma – and she liked what she saw. ‘When she would walk into a room, everyone would look at her, no matter what,’ Taylor told the Sunday Times. For young Taylor, the ‘it factor’ she identified in Marjorie gave her something that many children are scanning people for. It made her grandmother, said Taylor, ‘different from everyone else’. The youngster keenly wanted to be the same.
Yet despite this entertainment-industry heritage further up the family tree, Taylor grew up among a wholesome clan. The Swifts are a Catholic family. Taylor attended pre-school at Alvernia Montessori School, which is run by nuns. ‘She always liked to sing,’ the school’s head, Sister Anne Marie Coll, told the Reading Eagle. The family were regulars in church, and these services gave Taylor yet more experience of singing, as she joined in the hymns. When she was six years of age, Taylor began to listen to music seriously. An early artist to grab her attention was LeAnn Rimes, the country/pop singer who became famous at the age of 14.
Swift had to go her own way to discover the charms of Rimes, as that sort of music was not commonplace in the family home. Andrea, for instance, was a fan of rockier sounds, such as Def Leppard. Taylor says that her mother listened to a lot of their music when she was pregnant with her. However, the Swifts were a ‘random family when it comes to musical tastes’, which meant Taylor could find her own place within it all. ‘LeAnn Rimes was my first impression of country music,’ she told The Guardian. ‘I got her first album when I was six. I just really loved how she could be making music and having a career at such a young age.’
She also fell in love with other artists including Shania Twain and Dixie Chicks. Then she explored the history of country music, digging deep enough to discover, to her joy, older acts such as Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. She became, she said, ‘infatuated’ with the sound and the ‘storytelling’ of the genre. ‘I could relate to it. I can’t really tell you why. With me, it’s instinctual.’ At the age of 10 she was bowled over with admiration for Shania Twain. Taylor was impressed by Twain’s independent nature, and the fact that she ‘wrote all her own songs’. She told Time magazine: ‘That meant so much to me, even as a 10-year-old. Just knowing that the stories she was telling on those songs – those were her stories.’
Meanwhile, Taylor was continuing to show flashes of the same star quality that her famous ancestor possessed. Perhaps it was her grandmother who directly bequeathed Taylor her charisma. Andrea still remembers how, when Taylor was five years of age, she arranged for family photographs to be taken for Christmas cards. Her daughter was, recalled Andrea in an interview with Sugar magazine, ‘really posing’ in the snaps. So much so, in fact, that the photographer suggested that Taylor could have a career as a child model in Los Angeles. Mindful of the potentially seedy elements of that industry, Andrea decided that this was not the path she wanted her girl to follow.
Instead, Taylor continued to tread a more artistic path – but not one that was solely musical. She told the Washington Post that writing became an obsession for her from an early age. ‘Writing is pretty involuntary to me,’ she said. ‘I’m always writing.’ That obsession began with a fascination for poetry, and ‘trying to figure out the perfect combination of words, with the perfect amount of syllables and the perfect rhyme to make it completely pop off the page’. As with music, she found that poems she read would stay with her; she would replay the catchy rhymes she had read and then try and conjure up some of her own. In English classes at school, many of Taylor’s classmates would groan when the teacher asked them to write poems of their own. Not Taylor. Before she knew it, she had written three pages of rhymes. Many of these were strong efforts.
In fourth grade, she entered a national poetry contest with a piece of work she had written entitled Monster In My Closet. She was so excited to compete. It included the lines: ‘There’s a monster in my closet and I don’t know what to do / Have you ever seen him? / Has he ever pounced on you?’ It turned into a long poem and one that Taylor selected carefully from her collection. ‘I picked the most gimmicky one I had; I didn’t want to get too dark on them,’ she said. She was delighted to win and became ‘consumed’ with building on the success to write ever more impressive couplets.
She also loved stories: reading them, including The Giving Tree, a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein. First published during the 1960s, it is a story about a female tree and a male human who become friends. Taylor also enjoyed the Amelia Bedelia series, which was written by Peggy Parish and, more recently, by her nephew Herman Parish. Stories became a passion for the young Swift; she loved hearing them and telling them. ‘All I wanted to do was talk and all I wanted to do was hear stories,’ she told journalist and talk-show host Katie Couric. ‘I would drive my mom insane,’ she added. She usually refused to go to bed unless a story was read to her. ‘And I always wanted to hear a new one,’ she said. These readings lit a creative spark in the girl. Andrea remembered that Taylor ‘wrote all the time’ as a child. She believes that if her daughter had not made it as a musician she would have tried to become an author or journalist. It is conceivable that she may still take the former path. One summer, during the long holidays from school, Taylor even wrote a novel. It was a 350-page effort that she has scarcely elaborated on. But neither has she ruled out publishing it one day, so Swifties may yet get to read her story. It would be guaranteed plenty of attention and sales.
Readers should not be surprised if her novel turns out to have a dark side to it. As a kid she often dreamt up imaginary conversations and storylines involving the dead squirrels and birds that had been killed near the house by barn cats. These morbid moments suggest a darker side to her character, beneath the blonde-haired wholesome American girl. She also wrote short stories, which impressed her tutors, who felt she had a strong grasp of English far beyond her years. She credits her surroundings at the Christmas-tree farm for her creative imagination. There, as she ran free, she could ‘create stories and fairy tales out of everyday life’, she remembered.
The farm also provided some gainful employment for Taylor during her childhood. She was given a peculiar odd job – picking the eggs of praying mantises off trees. This task was important to avoid local homes becoming infested with the creatures. So she would move between the many Christmas trees and remove as many of the eggs as she could. The importance of this job was highlighted when she forgot to check the trees on one occasion and praying mantises hatched in homes around the neighbourhood. ‘There were hundreds of thousands of them,’ she recalled during an interview with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. ‘And they had little kids and they couldn’t kill them because that’d be a bad Christmas.’
However, despite mishaps such as this, she was rarely disciplined harshly as a child – mostly because she proved to be her own toughest critic, a self-disciplinarian of sorts. ‘When I was naughty as a kid, I used to send myself to my own room,’ she told the Daily Mail. Andrea was no pushover – far from it, in fact – but she hesitated to discipline Taylor because her daughter was ‘so hard on herself’. Taylor did not know at this stage what she wanted to do for a living when she grew up. She would often tell people she was going to become a stockbroker, but, despite her family heritage in that sphere, she admits that she did not even know what this meant. Friends of hers would say they wanted to become a ballerina or an astronaut. ‘And I’m, like, “I’m gonna be a financial adviser,”’ she said.
Adjusting to the realities of country life had been something of a strain for Scott and Andrea – particularly Scott, whose existence was one of stark contrasts: high-powered financial work in the