As she approached the childhood milestone age of 10, the country-keen Taylor was adding pop to her musical tastes – or trying to, at least. Among the acts she listened to were Natasha Bedingfield, the Spice Girls and Hanson. Hints of these three acts can be heard on her fourth studio album, Red. She also listened to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, choreographing dance moves to their biggest hits alongside a friend of hers. Pop was not a lasting flirtation for Taylor, but it was fun while it lasted.
At the age of 10, she decided she wanted to perform. She had already taken parts in small local productions, including a male character called Freddy Fast Talk in one such play. To Taylor, the fact that the character was a guy, and a bad guy at that, made no difference. ‘I was like, “I will dress up like a guy; I want to sing that song,”’ she said. The next push in that direction came when she saw a local children’s theatre, called the Berks County Youth Theater Association, put on a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Roald Dahl classic. She loved it when she went to watch, and felt drawn to being on the stage herself. Within days she was back at the theatre to audition for a part in a forthcoming production of Annie. She impressed enough to be welcomed into the group. There, she met other youngsters who were, in an important way, like her: they had a hunger to perform and to succeed. There was plenty of competitiveness and sometimes jealousy, too, yet at least the drive of these children would give Taylor a lift, ensuring that she upped her game and remained focused. It was within these walls that Taylor’s ambitions were nurtured.
In time, she would find she had several things going for her at the BYTA: she was tall, for one thing, so she could command the stage as required for lead roles. When she first arrived there, however, she found her height to be a disadvantage – it made her stand out awkwardly among her peers. This only added to the pangs of anxiety she felt in those early days. Fortunately, she still managed to get a part in Annie, albeit a very small one in the ensemble. According to one source, practically everyone who auditioned managed to get a part in the production.
Yet the confidence she drew from her experience in Annie helped her to land her first lead role – in the well-known musical The Sound of Music. She took to the part with aplomb – so much so that, contrary to usual BYTA procedures, she was not rested for half the weekend shows. Instead, she appeared in all of them. She then landed another starring role, as Sandy in the theatre’s production of Grease.
As she performed Sandy’s songs, Taylor found that her vocals were sounding distinctly country in flavour. ‘It was all I had listened to, so I guess it was just kind of natural,’ she told the Great American Country channel. It is from this moment that the rest of her story flows: she said she decided right there that ‘country music was what I needed to be doing’.
All the while, she was serious about making a go of it in musicals. She travelled to New York to audition for roles in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Her voice teacher, Kirk Cremer, became her unofficial manager for such ventures. He had professional-looking headshots taken of Taylor and he would be at her side as she travelled to the Manhattan auditions. She would, she recalled during a chat with Inquirer Entertainment, ‘stand in line in a long hallway with a lot of people’. Later, back in her home town, she took another lead part, in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. In this play she took the role of Kim MacAfee, who has a secret crush on a rock star. This play was less successful than her previous outings and the production was struck with a number of problems. But by now she had decided that country music was her future, so she was able to cope with the disappointment.
From this realisation, she began a process that, in increasingly voluminous form, continues to this day: she sought out opportunities to sing her favourite songs in front of a live audience. This began with karaoke, initially using the theatre’s own karaoke unit. She chose songs she liked and sang them to her fellow cast members at parties, loving the experience so much that it felt like ‘my favourite thing in the world’. She received plentiful praise for her karaoke performances. One evening, as Taylor stood there belting out another country classic, someone approached her mother and said that this was what Taylor should be doing for a living. It was a sentiment that Taylor and her family increasingly felt themselves.
She just needed to get out there and sing to new audiences. One venue she turned up at was the Pat Garrett Roadhouse, where she took part in karaoke competitions. This smoky bar was an incongruous place for a pre-teen girl to be, but her parents understood what it meant to her and allowed her to go and compete, provided they were physically accompanying her every inch of the way. Although one parent at the BYTA reportedly accused Taylor’s mother and father of being that dreaded species, the ‘pushy parents’, Taylor prefers to view their encouragement as ‘empowerment’ rather than pressure.
Speaking to Country Music Television, she expanded on her view of parenting and pressure. She felt that simply telling a child that they can be whatever they want to be and that they should chase their dreams was only half of the process. The other half was for the parents to genuinely believe those sentiments – ‘My parents actually believed it,’ she said. She is clear, however, that her mother and father ‘never pushed’ her. Indeed, she added, had they done so, she would probably have been a lot less, rather than more, successful.
So she continued to turn up at Pat Garrett’s venue every week. Her parents might not have been pushy, but Taylor was – proudly so. ‘I was kind of like an annoying flag around the place,’ she told CMT News. ‘I would not leave them alone. What they would do is have these karaoke contests … I would go until I won.’ She also played her guitar at a wide range of other venues, including coffee shops, and even at Boy Scout meetings.
Her persistence paid off and further success was quickly coming her way. On one significant occasion, she won a karaoke contest singing the LeAnn Rimes song ‘Big Deal’. As part of her victory, she was given a slot opening for the country music legend Charlie Daniels. Having wowed the often-sparse audiences at her karaoke performances, Taylor then began to target larger crowds. High on her target list were sports teams who needed someone to sing the national anthem at their matches. The Reading Phillies, the local baseball outfit, were one of the first teams to invite her to sing. With a handful of performances for them under her belt, she aimed even higher. For her, this was a simple equation. ‘I figured out that if you could sing that one song, you could get in front of 20,000 people without even having a record deal,’ she would tell Rolling Stone later.
She sang at the US Open tennis tournament and then at a Philadelphia 76ers match. It was April 2002. Taylor looked marvellously patriotic as she took to the stage with a top covered in small American flags. When she looked back on the night later, she laughed at how nervous she had seemed. She was indeed ‘nervous’, she said, but she still found it to be an ‘awesome’ experience.
As she left the court after this latter performance, she saw the famous rapper Jay-Z sitting in the audience. As she walked past, he leaned in and gave the youngster a congratulatory high-five. She was so thrilled: she has said that she boasted about that encounter ‘for, like, a year straight’. What a badge of honour for a budding singer to have! Singing the national anthem became easier for her the more she did it, but she admitted that she did feel nerves when she sang at a World Series tie between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. She said the ‘challenge’ came due to the ‘utter silence that comes over 40,000 people in a baseball stadium and you’re the only one singing it’. Taylor recalled how that first moment of silence would be ‘surreal’. Then she would do what all artists yearn to do, however terrifying it can feel: she would fill the silence with her own sweet voice.
‘It was a little scary at first,’ she told Elle Girl magazine. What she would learn in time was that the best answer for nerves was simply to keep performing. ‘Every time you play another