Her isolation during her middle-school years also gave her plenty of time to focus on music. Had she still been running with the in-crowd she would have spent more time on normal schoolgirl pursuits, rather than solitary sessions with her guitar and imagination – those two dear friends who have served her so loyally ever since. The fact that she had her guitar to turn to when she was feeling low also prevented her from needing to use alcohol or drugs as a form of escape. ‘Music has always been that escape for me,’ she said.
So now Taylor looks back with gratitude at those who rejected her, recognising the gift their bullying gave her. Sadness has proved to be the most fertile creative ground for so many artists, but that inspiration comes, by definition, at a price, and being tormented and excluded was the price Taylor paid.
So imagine her huge relief when she learned that Andrea had begun to buckle in the face of her determination to move to the city of her dreams. As we have seen, however, Andrea only agreed to take Taylor to Nashville for a temporary visit to begin with. During a school holiday, Andrea took Taylor and her brother on the 650-mile trip to Nashville. Taylor would distribute her demo tape to the record labels and hope that one of them would snap her up once they heard her music.
Although Andrea sanctioned and organised the trip, she also drew a clear line in the sand over her own role within it. It was one that was supportive but strictly defined. ‘I made it really clear,’ she told TV show Teen Superstar. ‘Okay, if this is something you want, you’ve got to do it,’ she told Taylor. She added that she had never signed up to be Taylor’s manager and she certainly did not see herself as a ‘stage mom’. So she would walk only as far as the front door of the label companies with Taylor. From then on, the youngster would have to walk on alone. Remembering her pride over her own career achievements, Andrea was keen for her daughter to feel the same.
Taylor had given the demo CD a simple design. The front cover had a photograph of her face on it and the words ‘Call me’. On the back cover were her telephone number and her email address. As they drove down the road, Taylor would suddenly shriek as she saw a label. ‘That’s Mercury Records!’ she would cry. ‘Pull over! I need to give them my demo tape!’ When she arrived at the reception desk she would hand over her homemade CD and tell them, ‘Hey, I’m 11, and I want a record deal.’ Then, echoing the slogan printed on the front cover, she would add with a smile: ‘Call me!’ It was a sweet pitch, but not a finely honed one. Later, looking back at this with the advantage of time and experience, she was able to smile. She would say: ‘How did that work out for me? It didn’t!’
In the immediate wake of her trip, she was enormously disappointed when all but one of the labels she had visited failed to contact her. She waited for the phone to ring or the email to ping, but nothing happened. These were crushing days – they felt more like weeks, so slowly and emptily did they drag along. Until, one day, a man from one of the record companies rang her back to tell her that the way she was going about her pitch was unlikely to work. ‘He was so sweet,’ she recalled later.
She had thought she was special, but in time she realised that there were ‘hundreds of people’ also trying to make it in Nashville and that they all had ‘the same dream’. She realised that she was not inherently as special as she had hoped, and that she would have to make a real effort to show how much she could stand out. While this was news to her, she did not take it as bad news. Instead, she stepped up again. Taylor is usually good when there is a challenge on. ‘I thought,’ she told Teen Superstar, ‘you don’t just make it in Nashville. I’ve got to really work on something that would make me different.’
The short trip to Nashville had not reaped the immediate results that Taylor had hoped for. In fact, she would get her first attention from a major label as a result of her being spotted at one of her sporting performances by a man called Dan Dymtrow. He was then managing the career of the pop princess Britney Spears. He approached Taylor and asked if she could provide some more evidence of her talent and personality. Scott decided that the best way to do this would be for them to film a quirky home video, showing Taylor in an interesting light. ‘My dad put together this typical “dad video” type of thing, with the cat chewing the [guitar] neck and stuff like that,’ Taylor told Wood & Steel. This was enough for Dymtrow to invite her to his office, so she showed up with her trusty 12-string guitar and played some music for him.
He was impressed. But the first project he got her involved in was closer to modelling than music. She posed in Abercrombie & Fitch clothes in a shoot for Vanity Fair magazine called ‘Rising Stars’. This promotional gimmick saw the retailer link up with potential stars of the future and drape them in its autumnal range. After Dymtrow had sent them a press kit about Taylor, they invited her to take part in the shoot. In Taylor’s photos, she wore a white top with denim jeans. She portrayed a heartbroken girl, even wiping away a tear from her eye with a handkerchief. She was holding a guitar in the photos, but this was still far away from what she really wanted to do. She also worried that she was not ‘cool’ enough to be in such a position – a legacy of her school experiences, perhaps.
The irony was that she certainly was cool enough to take part, and by doing so she was showing her bullies that she could be very much the insider after all. To be part of the well-known label’s ‘Rising Stars’ campaign was a significant honour. Among those selected by Abercrombie & Fitch before they became household names were Channing Tatum, Jennifer Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher and Penn Badgley. More recently, the label has chosen Glee star Jacob Artist, American Horror Story’s Lily Rabe, Texas Chainsaw 3D’s Scott Eastwood and a slew of other young talent. Now, Taylor stands tall among this list, but at the time she felt out of her depth.
She worried about all sorts of scenarios, including her photograph being dropped from the publication. So imagine her excitement when, in July 2004, her photo appeared on the news stands in Vanity Fair magazine. There she was, featured in a full-page photograph, alongside a passage of text in which she explained to readers who she was. ‘After I sang the national anthem at the US Open last year,’ she began, ‘a top music manager signed me as his client.’ She went on to describe her love of country music: ‘I love the sound of fiddles and mandolins ringing in my ears and I love the stories that you hear in country ballads. I sometimes write about teenage love, but I am presently a 14-year-old girl without a boyfriend. Sometimes I worry that I must be wearing some kind of guy repellent, but then I realise that I’m just discovering who I am as a person.’ She concluded: ‘Right now, music is the most important thing in my life, and I want to touch people with my songs.’
She was aiming for the top but was not shy of taking on more apprentice-style roles within the country music scene. For instance, she grabbed an intern slot at the four-day CMA Music Festival, held each year by the Country Music Association in Nashville. She was handed a clipboard and set to work in an administrative role. She was entranced as she watched autograph hunters approach the stars she was serving. ‘I remember just feeling like, if there was ever a chance that one day people would line up to have me sign something of theirs, then that would be a really, really good day for me,’ she said.
Another promotional activity at this stage saw her signed-up to a compilation album assembled by the cosmetics firm Maybelline. One of her songs appeared on the album Chicks With Attitudes. Her manager then took her on a breathless tour of meetings with record labels. The tour would pay off – in a way. Meetings such as these come with a wide scale of outcomes. Sometimes, executives cannot contain their excitement for the young act in front of them. Other times, they are summarily dismissive of them. It is also far from unheard of for an act to