However, the agreement turned out to be not quite as exciting as she hoped. ‘A development deal is an in-between record deal,’ she told NBC. ‘It’s like a guy saying that he wants to date you but not be your boyfriend. You know, they don’t want to sign you to an actual record deal or put an album out on you. They want to watch your progress for a year.’ At 14 years of age she was being told by the label that they wanted to keep her on ice until she was 18. For a girl in her mid-teens this was unbearable – four years seemed so far away. She felt she was running out of time. For Taylor, her teenage years were not an inconvenience to get beyond before she could become a singer-songwriter. She wanted to be that creature there and then. ‘I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through,’ she recalled.
Her self-belief would soon be rewarded when her parents agreed to a more fixed move to Nashville in the wake of the RCA development. ‘My father had a job he could do from anywhere,’ she told Blender magazine. ‘My parents moved across the country so I could pursue a dream.’ Put like that, it slightly downplayed the sacrifice Scott and Andrea had made. Taylor was aware of the extent of that sacrifice, despite the fact that her parents went to some effort to minimise it. There was no pressure heaped on her, no guilt trips laid at her feet. Instead, they acted as if this was a choice they had made themselves, on their own terms.
It did not fool Taylor for a moment. She told Self magazine: ‘I knew I was the reason they were moving. But they tried to put no pressure on me. They were like, “Well, we need a change of scenery anyway,” and, “I love how friendly people in Tennessee are.”’ Crucially, they took steps to ensure that as little expectation was placed on Taylor’s shoulders as possible. With the entire family moving hundreds of miles for her, it would be easy for Taylor to feel that she had let everyone down if she were not to hit the big time. But as Andrea told Entertainment Weekly, ‘I never wanted to make that move about her “making it”.’ She feared it would be too ‘horrible’ if Taylor had not succeeded.
As she house-hunted in Nashville, Andrea found a place on Old Hickory Lane that she liked the look of. She arranged for the rest of the family to go and look at it. Scott told the Sea Ray website how quickly he was sold on it. ‘We stopped at the dock on the way to check up on the house,’ he recalled. ‘I looked down the cove toward the lake, imagined my Sea Ray tied up there and said, “I’ll take it.”’ Even the estate agent was shocked: ‘Don’t you want to see the house first?’ she asked.
He felt at home and so did his children. Taylor and Austin joined a local high school called Hendersonville. Here, to Taylor’s relief, her fellow pupils were not suspicious or envious of her musical endeavours. Quite to the contrary – they were impressed by her efforts and delighted to help her make her dreams come true. ‘Everybody was so nice to me,’ she told the New Yorker later. ‘They’re all, like, “We heard you’re a singer. We have a talent show next week – do you want to enter?”’ What a breath of fresh air for her; she could hardly believe how well the move to Nashville was turning out. It felt a world apart from the troubled existence she’d had in Pennsylvania. ‘They were so supportive,’ she recalled of her new neighbours.
She had her first ever kiss at the age of 15. However, it was a subsequent boyfriend, called Brandon Borello, who inspired her to write a song. She was in the freshman year of high school when she was asked to write a song for a ninth-grade talent-show project. ‘I was sitting there thinking, I’ve got to write an upbeat song that’s going to relate to everyone,’ she told AOL. ‘And at the time I was dating a guy and we didn’t have a song. So I wrote us one, and I played it at the show. Months later, people would come up to me and say, “I loved the song you played.” They’d only heard it once, so I thought, there must be something here.’
On her first day at school she sat down next to a girl in English class. They began to chat and quickly became close friends. The girl’s name was Abigail Anderson. They felt an instinctive bond, grounded in the fact that they both felt like outsiders but both had defined ambitions: Anderson’s was to become a professional swimmer. Finally, Taylor had a friend she could relate to on several levels. They were the outsiders who wanted to become, in the widest sense, champions. They also shared an impish sense of humour.
Anderson was not the only good thing about English classes for Taylor. A lover of words and writing, she often enjoyed these lessons enormously. Among the books that they studied in these classes was that staple feature of so many youngsters’ education: Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This classic American novel inspired her greatly. ‘You know, you hear storytelling like in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and it just … it makes your mind wander,’ she has said. ‘It makes you feel like it makes your world more vast. And you think about more things and greater concepts after you read something like that.’
After studying like any other schoolgirl during the day, in the evening she would enter a much more adult world, as she teamed up with established songwriters for creative sessions. She later described the curious duality of these days as ‘a really weird existence – I was a teenager during the day when I was at school, and then at night it was like I was 45. My mom would pick me up from school and I’d go downtown and sit and write songs with these hit songwriters.’
She told American Songwriter magazine that she realised what an opportunity these sessions were for her. Yet she was also aware that it was important for her to appear as confident as possible. ‘I knew that, being a 14-year-old girl, anybody would – understandably – think, I’m going to have to write a song for a kid today.’ She was determined that this would not happen. ‘So I would walk in with 10 or 15 almost-finished melodies or choruses. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew I was serious about it.’
Throughout her waking hours she was on the hunt for new inspiration and for the opportunity to record it. When moments of lyrical inspiration struck she would scribble down the words on whatever came to hand: her school exercise books, a tissue. This sometimes caused awkward moments. Teachers would sometimes call in a random notebook check and they would be surprised to find Taylor’s scribbled lyrics of anguish alongside her schoolwork. ‘But they learned to deal with me,’ she said. Other times a melody would come into her head. She would record it by humming it into her mobile phone. It was not unheard of for her classmates to spot – and hear – her in the toilets, humming a rough tune into her phone.
Here, we turn to a crucial difference between her new school and her old one. Previously, her fellow pupils gave her inspiration only via the cruellest and most unintentional of routes. By excluding her and bullying her, they sent Taylor into such pits of unhappiness that she would compose her way out of them. Now, however, her schoolmates offered deliberate and positive inspiration. Groups of them would join Taylor around a campfire at night and listen to her singing her songs as she strummed her guitar. These youngsters were of the age that Taylor wanted to appeal to, so they were the perfect test audience for her songs and ideas.
This obsessive documentation and regular road testing meant that Taylor turned up to her writing sessions with plenty to put on the table. There would be no question of her being a young passenger, incomplete without the patronage of those older and wiser. For instance, she wrote with a fellow composer called Liz Rose. ‘I think she ended up just writing with me because I didn’t change what she was doing,’ Rose told American Songwriter. ‘I tried to make it better and mould it and hone it, and [said] “hang on there” and “write it down”; that’s why it worked with us. I really respected her and got what she was trying to do, and I didn’t want to make her write in the Nashville cookie-cutter songwriting mould.’
Rose was impressed with her young collaborator. In time, she felt that she was little more than Taylor’s