Taylor Swift: Little Miss Perfect

"That’s Sam’s house, the one with the boat in the driveway. He’s the guy who made the unfortunate error of cheating on a songwriter. Big Mistake.”

Taylor Swift, the extravagantly blond, improbably blue-eyed, intimidatingly leggy 18-year-old star is sitting in the driver’s seat of her Lexus SC430, idling outside a two-story house on a serene side street in her hometown of Hendersonville, Tennessee. Hendersonville is a suburb of 40,000 that stretches along the northern shoreline of scenic Old Hickory Lake, just outside Nashville. There are a couple of gaudy strips near the turnpike, packed with malls and chain restaurants, but in general, it’s a lovely, leafy place, with pretty homes set back from well-manicured lawns on pleasant little streets and culs-de-sac. A bit farther outside town, the landscape turns horse-country bucolic, and the houses get much, much bigger. Swift, who offered to show Blender around Hendersonville, has already piloted the Lexus past Roy Orbison’s old mansion and a sprawling compound that once belonged to Johnny Cash.

Now, in the more middle-class section of town, we make the first stop on Taylor’s Hendersonville Boy Tour. We’re in front of Sam’s, the rake who prompted Swift to write the revenge ballad “Should’ve Said No,” one of the preternaturally catchy songs on her self-titled debut album. Not far away lives Drew, another ex, now off at ­college, who inspired two of Swift’s monster hits, her wistful debut single, “Tim McGraw,” about a thwarted summer romance between a couple who share the same favorite singer, and 2007’s No. 1 country smash “Our Song.” Swift pulls her car over. “I took my prom pictures in that backyard. I’ve totally moved on. Drew’s a great guy, but we’re not really in touch. His girlfriend”—Swift pauses for emphasis—“she’s not much of a Taylor Swift fan.”

She chuckles. “The cool thing about being a songwriter is, whatever you go through, you can write a song about it and turn it into something good for your career.”

Some teenagers pour their hearts out in diaries or on their MySpace pages. Taylor Swift has a little MySpace page of her own, of course—it recently clicked past 39 million plays. But not many teens can justifiably refer to themselves in the third person, and fewer still immortalize their confessions and crushes in hit songs. She wrote or cowrote all of her debut, and each track is melodic and witty in its description of homeroom crushes or sneaking out late with a boyfriend. Swift excels at the Drew Songs (sweetly sentimental) as well as the Sam Songs (spiked with venom). She’s the poet laureate of 10th-grade relationships, from first kisses to kissoffs.

Her debut, Taylor Swift, released by the upstart indie label Big Machine, has sold more than 2.5 million copies, thanks to an unmistakably Generation Y sound that mixes the admissions and complaints of emo—and even a little hip-hop swagger—with plucked banjos and sawing fiddles. She plays country, the last genre that actually sells records, but her songs also have pop appeal, and Universal Music, which distributes Big Machine, crossed over “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Our Song” to Top 40 radio this winter.

Although this five-foot-eleven teenager with a cute overbite looks like she should still be on the cheerleading squad, she’s not only proven her songwriting skills, she’s also honed a crack live show while opening for stars twice her age, including Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Kenny Chesney and Brad Paisley.