Taylor Swift: Little Miss Perfect

Her songs may have been born in high school hallways, but their dramatics also resound with adults. Brad Paisley tells Blender, “I was looking at a lot of artists to come out on tour with us, but as soon as I downloaded her album, I knew we had to have her. I was floored by the songwriting. I love the fact that she doesn’t pretend to be 30 years old in her songs. She has a very genuine voice.” In November, she won the CMA Horizon Award—Nashville’s official welcome-to-the-A-list prize—and in February she attended the Grammys, where she presented an award, was a nominee for Best New Artist and chatted up Timbaland and Flo Rida.

It’s safe to say there has never before been a teenage bombshell beloved by the big-hat crowd, with a penchant for acoustic Beyoncé and Rihanna covers and a habit of opening her concerts by rapping a few verses of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” While the record industry continues its slow-motion implosion—and the hitmaking princesses of a previous generation stagger from the nightclub to the rehab center—Swift is looking an awful lot like the perfect 21st-century pop star.

Back in Hendersonville, Swift steers her car into the parking lot of the high school she attended for two years before she left to pursue her career full-time. “It’s so weird,” she says. “All these cars belong to my friends. They’re in class; I’m doing a magazine interview. Life is funny.”

Taylor Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in Eastern Pennsylvania, almost 800 miles north of the Grand Ole Opry. She grew up in Wyomissing and in Reading, where her family owned an 11-acre Christmas-tree farm as a secondary business. (Swift’s father, Scott, is a successful stockbroker.) She was always musical, but the eureka moment came when she was 6 and her mother brought home an album by LeAnn Rimes, a 13-year-old country phenom. An obsession was born. “I started listening to female country artists nonstop: Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Dixie Chicks. And they led me back to Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette,” she says. “I think it was the storytelling that really grabbed me.” The young Taylor got her first taste of live performance in a local children’s musical-theater company—she played Sandy in Grease and Maria in The Sound of Music—but the influence of her heroines had already seeped into her voice. “My singing sounded a lot more country than Broadway,” she recalls.

Soon, Taylor got her first guitar, practicing “until my fingers bled or my mom called me to dinner.” On weekends, she dragged her parents to karaoke bars and open-mic nights. (Her play list included “Goodbye Earl,” the Dixie Chicks hit about an abused woman who gets murderous revenge.) She also began to write her own songs. And her fascination with country music made her an outcast. “She was shunned,” says her mother, Andrea. “After school, I’d hear what nightmare had occurred that day, what awful thing was done to her. I’d have to pick her up off the floor.” The second song Taylor wrote, when she was 12, was a schoolgirl’s plaint about social ostracism, “The Outside,” which made its way onto her album six years later. “I used to sit in the back of class and watch these people and their interactions and really wish that I could be included,” Swift says. “Part of it was that they were already starting to party at ages 12 and 13—and I was playing at singer-songwriter nights ­every weekend instead.”