Taylor Swift Can't Sing or Write, But That Doesn't Matter, and No I'm Not Being Mean, Part 1

If I remember correctly, I was Taylor Swift's friend number 520 or so back in the recent past when Myspace was the thing. She was about 16 and had signed a contract with a new tiny Nashville record company, Big Machine. On Myspace, she'd post tidbits about songs she was working on and hooks she had come up with. For those who don't know song lingo, a hook is a catchy musical phrase or song title that's used in the chorus. In Nashville, hooks are always song titles.

At 16, Taylor Swift was already well aware that a song lived or died on its hook. I didn't know it at the time, but she was working with and learning from a songwriter I vaguely knew, a Nashville songwriting veteran at a tiny publishing house. The writer was a suburban mom who probably related to Ms. Swift well. And clearly she was being a good mentor.

I had a lot of young female aspiring Nashville stars as friends on Myspace back then. No I wasn't being a stalker. But if you're going to write music for the Nashville market, the odds of getting a song signed to a major star are almost non-existent (when I heard from a publisher that Tim McGraw was going to record a song of mine, I felt like I was going to die and go to heaven; but neither - going to heaven nor having Tim McGraw sing my tune - happened). So the better bet - still remote - is to find talented young aspiring stars in Nashville and write songs with them. Male singers tend to think they can write songs on their own (they're usually wrong). But female singers know they can't.

The standard strategy of a songwriter in Nashville is to try to be avuncular and helpful with as many young female Nashville singers as possible and co-write with them. The hope is that one day one of them will get a record deal and record a song on her first album that you co-wrote. That approach used to be surprisingly effective - if time consuming and inefficient - for quite a few people I know.

Big Machine Records was one of many boutique labels that popped up in Nashville after the downloading-induced collapse of the record industry. Midas, Cloud 9, Broken Bow, Montage (I'm trying to remember the names of record companies I visited fairly regularly off the top of my head). A lot of rich people from god knows where who had Nashville record company dreams started labels at the time. They'd hire people to head them who had gotten laid off at RCA, Sony et al. Their chance of success was ridiculously remote.

Taylor Swift was, I think, one of three initial acts signed by Big Machine. No major label would have signed her. It's not that she was too young. It's that she can't sing. At the time, singing ability was an essential requirement for females who wanted to get signed by RCA or Curb or Warner or Capitol. You really had to have serious vocal chops. You had to sing on pitch. Major country labels had old school standards about female singers, not so much for male singers. Taylor Swift wasn't even close.

But either by luck or genius, Big Machine was on to something with Ms. Swift. Unlike any singer that came before her, she ignored the types of topics that were the staple of country music, tales of long-lasting love, hardship, nostalgia, and hard won wisdom. Instead, she sang about teen age boys in a winsome way. She and Big Machine invented a whole new sub-genre, kiddie-country-pop. And it took off.

Before Ms. Swift, the dominant market for country music was the suburban red-state mom, the kind that played CDs in her minivan while shuttling kids to soccer, baseball, dance class or whatever. Every Nashville artist and every song had to pass the suburban red-state mom litmus test. These women were the ones who bought their CDs at Walmart. And Walmart drove country music sales.

Major labels and publishing houses were well aware of the importance of the suburban red-state mom and Walmart. They were dismissive of newbies like Big Machine because they assumed rightly that little labels couldn't get the financing and credibility to push for major purchases at Walmart. The feeling was that a new record company might be able to generate a hit on radio, but if it did, CD sales depended on Walmart having at least tens of thousands of copies of the song in their warehouses three weeks before it took off. Newbies like Big Machine couldn't make that happen. They were doomed as a result.

The first song that hit the charts for Taylor Swift was a cute-kiddie-pop thing named Tim McGraw (after the singer). It was about a teen relationship that ended badly co-written with Taylor Swift's mentor; in the song, hearing Tim McGraw on the radio is supposed to trigger a memory. The song broke a cardinal rule in pop songwriting, the chorus needs to lift up. But Taylor Swift has only about a one octave singing range. It's hard to lift a song by a fourth or fifth in the chorus when the singer can only hit eight notes. Instead of lifting to maintain audience interest, the chorus in the song has a rhythmic change to separate it from the verses. This little trick has turned out to be Taylor Swift's signature style.

The song started very slowly on the country charts. Big Machine made a music video of Taylor falling in and out of love with a cute boy that was popular on CMT. It was Blue Lagoon without the sex. And they also did a very clever thing that endeared them to country music stations. There's a line in the final chorus,"some day you'll turn your radio on," in that song. Big Machine sent a personalized version of that line to every radio station; they included Ms. Swift singing the radio station's call letters in the song. It was a cute idea and Taylor Swift was cute as a button.

Slowly but surely teen and pre-teen girls started to get interested in Taylor Swift. They'd never been courted before by country music. That music was the stuff their moms listened to in their mini-vans not them. They listened to pure pop, people like Avril Lavigne, on their headphones.

Those kids liked what they heard. Tim McGraw kept rising in the charts. An album was released in the fall. On the strength of the slowly building radio play of the single, Walmart bought tons of album copies. About 40,000 CDs were sold in the first week, numbers unheard of for a boutique label. Big Machine had created an entirely new sub genre in pop music and they had that sub-genre's only practitioner. Teenage and preteen girls have a lot of disposable income. The album went platinum.

In May of 2007, rising star Taylor Swift appeared at the Academy of Country Music show in Las Vegas for the first time. I was there. Two things were obvious. One, Taylor Swift couldn't really sing. Two, she was extremely confident, poised and could easily connect with an audience.

Taylor Swift's success wouldn't depend on her music. It would depend on her message and personality. She wasn't a singer, but for lack of a better word, a "singtertainer". Her role models weren't Pasty Cline or Trish Yearwood, but performers with weak voices and big personalities like Madonna. She would have to re-invent herself every couple of years to maintain interest. And that seems to be what is happening. I'll continue this next time.