Taylor Swift Can't Sing or Write, But That Doesn't Matter, and No I'm Not Being Mean, Part 2

When I was going to Nashville pitching songs, most of my effort was centered on new female acts. It seemed to be where my songs consistently found the most interest. At any given time, record labels had a combined six to ten acts like this and for each one they were looking for "the song," the one undeniable hit that would launch a career.

I'm trying to remember the names of these singers signed to major labels, but they all kind of blur: Catherine Britt, Lauren Lucas, Jessica Harp and many more. They were all young and gorgeous. They all had major league voices. They were all like Carrie Underwood, very nice girls with demure personalities. But how many Carrie Underwoods does the genre of country music need? The answer is one. Once Underwood's career was launched, there was no oxygen left for similar performers.

Still, the record companies insisted on developing these new singers. They'd listen to thousands of songs for each one. For reasons I never understood, they'd never put these acts on the road to generate buzz and get the singers seasoned for live performance. No, these girls would just hang in Nashville and wait a year or two to be launched on the radio.

The record companies would release play it safe singles for each of these acts that hit all the "right" buttons - songs that proclaimed that the singers were sweet country girls and proud of it - that were overproduced out the ying yang. The songs were accompanied by promotional campaigns emphasizing the girls' country bona-fides with lots of pictures of the girls sweetly posing in country settings. In every case, these girl acts instantly flopped.

It was always a mystery why these record companies kept beating this dead horse. When the act flopped they'd shake their heads and say, well girls are a tough sell. But that wasn't it at all. Girls aren't a tough sell. They just can't be sold the way country record companies usually try to sell them.

Over the time I was visiting Nashville regularly, there were four female country acts that rose to stardom. None of them fit the sweet country girl with a big voice mold. One was Jennifer Nettles aka Sugarland, who sang Mamas and Papas type songs written with her co-performer, an obviously butch Kirsten Hall. Another was a rather homely woman a little long in tooth, Gretchen Wilson, who had spent years being a top-flight demo singer, and whose songs played on her trailer trash "heritage". Then there was Miranda Lambert, a gorgeous girl with a not-so-great voice, who sang and wrote songs about shooting things, usually men.

Finally, there was Taylor Swift, who has risen higher than all those three successes I just mentioned, and who, as I noted in Part 1, invented the sub-genre of country-kiddie-pop. Her first album sold a ton. Her second album, Fearless, which was a slicker version of the first, took off in a hurry. Some of the songs were co-written with her collaborator on her first album, Liz Rose. The songs on the second album focused again and again on teen-age love. Liz Rose made sure the songs were well crafted and followed the well established rules of country radio.

The launch of Fearless was accompanied by an incredible slew of positive reviews, some in places that normally would have nothing to do with country music. Even the New Yorker called Taylor Swift a "prodigy." I didn't get this. The album was run of the mill country radio fluff. But it did fill a niche that had never been filled before. Kids loved this thing. If it hasn't happened already, Fearless will soon have achieved 10 million sales worldwide, a number that's phenomenal in today's depressed music market.

A couple of strange things happened with the promotion of this album. One was a very public brouhaha involving Kanye West at an awards show. I've actually never seen the video clip, but apparently Mr. West did something very bad and disrespectful to Ms. Swift on television and the video of their interaction went viral. Taylor Swift wasn't just a singer anymore. She was a very public and sympathetic personality.

Second, Taylor Swift sang on the Grammys in 2010 and absolutely stank. Worse yet, she sang not just one time, but twice. Even if you were inclined to be sympathetic with her mangling her first performance, you got annoyed in a hurry by bomb number two.

The fact is that Taylor Swift cannot hit her notes live. She is a studio manufactured singer who couldn't make it in the music world without Auto-tune. While these performances generated much negative publicity, most of the public is tone deaf anyway and musical ability has never been an important thing in the world of kiddie pop. From Fabian on to Britney Spears, kiddie pop is all about personality and looks, not musicality.

This month, Taylor Swift released her third album, Speak Now. She shed her collaborator on her first two albums, Liz Rose. She is now too old to be a kiddie pop singer - although she still has a big pre-teen and teen following - and so she redefined herself with Speak Now. Ms. Swift doesn't sing about high school romances. Instead Speak Now is about weddings and adventures falling in and out of love with famous movie and music hunks. Her fans can be voyeurs as they listen to Ms. Swift sing about what a rat John Mayer is or how she's sorry she broke up with Taylor Lautner. It's a reality TV show set to music.

The songs aren't very good. Without Liz Rose, Ms. Swift seems to have forgotten about the importance of a good hook, making sure a song's central theme is all about that hook, and keeping a song tightly structured. Speak Now has a bunch of messy and sloppy songs that just don't stick. Be that as it may, singing about breaking up with famous boyfriends is a time honored way for a pretty female singer to have a good career (note these two, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon). Speak Now went platinum in its first week.

Can Taylor Swift be a long-lived star? I have no idea really. It's always a mystery to me why certain stars fade and others shine bright for decades. No, Taylor Swift can't really sing, but that doesn't matter as I've noted above. Plus, she's finally discovered the value of Live Auto-tune for performances and as a result, she no longer sounds so awful on TV.

Taylor Swift can probably keep singing about losing famous boyfriends for another album or two, but then that's going to get old. She doesn't have anywhere near the talent of Joni Mitchell and can't sing nearly as well as Carly Simon, so she's going to have to rely on her personality to carry her. It is a pleasant and winsome personality. Lord knows, we could always use more pleasant and polite people in this world.

I imagine that in another three years Taylor Swift's records will start to go stiff and her career will shift to playing state fairs and whatnot. But I also note that Britney Spears - someone with less talent than Taylor Swift and a whole lot of emotional baggage and bad publicity - made something on the order of 60 million dollars last year. Madonna - who in terms of talent is at about the same level as Taylor Swift - is still an improbable big draw at the age of 52. So maybe Ms. Swift will be around singing badly about love lost for decades. Stranger things have happened.