Honored as Woman of the Decade, at the age of 30: Taylor Swift; Birthday Special
Taylor Alison Swift, American Singer, and songwriter, who is well known for her song based on her life, and appreciated by her fans all over the world.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in Reading, Pennsylvania Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker; her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), was a homemaker who had worked as a mutual funds marketing executive. Swift, who has said she has Scottish heritage was named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor.
At age nine, Swift became interested in musical theater and performed in four BerksYouth Theatre Academy productions. She also traveled regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. Swift later shifted her focus toward country music, She spent her weekends performing at local festivals and events.
She traveled with her mother at age eleven to visit Nashville record labels and submitted a demo tape of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected, however, because “everyone in that town wanted to do what I wanted to do. So, I kept thinking to myself, I need to figure out a way to be different.”
In Nashville, Swift worked with experienced Music Row songwriters such as Troy Verges, Brett Beavers, Brett James, Mac McAnelly, and The Warren Brothers, formed a lasting working relationship with Liz Rose. They began meeting for two-hour writing sessions every Tuesday afternoon after school.
She began working on her eponymous debut album shortly after. Later after some time, Taylor Swift was released on 24, October 2006. On which The New York Times said, “a small masterpiece of pop-minded country, both wide-eyed and cynical held by Ms. Swift’s firm voice. Taylor Swift peaked at number five on the Billboard 200 albums chart in the United States, spending 157 weeks there—the longest stay on the chart by any release in the U.S. that decade. As of August 2016, the album had sold over 7.75 million copies worldwide.
Swift’s second album, Fearless, was released in 2008. Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles “Love Story” and “You belong with me”, it became the US’ best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond by the RIAA. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Swift was the sole writer of her 2010 album Speak Now, which won two Grammy Awards and was her first to debut with over a million copies in the US. Her fourth album, Red (2012), yielded her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, “We are never ever getting back together”. For her fifth album and first all-pop project, 1989 (2014), she won three Grammy Awards and became the first woman to win Album of the year twice, and the first woman in the Hot 100’s history to succeed herself at number one, with the singles “Shake It Off’ and “Blank Space”. Her sixth album, Reputation (2017), made her the only act to have four consecutive albums sell one million copies in their first week in the US, while yielding her fifth Hot 100 number-one song, with “Look What You Made Me Do”. Her seventh album, Lover (2019), made her only the second woman in history with six consecutive number-one albums on the Billboard 200.
Having sold more than 50 million albums—including 37 million in the US—and 150 million singles, Swift is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. She has won 10 Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, six Guinness world records and is the most-awarded act at the American Music Awards (29 wins) and most-awarded woman at the Billboard Music Awards (23 wins). As a songwriter, Swift has been honored by the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Association and was included in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time list in 2015. She has appeared in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2010, 2015, 2019) and was ranked first in the Forbes Celebrity 100 (2016 and 2019), further being the youngest to be featured in the magazine’s listing of the 100 most powerful women (2015). In 2019, placed Swift at number eight on its list of “Greatest of All-Time Artists”—the highest for an artist that debuted in the 21st century—and named her Woman of the Decade (the 2010s), while the American Music Awards named her Artist of the Decade (2010s).