Taylor Swift

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, she is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions. Swift is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Speak Now (2010) expanded her country pop sound with rock influences, and Red (2012) featured a pop-friendly production. Swift recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014); ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-imbued Reputation (2017). Through the 2010s, she accumulated the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do".

Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and re-recorded four of the first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She ventured into indie folk with the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, and dominated record charts with the electropop record Midnights (2022), the double album The Tortured Poets Department (2024), and the soft rock-tinged The Life of a Showgirl (2025). The singles "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)", "Anti-Hero", "Cruel Summer", "Is It Over Now?", "Fortnight", and "The Fate of Ophelia" topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) is the first concert tour ever to earn a billion-dollar revenue, and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023), became the highest-grossing concert film in history.

Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year five times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of the Year (2023). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards—including a record four Album of the Year wins—and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase known as Swifties.

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Italian and Irish ancestry. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music.

During childhood, Swift spent her holiday seasons on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and summers at her family's vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. Raised Christian, she attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by the Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School in Pottstown. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. At age nine, she aspired to a career in musical theater, performing at local festivals and in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions, and traveling regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she changed her goal and became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.

At the age of 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and local musician who assisted Swift with writing an original song. In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.

Swift signed to Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest signee in the publishing company's history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, who decided to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately, to make sure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.