Through the 62nd Grammy Awards, Swift has been awarded thirty-five nominations and ten wins; she has been nominated for three Golden Globes and is the winner of a 2015 Primetime Emmy Award. How did she get to this point in her career?
With parents that have been described as adept marketers, Swift embraced music at a young age, and her parents were all too happy to help make her music dreams come true. Their proactivity meant that she was able to build a career extremely early in life.
With a career now spanning across music, film, producing, directing, and more, many ask how Swift achieved her prestigious level of fame and prominence at such a young age.
Set Up For Success
Posts from as early as 2005 exist from Swift’s old Myspace profile, putting her right around age 15 at their creation. While many parents at the time rejected and shied away from social media, Swift’s parents wasted no time in setting her up with a profile.
Swift’s former manager commented that when he began working with the family, Taylor had already been set up with a “very professional” Myspace page. This ushered in her earliest works and first fans.
Writing songs as early as twelve, Swift showed early talent and promise in music. The Swift family had so much faith in her abilities that they moved to Nashville when she was fourteen to pursue her music career.
In an interview with Time, Swift remarked that she decided to move to Nashville at ten years old; she unrelentingly pestered her parents about visiting the city.
Then finally, at fourteen, she was offered a development deal with a major record label in Nashville. Starting her career this early means that she would begin creating a large and impressive body of work.
Her 2006 album, ‘Taylor Swift’, broke the airwaves and earned her worldwide recognition.
In the U.S. the album achieved commercial success, peaking at number five on the Billboard 200, and was certified four-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.
A Career Taking Off
Since her incline in 2006, Swift has consistently been producing media for her audiences. She has two RIAA Certified Diamond items; one is her 2008 album, ‘Fearless’, and the other is her 2014 single ‘Shake it Off’.
Another interesting claim to fame was her 2009 run-in with Kanye West. His interruption of her acceptance speech for the best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards lives in infamy.
The incident became so ingrained in US pop culture memory, that the phrase ‘imma let you finish’, will always be a collectively understood inside joke. But as they say, all publicity is good publicity, especially with so many Swift sympathizers in reference to this event.
In addition to the aforementioned awards, she has also won Multi-Platinum status on fourteen of her albums and forty-nine of her singles. From 2006 through 2019, Swift was largely working on her music career, and only recently broke into the cinematic world.
Her vivid music videos have been worked on by the likes of Rodrigo Prieto, who is known for being a lead cinematographer to Martin Scorsese. Many of her more recent music videos such as ‘cardigan’ and ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ take on a very produced and picturesque quality.
The 2019 movie ‘Cats’ was a new experience for Swift, as it was one of her first major cinematic roles. Debuting as Bombalurina, Swift had a major number in the film entitled, ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat.’
Stable Beginnings & Continued Success
With the staunch support of her parents, Swift got a very early start in the entertainment business and continues to prove herself with each additional release. With a career she has been building since fourteen, she has never known any other world than show business.