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Taylor Swift · S1 E5
Shania and the Decision
How a nine-year-old watching Shania Twain on TV decides she wants to be a country star — and what she does next.
A nine-year-old is watching a woman on television who has a cowboy hat and a midriff and is singing about exactly what she wants. The girl watches and decides: that is what I am going to do.
"Our Song" -- Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift, 2007). Her third single: fiddle-driven, rhinestone-and-denim, shot when she is sixteen. This is what Shania Twain's influence looks like filtered through a Pennsylvania girl who moved to Tennessee.
Our Song
"Our Song" is written as a freshman for a talent show at Hendersonville High School. She needs a song she can perform that night, so she writes one in her bedroom about a boy she is dating and plays it with just an acoustic guitar. It becomes her third single and her first number one on the Hot Country Songs chart, making her the youngest person to ever write and perform a solo number one country single. Shania's fingerprints are everywhere: the confident delivery, the pop-friendly melody over a country arrangement, the sense that genre boundaries are suggestions.
The Decision
By age nine, Taylor is being trained for two careers simultaneously: musical theater and country music. Broadway has audition circuits, conservatories, a clear pipeline from training to career. Country music has almost no structure for a girl from Pennsylvania, and the only evidence it can work for someone like her is a woman from Ontario who decided the genre's rules were starting positions for a negotiation.
TAP TO REVEAL: Taylor Swift's most consistent career strategy, crossing genre lines until the category breaks, comes directly from one source. Who?
“Shania Twain was the first artist who made me realize you could write your own songs and be in control of your own world. She showed me that a woman could do all of it.”
— Taylor Swift, CMT interview, 2007
Bonus Listening
"Mary's Song (Oh My My My)" (Taylor Swift, 2006). Pure narrative country songwriting in the Shania tradition: two people grow up next door, fall in love, grow old. A complete story, two characters, beginning to end, in under four minutes.
Come On Over by Shania Twain, the album Taylor has cited as her earliest musical influence, holds a specific record. What is it?
She has made the decision: country music, not theater, Nashville, not Broadway. Starting at eleven years old, she and her mother fly down every weekend with a folder of handwritten demos, and every door on Music Row stays shut.
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