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Taylor Swift · S1 E7
The Move
The Swifts leave Pennsylvania for Hendersonville, Tennessee. Taylor is fourteen. The family bets everything on one decision.
The movers come on a Tuesday, and fourteen-year-old Taylor carries the last box out of the only house she has ever lived in. She takes her guitar, and they drive south to Tennessee.
"Change" -- Taylor Swift (Fearless, 2008). Written at sixteen about being on the smallest label in Nashville, going up against every major. She is singing about the move, the bet, the thing she cannot let her parents have sacrificed for nothing.
Change
"Change" is written at sixteen about the specific situation of being on Big Machine Records, a label with fewer than ten employees, while competing for radio time with acts backed by Universal, Sony, and Warner. The lyric "and it was the night things changed" is about no single night. It is about the accumulated weight of every decision that led here: the Pennsylvania house, the RCA walkout, the Tuesday movers, the guitar in the car. In 2008, Taylor donates the song to Team USA as the official theme for the Beijing Olympics.
TAP TO REVEAL: What does the Swift family leave behind when they move to Tennessee, and what do they arrive with?
“My family moved to Nashville because of me. My dad transferred his whole life. I'm not going to let that be for nothing. That's not something you forget.”
— Taylor Swift, Rolling Stone, 2008
Hendersonville, Tennessee
Bonus Listening
"Fifteen" (Fearless, 2008). About the first year of high school in a new place: a girl who does not know anyone yet, watching everything happen around her and wondering where she fits. Written at eighteen about being fifteen in Hendersonville.
"Change," written by sixteen-year-old Taylor Swift about Big Machine Records going up against the major labels, became the official theme song for which event?
The family is in Hendersonville, and the stack of songs is larger than it has ever been. On a night in 2005, a man named Scott Borchetta sits down at a table at the Bluebird Cafe, and someone is about to play a set he will remember for the rest of his life.
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