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Taylor Swift · S2 E2
Scott Borchetta
The A&R man who is leaving Universal to start something nobody thinks will work: an independent label called Big Machine Records.
An executive at DreamWorks Nashville is about to quit his job and start an independent label that nobody in the industry thinks will survive. The first artist he signs is a fourteen-year-old girl he sees perform at the Bluebird Cafe.
"Begin Again" -- Taylor Swift, official music video (2012). Taylor walks through Paris, starting over in a city where nobody knows her name. For an episode about a man who leaves a major label to build something from nothing, and a girl who leaves RCA to bet on him, the title says everything.
Begin Again (2012)
"Begin Again" is the quietest track on Red and one of the few Taylor writes entirely alone. The production is acoustic guitar, light percussion, and a vocal that sits close to the microphone, almost conversational. It is the only song on Red that sounds like it could have been on her debut album, which is precisely why it closes the record. Listen for the lyric about wearing heels for the first time in months. Taylor has said this is a real detail from a real date, and the entire song is built from these small, specific observations. That method of converting a single concrete moment into a universal feeling is the technique she develops during the Big Machine years. Borchetta bets on it before anyone else sees it.
The Bluebird Cafe
The Bluebird Cafe on Hillsboro Pike is a sixty-seat listening room where Nashville songwriters perform in the round. The audience is expected to be silent. In late 2004, Taylor Swift plays a songwriters' showcase here, and Scott Borchetta is in the crowd. He has spent years inside the Nashville major label system, working promotions at MCA Nashville and then as SVP at DreamWorks Nashville. He is about to leave and launch his own operation.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Scott Borchetta promise Taylor that no other Nashville label would?
Cold As You -- Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift, 2006)
One of the most emotionally mature tracks on the debut, written by a fifteen-year-old. The production is spare, the lyric is precise, and the vocal performance sounds like someone twice her age. This is the kind of songwriting that made Borchetta bet the label. Listen to it knowing that Nashville's biggest labels heard the same voice and said "come back in five years."
Cold As You, Taylor Swift (2006)
Read the lyrics while you listen. The precision of these words, written by a fifteen-year-old, is exactly what convinced Borchetta to build an entire label around her.
What was Scott Borchetta doing before he founded Big Machine Records?
She has a label, a deal that lets her write, and a partner who believes in her. Now she needs songs that prove everyone else wrong. Next: the first co-written song, published at thirteen, about being excluded from every group at school.
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