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Taylor Swift · S3 E1
Fearless
The album written at sixteen and seventeen. Released November 11, 2008. The one that changes everything.
A teenager walks into a Nashville studio with a notebook full of songs she wrote on tour buses, in hotel rooms, and backstage at other artists' concerts. The album she records will sell 592,000 copies in its first week and make her the biggest-selling artist in America.
"Fearless" -- Taylor Swift, official music video (2008). Taylor dancing in the rain with a boy, both of them soaked and laughing. The video captures the album in miniature: young, romantic, completely unashamed of how big the feelings are.
Fearless
Co-written with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey, "Fearless" is the most cinematic song Taylor has written up to this point. The production opens with a country fiddle that gives way to electric guitars and a driving drum pattern. Nathan Chapman mixes the vocal with a touch of reverb that makes her voice fill the room. Listen for how Taylor never belts the word "fearless." She almost throws it away, singing it quickly and moving on, as though being fearless is not something you announce but something you do. The restraint is the power.
The Numbers
“This album is about all the things that go through your head when you're falling in love, and all the things that go through your head when love goes wrong. I was seventeen when I wrote most of it, and that's the best age for both of those things.”
— Taylor Swift, Entertainment Weekly, November 2008
TAP TO REVEAL: What makes the production of Fearless different from every other country album released in 2008?
Bonus Listening
"The Way I Loved You" -- one of the most emotionally complex songs on the album, about choosing a safe relationship and missing the chaos of a difficult one. The lyric describes a "beautiful, wonderful" boyfriend and then admits she misses "screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain." Taylor at eighteen, already understanding that love is a contradiction.
Taylor Swift defined the word "fearless" in a specific way that became the album's philosophy. What did she say it means?
The album is a phenomenon, but one song on it will become bigger than everything else combined. She writes it in twenty minutes on her bedroom floor. Next: "Love Story," the single that crosses every border country music has ever built.
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