# Taylor Swift (album)

Taylor Swift is the debut studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released in North America on October 24, 2006, and reissued multiple times in 2007–2008, by Big Machine Records.
Swift relocated from Pennsylvania to Nashville, Tennessee at 14 to sign a songwriting contract with Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing. Her recording contract with Big Machine in 2005 enabled her to work on the album with the producer Nathan Chapman during her freshman year of high school. She wrote or co-wrote all tracks of Taylor Swift; co-writers include Robert Ellis Orrall, Brian Maher, Angelo Petraglia, and Liz Rose. Inspired by her teenage outlook on life, the lyrics address love, friendships, and insecurity. Musically, Taylor Swift is a country album with pop and pop rock elements, and its acoustic arrangements are instrumented with guitars, banjos, and fiddles.
Five songs were released as singles; "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" peaked atop the Hot Country Songs chart, and "Teardrops on My Guitar" charted in the top 10 on the Pop Songs chart. Swift embarked on a six-month radio tour in 2006 and opened tours for other country artists throughout 2006–2007. By promoting Taylor Swift via the social networking site Myspace, she reached a teenage audience that had been excluded as a target demographic for country music. Initial reviews praised the accessible production with crossover appeal and Swift's earnest depictions of adolescent feelings. Taylor Swift was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2008 Academy of Country Music Awards.
In the United States, Taylor Swift spent 24 weeks at number one on the Top Country Albums chart, became the longest-charting album of the 2000s decade on the Billboard 200, and made Swift the first female country artist to write or co-write every song on a platinum-certified debut album. It also charted and received certifications in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Taylor Swift's pop-oriented country sound and autobiographical songwriting set a blueprint for Swift's next albums and became an inspiration for other confessional singer-songwriters. Rolling Stone featured it in their 2022 list "100 Best Debut Albums of All Time".

## Background

Taylor Swift had an interest in the performing arts as a child. While acting in a children's musical theatre company, she developed a fondness for singing and would sing country songs on the company's karaoke machine during the cast parties. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she felt sure she needed to move to Nashville, Tennessee—the center of country music—to become a country singer. At 11, Swift broadened her performing capabilities by opening for Charlie Daniels and singing the national anthem of the United States at local sports games. She traveled from her hometown in Pennsylvania to Nashville with her mother to pitch demo tapes of karaoke covers to record labels, who rejected her of a recording contract, believing that her teenage songs were unfit for country music's target middle-aged demographic.
The rejections made Swift become determined to distinguish herself from other aspiring country singers. At 12, she started writing songs and learned to play the guitar with the help of a computer repairman who had fixed her family's computer. Her performance of "America the Beautiful" at the 2002 US Open caught the attention of Dan Dymtrow, a music manager who helped 13-year-old Swift get an artist development deal with RCA Records in Nashville. To assist Swift's artistic endeavors, her father transferred his job to Nashville, and her family relocated to the Nashville suburb of Hendersonville, where she enrolled in Hendersonville High School before being homeschooled after two years.

## Development and conception

Dymtrow's management led to Swift's early exposure to show business—she had an advertising tie-in with Abercrombie & Fitch, a music compilation CD with Maybelline, and a 2004 appearance in Vanity Fair. With a songwriting deal with Sony/ATV Publishing House at 14, she became the youngest signee in the publishing company's history. Swift commuted from Hendersonville to Nashville every afternoon after class to practice writing with experienced Music Row songwriters. After one year on the development deal with RCA Records, Swift performed self-written songs to the label's executives, who decided to hold her off an official contract and keep her in development until she was 18. She left the label and recalled: "I genuinely felt that I was running out of time. I'd written all these songs and I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through."
Swift invited record label executives to her showcase concert at Nashville's Bluebird Café on November 3, 2004; among the invitees was Scott Borchetta, a music executive who had working experiences at MCA Nashville and DreamWorks Records. Borchetta was planning to establish an independent record label that still needed financing. Impressed by Swift's performance, he offered to her and her parents that as soon as the label was set up, she would have a recording contract with him. Two weeks later, Swift called Borchetta to accept the offer. The label was Big Machine Records, who partnered with Universal Music Group for music distribution. According to Swift, she signed with Big Machine because the deal allowed her to write all songs that would feature in her albums. Her contract finalized by July 2005, when she ended her partnership with Dymtrow, and her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company.
Swift wrote over 40 songs for the album, and 11 made the standard edition. Seven songs were co-written by Liz Rose, who became an important collaborator and formed a lasting working relationship with Swift on later albums. According to Rose, they had productive sessions because she respected Swift's vision and did not want to put her in the "Nashville cookie-cutter songwriting mold". Robert Ellis Orrall and Angelo Petraglia co-wrote "A Place in This World", and Brian Maher co-wrote "Mary's Song (Oh My My My)" with Rose. Three tracks—"The Outside", "Should've Said No", "Our Song"—were written solely by Swift. The deluxe edition features three additional songs—"I'm Only Me When I'm with You", "Invisible", "A Perfectly Good Heart"—co-written by Orrall, Petraglia, Brett James, and Troy Verges.
After experimenting with different producers, Swift persuaded Big Machine to recruit Nathan Chapman, who had produced her demo album in a "little shed" behind the Sony/ATV offices. Big Machine was skeptical about hiring Chapman because he had never produced a commercially released studio album but conceded because Swift felt they had the "right chemistry". Before approaching Chapman, Swift conceptualized how her songs should sound: "I know exactly where I want the hook to be and [...] what instruments I want to use." He has sole production credits on all songs but one, "The Outside", which credits Orrall as the producer and Chapman as an additional producer. Recording took place for four months near the end of 2005. When the recording and production wrapped, Swift had finished her freshman year of high school.

## Themes and lyrics

Taylor Swift follows the confessional songwriting practice of country music, and its lyrics were inspired by Swift's observations and reflections to depict her adolescent perceptions of her life, revolving around romantic relationships, friendships, and self-identity; she viewed her lyrics as atypical to country music's emphasis on rural lifestyles. To capture real-time feelings in songs, she wrote anytime and anywhere, from studio sessions to school breaks. This practice resulted in straightforward lyrics that The Daily Telegraph found to have "an earnest naiveté". Narrated from the perspective of a teenage girl in an American small town, the songs have their settings confined within high-school hallways and rural backroads, resulting in a personal and contemplative tone.
Much of Taylor Swift is about teenage love, inspired by both Swift's relationships and her observations of others'. In "Tim McGraw", inspired by a senior boyfriend during her freshman year of high school, the narrator hopes that after ending the relationship and leaving for college, the boyfriend would reminisce about her every time he hears their mutual favorite song by the country singer Tim McGraw. "Stay Beautiful", addressed to a character named Cory, describes Swift's admiration for him from afar without him knowing. "Mary's Song (Oh My My My)", written in third-person perspective from the perspective of a character named Mary, portrays a love that has survived its trials and tribulations, and it ends with a marriage received by a supportive crowd. In "Our Song", which Swift wrote for her high-school talent show, her character sings about creating a song drawing from her and her boyfriend's daily experiences. Unrequited love is the theme of "Teardrops on My Guitar", in which Swift's narrator is disappointed upon learning that Drew, the boy she dreams about, is in love with another girl; and "Invisible", inspired by a childhood crush of Swift who would talk to her about other girls that he liked.
Breakup songs are also prominent on Taylor Swift. "Picture to Burn" and "Should've Said No" both depict a vengeful attitude towards boys who cheat. In "Picture to Burn", the narrator criticizes her ex-boyfriend as self-centered and lying, and she vows avenge by dating his friends and burning photographic evidence of him. Its original version included the lyric, "That's fine; I'll tell mine you're gay", but the and subsequent versions modified it to: "That's fine; You won't mind if I say." In "Should've Said No", the narrator confronts a cheating ex-lover that he should have not done so: had he declined the other girl, he might still have her without having to beg for forgiveness. "Cold as You" laments a fruitless relationship in which the lover does not appreciate the female protagonist. Swift said it was her favorite song lyrically on the album, citing its hook ("I've never been anywhere cold as you"): "I love a line in a song where afterward you're just like... burn."
In other songs, Swift sings about insecurity and self-consciousness. "The Outside", which Swift wrote at 12, describes the loneliness she felt when her love of country music alienated her from her friends at school. "A Place in This World", written by Swift at 13 when she first moved to Nashville, expresses her uncertainty about where she truly belongs. Swift wrote "Tied Together with a Smile" the day she learned one of her best friends had an eating disorder. The song describes a young girl who lacks self-esteem and disguises her inner turbulence with a smile, but Swift's character tells her that she will never overcome her struggles until she learns to love herself. In "I'm Only Me When I'm with You", Swift's narrator appreciates a loved one for their understanding, which makes her comfortable enough to share her insecurities and secrets.

## Music

Taylor Swift incorporates country music elements, including a twang in Swift's vocals and acoustic arrangements composed of guitars, fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and Dobro, instruments that conjure the roots of American folk music popular in the American South. Big Machine marketed the album to country radio, but music critics debated its genre classification. Some publications' reviews appeared in their columns for country music. Multiple others commented that the songs incorporate influences of pop, rock, and rap; Jon Caramanica from The New York Times called the overall sound "pop-minded country". Grady Smith from Rolling Stone listed "Tim McGraw", "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", and "Picture to Burn" among Swift's "countriest songs" that evoke "classic country" in their instruments and song structure. According to Maura Johnston, in her review for Pitchfork, the album is a "solid" country record, but many of its songs have a "deft melodic touch and conversational way" that make them seamlessly translatable to mainstream pop music.
The opening track "Tim McGraw" is an understated acoustic guitar–driven ballad that incorporates the '50s progression (I–vi–IV–V); its melody is defined by repeated short motifs and variations of one figure within a small pitch range, and its refrain—and to a lesser degree, its verses—extensively uses syncopation at the sixteenth-note level. According to the musicologist James E. Perone, these elements evoke diverse styles, such as the nostalgic feel of 1950s–1960s rock and roll and doo-wop, and the melodic rhythms of contemporary alternative rock and hip-hop. The genre-agnostic sound of "Tim McGraw" informs the styles of other tracks. "Picture to Burn" similarly uses syncopation at the sixteenth-note level, and Swift's vocals in the song imitate the jazz–influenced flexibility of 1970s female singer-songwriters such as Rickie Lee Jones, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell. Its arrangement features a mix of banjo, mandolin, pedal steel, and fiddle, and separate solos of banjo and electric guitar in the break.
"Teardrops on My Guitar" has a tender production composed of hushed pedal steel, subdued banjo, and a mix of acoustic and electric guitars, with a sound that critics deem adaptable into pop, rock, or country. The version released to pop radio replaced the banjo with a drum loop; Perone comments that this change transformed the track from a genre-agnostic tune to a "rather anonymous pop ballad". "A Place in This World" is built on picked banjos and features influences of 1990s alternative rock, and "Cold as You" has a slow-tempo balladic production instrumented by sorrowful fiddles. "The Outside", similar to "Tim McGraw" and "Picture to Burn", uses 1970s jazz–influenced vocal flexibility and short musical motifs that evoke alternative rock; its country rock melody alternates between syncopated phrases at the eighth-note and sixteenth-note levels. The arrangement of "Tied Together with a Smile" is composed of prominent acoustic guitars, fiddles, and Dobro, evoking folk and country arrangements.
"Stay Beautiful", similar to "Tim McGraw", follows the '50s progression; it incorporates traditional styles of folk and country. In "Should've Said No", the electric guitar tone evokes the texture of rock power ballads, while the fiddles in the introduction and break and the use of minor chords and the pentatonic scale showcase influences of Anglo-American folk music. "Mary's Song (Oh My My My)" is a mandolin–led country pop track with influences of traditional country folk. The standard album's closing track, "Our Song", is built on a banjo riff with a dynamic contrast between the verses and the refrains: the verses use repeated pitches in the lower register of Swift's vocals, with her singing at one pitch for a sustained period; the refrains emphasize the fifth scale-step with a wider-ranging melody and higher-pitched vocals, resulting in an upbeat and tuneful sound. Some critics identify elements of hip-hop and rhythmic music on the phrasings and the final refrain's compressed drums.
"I'm Only Me When I'm with You" is driven by subdued pedal steel, lively drums, and interweaving fiddles. The version included on Taylor Swift is the same as the one that Swift recorded at 14 while she was still under RCA Records' development deal; the label had rejected it because they deemed it "too pop". "Invisible" is instrumented by melancholic fiddles, and "A Perfectly Good Heart" has a balladic, country pop production.

## Release and promotion

Big Machine released "Tim McGraw" to US country radio on June 19, 2006, as Swift's debut single. Swift spent the summer of 2006 with her mother and Big Machine personnel putting CD copies of the single to pitch to radio stations across the United States. To promote the single and the album, she embarked on a six-month radio tour, continuing through the end of 2006. "Tim McGraw" peaked at number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. On the Hot Country Songs chart, the single reached the top 10 by December 2006 and peaked at number six in January 2007.
Big Machine released Taylor Swift on October 24, 2006. Swift designed doodle graphics for the album packaging. In the liner notes, Swift included hints at the subjects of her songs: in the lyrics to each track, she capitalized certain syllables that would spell out the message; she was inspired by the Beatles' practice of hiding secret messages in their records. On the day of the album's release, Swift performed live on Good Morning America and The Megan Mullally Show. She performed on America's Got Talent and Total Request Live and opened tours for other country musicians, including Rascal Flatts in October–November 2006, George Strait in January–March 2007, Brad Paisley in April–November 2007, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in July 2007.
Taylor Swift was reissued several times between 2006 and 2008, with each edition containing bonus tracks and music videos. A deluxe edition was released on November 6, 2007. It contains the three bonus tracks and a recording of Swift's first phone conversation with McGraw. Its DVD accompaniment includes the music videos of "Tim McGraw", "Teardrops on My Guitar", and "Our Song"; behind-the-scenes footage; and a home video. An "enhanced" edition was released in March 2008, containing the "pop version" of "Teardrops on My Guitar". Swift extensively used her social media profile on Myspace to communicate with her audiences, sharing her daily blogs and song information. Her online marketing strategy boosted the album's popularity among teenagers and young adults, who had been excluded as the target demographics of country music.
Four more singles were released: "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", "Picture to Burn", and "Should've Said No". "Teardrops on My Guitar" had a crossover release to pop radio; it peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached the top 10 on four of Billboard's airplay charts: Hot Country Songs, Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary, becoming Swift's first crossover success on the pop charts. "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" reached number one on Hot Country Songs. With "Our Song", Swift became the first female solo country artist to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country song. From August 2019, Big Machine re-released the Taylor Swift singles on limited-edition vinyl. This was met with backlash from Swift's fans in light of the purchase of the masters of her first six studio albums.

## Critical reception
### Reviews

Taylor Swift ratings :
| Aggregate scores ||
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 67/100 |
| Review scores ||
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic | |
| Christgau's Consumer Guide | |
| Country Weekly | |
| The Palm Beach Post | A |
| The Philadelphia Inquirer | |
| Pitchfork | 6.7/10 |
| PopMatters | 6/10 |
| Rolling Stone | |
Taylor Swift received generally positive reviews. According to critical consensus, Swift's songwriting used familiar topics but succeeded in sounding original and novel. The review aggregate site Metacritic reported five published reviews and assigned the album an aggregated score of 67 out of 100.
Laura Snapes of The Guardian said that critics were impressed by Swift's "pure yet prematurely wise" portrayals of adolescent feelings; such reviewers include Ken Rosenbaum of The Toledo Blade, Nick Cristiano of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeff Tamarkin of AllMusic, and Rolling Stone. Several critics, such as Rosebaum, Johnston, and Country Weekly's Chris Neal praised Swift's abilities to convey different emotions that made her songs connect with people of all ages, not just teenagers. Tamarkin opined that the lyrical details were sophisticated.
Reviews of the album's sound was not as uniformly positive. The Palm Beach Post's James Fontaine wrote that Taylor Swift had a musical maturity with catchy melodies that complemented the lyrical sentiments. Rosenbaum and The Morning Call's Keith Groller praised Swift's vocals, and Cristiano complimented the acoustic country sounds for showcasing the "taste and restraint of the singing and writing". Johnston considered Taylor Swift a showcase of Swift's deft musical abilities to create catchy songs from different styles and not just country.
In less complimentary reviews, Tamarkin criticized some unnecessary "gloss" to the songs, and Chrissie Dickinson of the Chicago Tribune found Taylor Swift "pleasant enough" but not groundbreaking. Writing for PopMatters, Roger Holland argued that Taylor Swift limited Swift's creative outlook to country music despite her "very obvious pop sensibilities". Robert Christgau rated the album a "cut" and selected "Tim McGraw" and "Picture to Burn" as highlights.

### Accolades and reappraisal

Taylor Swift helped Swift earn a nomination for New Female Vocalist of the Year at the 2007 Academy of Country Music Awards, a Horizon Award at the 2007 Country Music Association Awards, and a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards (2008). The album was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2008 Academy of Country Music Awards.
Retrospective reviews have remained generally favorable, praising the album for featuring Swift early songwriting strengths. According to Perone, the songs evoke high-school sentiments while being "general and vague" about the characters' ages, suggesting that they could have been written by someone more experienced in life than the teenage Swift at the time. In July 2022, Rolling Stone ranked Taylor Swift at number 32 on its list "100 Best Debut Albums of All Time".

## Commercial performance

In the United States, Taylor Swift debuted at number 19 on the Billboard 200 chart dated November 11, 2006, with first-week sales of 40,000. The album kept selling at a fairly consistent pace, contrary to the norm that albums would gradually drop in sales; it had sold one million copies by November 2007 and reached its peak at number five on the Billboard 200 chart dated January 19, 2008. By October 2009, Taylor Swift had become the longest-charting album released in the 2000s decade after spending 157 weeks on the chart. On Top Country Albums, it spent 24 nonconsecutive weeks at number one. The Recording Industry Association of America, in December 2017, certified Taylor Swift seven-times platinum for accumulating seven million album-equivalent units, and it had sold 5.871 million copies by January 2024. It made Swift the first female solo country artist to write or co-write every song on a platinum–certified debut album.
Taylor Swift peaked at number 14 in Canada and charted in several European markets, appearing on some charts years after its initial release. It peaked at numbers 81 in the United Kingdom, 59 in Ireland, 49 in Austria, 33 in Portugal, and 2 in Greece. In Asia–Pacific, the album peaked at numbers 33 in Australia, 38 in New Zealand, and 53 in Japan. Taylor Swift was certified platinum in Canada and New Zealand, double platinum in Australia, and gold in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

## Impact

   Ms. Swift ... has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. [...] She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that ... is proving to be revolutionary in country music, ... helping country reach a new audience.
When Taylor Swift was released, country music was welcoming a surge of young female artists. While Swift was part of this trend, her themes of adolescence and youth were considered novel for country music's middle-aged target demographic. Her album was met with doubts from Nashville music industry executives but its commercial success on country radio established her as one of the few successful female artists in a radio format traditionally dominated by male musicians. Its success helped the infant Big Machine Records sign Garth Brooks and Jewel to their artists cohort.
Although there were disagreements over her identity as a country artist, according to Rolling Stone, following the Dixie Chicks controversy in 2003 that left "a huge space opened up in the heart of the country audience", Swift "has completely filled it" with a country style that was as "rock-informed" as "teen-poppy". Swift's songs detailing her personal experiences and her online marketing via Myspace resonated with teenagers—a demographic that had been neglected as a target audience in country music. This broad relatability contributed to her popularity on both country and pop radio.
Many of Taylor Swift's aspects set the blueprint for Swift's later albums—the country-pop sound, the autobiographical, confessional songwriting, and the online marketing strategy on social media sites—which helped her cultivate a loyal fan base known as Swifties. Besides shaping Swift's artistry, the confessional songs about unrequited love and heartbreak inspired a subsequent generation of singer-songwriters such as Conan Gray and Olivia Rodrigo. Taylor Swift also contributed to the popularity of a modernized country-pop sound; Rolling Stone thought that the album showcased "complete mastery of a genre [that Swift] was also completely transforming".

## Track listing

All tracks are produced by Nathan Chapman, except where noted.