A Fairy Tale

She both looks younger and sounds older than a 19-year-old.

Willowy blonde Taylor Swift hurls her feelings at you like a heart-shaped javelin, coming across as the kind of good-natured girl next door who dots her i's with little smiley faces.

But beneath the effervescence, the soda pop bubbliness, there's a self-assertiveness that belies Swift's wide-eyed charm.

This is a young lady who won a national poetry contest in the fourth grade, who started writing and performing her own songs at age 10 and who, with but two albums under her belt, already has penned more tunes than Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé have in their entire careers.

We've come to expect less and less from our pop stars, male or female, settling for the kind of elaborate dance routines normally reserved for the Ice Capades, lots of hammy glamour, lip synced gigs and the perfect, plastic sheen of sexy action figures.

Sure, you've probably seen Swift's porcelain-smooth features staring back at you from the cover of this fashion rag or that while standing in the checkout line at Albertsons, but she's different than her Barbie brethren.

For instance, even though she's found fame at a relatively early age, she wasn't exactly groomed for it.

"The way I grew up, I was raised by a very realistic and practical mom," Swift says. "I would be at talent shows and festivals, and I would run into the other girls who wanted to be singers and their moms, and they would always walk up to every single new person they met and say, 'This is my daughter so-and-so, she's going to be famous some day.'

"My mom and I were always so completely opposite of that, because my mom never wanted to promise me anything that she didn't know was going to happen," Swift continues. "My mom never, ever would say things to me like, 'Don't worry, honey, you're going to be a singer some day.' She didn't know if that was true, and I didn't know, so I kind of went about it not really expecting success."

Still, it'd be hard to describe Swift's rise to an arena-filling attraction as anything but fairy tale-like.

Since issuing her triple platinum 2006 self-titled debut, Swift notched the biggest selling album of 2008 with her sophomore release, "Fearless," which spent 11 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard album chart, the longest run in nearly a decade. She became the first country artist to notch more than 2 million downloads of three different songs, laid claim to the most downloaded country song ever with her smash hit "Love Story" and is the rare act to keep posting big numbers as the music industry continues to recede saleswise.

Swift's appeal, however, is easy to discern.

Her songs are unabashedly open-hearted and near-blushworthy on some occasions, a big bundle of coming-of-age uncertainty distilled into hummable form. Her tunes are posited on a series of firsts -- first dates, first crushes, first kisses, the first day of high school -- and unlike many of her peers, Swift seldom sees herself as the object of desire. Instead, she's the self-effacing suitor, the overlooked catch, forever in pursuit of the boy who doesn't seem to know she even exists.

"All of those other girls, well, they're beautiful, but would they write a song for you?" Swift asks a would-be beau on "Hey, Stephen," a sweet-voiced little pop come-on that floats by on soft tendrils of organ.

Despite her photogenic allure, Swift always seems to see herself as the oddball stuck in English class, rolling her eyes at the cool kids.

"She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts. She's cheer captain, I'm on the bleachers," Swift sighs on the banjo-flecked "You Belong With Me."

In this way, Swift strives to be more relatable than most stars of her magnitude.

Few of us know what it feels like to be a pop pinup, but who can call themselves a stranger to unrequited love?

Ultimately, it's this longing that colors much of Swift's catalog. She trades in vulnerability, but stops short of being overwhelmed by it.

If there's such a thing as emo country, this would be its poster girl.

And as for the whole country thing, Swift belongs to that crowd largely in name only, as her sprightly, lovelorn pop has little in common with a traditional honky-tonk swing other than the occasional fiddle. Still, she does embrace the genre's populist, of-the-people appeal, and because of this, she's found a home in Nashville.

Even the way Swift's built her career speaks directly to the blue-collar bona fides that country music espouses. From the time she was a freshman in high school, Swift was attending class by day and hitting the recording studio at night.

"I was living a little bit of a double life," she says. "And then, at the end of my sophomore year, I went on tour, and that's when things changed dramatically."

She's been on the road or making records ever since.

Currently, Swift's ensconced on her first headlining tour, a victory lap of sorts to commemorate the success of "Fearless."

Swift sketched the stage design that she's using for the tour while she was pretending to pay attention in school a few years back, and, incredibly enough, it's actually come to fruition.

Speaking with her these days, she still sounds like a kid in the back of class, caught up in a bunch of daydreams that have somehow become reality.

"Every day is a pleasant surprise for me," Swift says, "because I never really thought this was going to happen."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.