Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is an American singer-songwriter. Known for her autobiographical songwriting, artistic reinventions, and cultural impact, Swift is a leading figure in popular music and the subject of widespread public interest.

Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005, starting as a country pop singer with her first two albums, Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). Their singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" were crossover successes on country and pop radio formats. She experimented with rock on Speak Now (2010) and electronic on Red (2012), later recalibrating her image from country to pop music with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014). The ensuing media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-imbued Reputation (2017); the albums contained the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do".

Shifting to Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the electropop album Lover (2019) and the autobiographical documentary Miss Americana (2020). She explored indie folk styles in the 2020 sister-albums Folklore and Evermore and subdued pop genres on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024), while also re-recording four of her albums under the (Taylor's Version) subtitle, after an ownership dispute with Big Machine. The albums garnered the U.S. number one songs "Cruel Summer", "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well", "Anti-Hero", "Is It Over Now?", and "Fortnight" in the 2020s. Her sixth concert tour, the Eras Tour (2023–2024), and its accompanying concert film are respectively the highest-grossing tour and concert film of all time; Swift became the first billionaire with music as the main source of income and the highest-grossing female touring act.

Swift is one of the world's best-selling music artists with an estimated global sale of 200 million records. Seven of her albums have opened with over one million pure sales in a week. She has been listed amongst history's greatest artists by publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Forbes, as well as the only individual from the arts to have been named the Time Person of the Year (2023). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards, 39 Billboard Music Awards, and 30 MTV Video Music Awards; she has won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year, and the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year at least four times each.

Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania, United States. She is named after singer-songwriter James Taylor. Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive briefly. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer, whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music that shaped her career. The siblings are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Italian and Irish ancestry. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

• "Taylor Swift." Wikipedia, revision of 16 September 2024. < link > Accessed 17 September 2024.
• “BEJEWELED Taylor Swift has royalty in her blood as relation to king unearthed in family tree.” Taylor, 34, is related to King Louis XIV of France, according to MyHeritage. < the-sun.com >