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CNN SPOTLIGHT

CNN Spotlight: Taylor Swift

Aired February 8, 2015 - 19:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN HOST: She's a multi-platinum power house.

FRANKIE BALLARD, MUSICIAN: And her ability to connect with people with songs is may be better than anybody ever.

PHILLIPS: Who made her name in country music.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She just had a charge in her that was twice her age.

PHILLIPS: For a decade, she's been building an empire and an image.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think that you could make an argument that Taylor is the anti-Miley.

PHILLIPS: From the branding. To the boys.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mayer, Lautner, Kennedy, Styles. She's as cute as a truckload of baby ducks.

PHILLIPS: So your advice to her then in her love life?

BIG KENNY, MUSICIAN: A shotgun. A shotgun.

PHILLIPS: She's shaking up the music world.

TAYLOR SWIFT, MUSICIAN: I really like to challenge myself musically, kind of push the envelope.

PHILLIPS: Tonight in the CNN SPOTLIGHT, the newly crowned princess of pop, Taylor Swift.

SWIFT: I can't even believe that this is real.

PHILLIPS: The Country Music Awards, November 2007.

SWIFT: I can't even believe this. This is definitely the highlight of my senior year.

(LAUGHTER)

Thank you CMA.

PHILLIPS: A big night and a big prize for Taylor Swift, nabbing the CMA Horizon Award for Best New Artist.

SWIFT: I mean, I'm not even like an adult yet legally. It's really exciting.

PHILLIPS: Barely 18 years old and owning country music, a CMA win, a platinum record and a Grammy nomination.

SWIFT: I mean, I never imagined that my life would be this magical.

PHILLIPS: Taylor Allison Swift has been writing her own fairy tale since she was born.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You want to see your daughter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's all dolled up and ready to go.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my god.

PHILLIPS: Here she is just a few days old. Taylor posted the home video for fans who preordered her latest album 1989, named for the year she was born.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't want to ever hear from this kid that we never did anything for her. Not ever.

PHILLIPS: Taylor had a privileged and idyllic childhood, both her parents had careers in finance and she and her little brother Austin were raised on a 12-acre Christmas tree farm in Redding, Pennsylvania.

Dolly Moore and her son Andrew Orth lived next door to the Swift family. Dolly baby sat Taylor for years.

DOLLY MOORE, NEIGHBOR: I didn't have a little granddaughter, so she kind of filled that space for me. I loved her beautiful almost white hair and her little clear blue eyes. You just wanted to hug her because she really was just a sweetheart.

ANDREW ORTH, PHOTOGRAPHER: She was a fantastically charismatic little child.

PHILLIPS: Orth, a professional photographer, snapped photo after photo of Taylor for more than a decade.

ORTH: Every time I took that camera and just pointed it at her, boom, boom, boom, and that's when I told her parents, this girl is going to be a superstar.

PHILLIPS: Taylor was a natural and a ham.

M. TYE COMER, EDITOR, BILLBOARD.COM: There are great videos of very, very young Taylor Swift just running around the house at 2, 3 years old, singing pop and country hits. Her hair is all over the place. You can even tell even at that young age that there was something special about her.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I love the fact that she's got stars with her name. PHILLIPS: She had grade schoolteachers Robin Klein and Nancy Boyer at

hello.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought one day I'm going to read about her, one day I'm going to vote for her, one day she's going to perform open heart surgery.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She was a very talented writer, used very colorful language, mature for a fifth grade writer.

PHILLIPS: Taylor performed in school plays, proving she had pipes, taking the lead in the local musical "Bye-Bye Birdie." Next she took on the karaoke circuit. Local country singer Pat Garrett ran the contests.

PAT GARRETT, COUNTRY SINGER: She was poised and handled the crowd quite well for an 11-year-old. I said when I was 11, I couldn't even tie my shoes, now get out of here. She got better as she went along. And in the finals, she got to open the Charlie Daniels show.

PHILLIPS: Next up --

The national anthem at a Philadelphia 76ers game.

SHIRLEY HALPERIN, MUSIC EDITOR, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: I think that that probably gave her a little taste of what superstardom is like, looking around tens of thousands of people and thinking this is what I want to do with my life.

PHILLIPS: Taylor found an audience, but she struggled socially during her middle school years.

SWIFT: I had this, you know, clique of girls that I used to hang out with and then all of a sudden they didn't want to hang out with me anymore. You know? And I don't know whether if it was because every single weekend I was at Songwriter Acoustic Nights or whether I was trying to do something completely different than what they were trying to do. But all of a sudden the friends were gone.

PHILLIPS: Singing became her salvation in these painful years. She poured her heart into her music and relentlessly lobbied her mother to take her to Music Row.

SWIFT: When I was 11 I came to Nashville and just kind of knocked on doors of record labels like my mom was like waiting in the car. And I had this little demo karaoke CD and would walk into every major record label, and I was like, hey, I'm Taylor, I'm 11, I want a record deal, call me.

PHILLIPS: The phone never rang. But Taylor didn't stop, she mastered the guitar, as seen here in her 2010 concert doc then wrote and recorded her first song.

COMER: Lucky you, she wrote it the day that she learned how to play guitar, and if you listen to that song, it is very characteristic of the way that Taylor will write songs. It's about not fitting in at school, of being the outsider.

PHILLIPS: Turning hurts into hits would become her trademark.

Coming up, Taylor's unstoppable quest for fame, the Swift family sells the farm.

GARRETT: Her dad said, well, we're going. I said yes? Well, where you going? He said Nashville. I said, how long are you going for? He said for the rest of our lives. I said what?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Summer, 2004, 14-year-old Taylor Swift and her family moved to the home of Honkytonks, big country stars and big country dreams.

HALPERIN: I think about that move to Nashville like the actresses in the '40s coming to Hollywood. You know, they step off the bus, they've got big dreams, wide eyes.

PHILLIPS: And in Taylor's case, she was also carrying some middle school angst she had turned into songs.

SWIFT: I think everybody goes through a period of time like that when you're just so alone, and instead of letting it drag me down into a downward spiral, I let music lifts me up and I wrote songs about it.

PHILLIPS: Even in a city full of talented performers, like duo Big & Rich, it quickly became clear that Taylor Swift had something special.

JOHN RICH, MUSICIAN: Some artists just -- they just got magnets on them, you know, you can just feel them when they come in.

BIG KENNY: She's got the it. She has the it.

PHILLIPS: RCA saw the it, and heard it. Signing her to a development deal which she walked away from a year later.

COMER: She had a collection of songs that she really wanted to get out there and RCA didn't think that she was ready.

PHILLIPS: She landed here, Nashville's Blue Bird Cafe, the place for aspiring singer songwriters. She was heard and quickly signed by a music executive about to launch his own company.

SWIFT: I ended up on a record label that let me write every song on my first album and I'll never forget it.

PHILLIPS: Taylor Swift's first single "Tim McGraw" dropped in June 2006.

It was from her debut album, "Taylor Swift."

SWIFT: My album is selling like freakishly amounts of -- I can't even believe like the way that it's selling right now.

COMER: The single "Our Song" went to number one on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. That made her the youngest person in history to write and perform a number one country song.

PHILLIPS: The first of many firsts. It was a platinum effort right out of the gate. She was just 16.

HALPERIN: Taylor Swift tapped into a young market that the country music industry was basically ignoring. And they were young girls.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my gosh. This is the best moment of my life.

PHILLIPS: One thing that makes Taylor Swift unique is her relationships with fans. That's thanks in part to social media.

SWIFT: MySpace has been one of the things that launched me as an artist.

BIG KENNY: She had an energy in social media that no one had really done up to that point. And yes, she was connecting with her fans because she was on there talking to them all the time.

SWIFT: Currently hanging out with my band in downtown Philadelphia.

PHILLIPS: MySpace morphed into video blogs, Instagram and Twitter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you followed her on Twitter or on Instagram, you feel like you could be best friends with Taylor Swift.

PHILLIPS: She works hard to connect with followers in the real world, too. Posting hour-long parties for randomly picked fans after every concert.

BALLARD: She would go around to everybody in the room. She'd have a conversation with them, how did you like the show.

PHILLIPS: Frankie Ballard toured with Taylor in 2011 and says nobody connects with an audience like she does.

SWIFT: Hi, Nashville.

BART HERBISON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NASHVILLE SONGWRITERS ASSOCIATION: You know, I went to Taylor's show here in Nashville a year or so ago.

SWIFT: Thank you for coming tonight.

HERBISON: I have never seen anything like it. I swear a couple of times I felt Taylor was looking at me. The energy connection and the personal connection with her audience. I would compare it to Springsteen, but it was a level above, the energy between her and the fans, it's phenomenal.

SWIFT: Good night, Nashville.

PHILLIPS: It helps that she has Bruce Springsteen's songwriting skills.

HERBISON: Taylor is one of the greatest songwriters ever to put a pencil to a piece of paper.

PHILLIPS: Many Nashville artists agree.

RICH: I go back to the song "Fifteen" that she wrote. What a knockdown lyric that is.

The first time I heard her sing it was at a little writer's night in New York City several years ago and she sang that and I went, god, it was Vince Gill, Trisha Yearwood, Taylor Swift and me. She hits "Fifteen" and Vince is going work. Trisha is like holy cow. Listen to this lyric coming out of this girl.

PHILLIPS: John Rich co-wrote this song with Taylor Swift after she called him out of the blue.

RICH: I said yes, come on over. And she pulls that guitar out and has some words already down and she starts tearing into this song "The Way I Loved You." And I said, damn, that's great. She said, yes, you like it, I said, yes, let's work on the verses. And so it was 90 minutes, two hours max, and the song was done.

PHILLIPS: "The Way I Loved You" is about dating Mr. Right while loving Mr. Wrong.

So Taylor said, I brought that idea, that title to John. He was able to relate to it. You know, he's that complicated, frustrating messy kind of guy in a relationship.

(LAUGHTER)

RICH: Yes.

BIG KENNY: There you go, John.

RICH: There you go.

PHILLIPS: Is it true?

RICH: Of course it's true. Yes.

PHILLIPS: That song along with "Fifteen" are on "Fearless." Taylor's second album.

HALPERIN: "Fearless" had her first crossover hit, which was "You Belong with Me."

PHILLIPS: And she became the first country star to ever win a VMA.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Best Female Video goes to Taylor Swift.

COMER: And as she was accepting the award, Kanye West bum-rushed the stage, grabbed the mike away from her.

KANYE WEST, SINGER: I'm really happy for you. I'm going to let you finish. But Beyonce had one of the videos of all time.

COMER: This became a media frenzy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What a jerk.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is a dope.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I just think he's an idiot, he's just a waste.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Poor Kanye got a little nuts last night.

COMER: It's the night that she went supernova. Even people who knew her in passing before, really wanted to know who this artist was.

RICH: The night I saw Kanye pulled the mike out of her hand, I felt like somebody had just disrespected my little sister.

PHILLIPS: Wow.

RICH: Like I went -- you know, if I had been in that room, I would have whooped his ass. I'd have tried.

PHILLIPS: Ahead, bad breakups have Taylor seeing red.

So your advice to her then in the love life?

BIG KENNY: A shotgun. A shotgun.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: It was early 2012, Taylor Swift's worldwide tour was anything but mean. She just won her sixth Grammy and had become one of the hottest country artists of the decade.

RICH: There's something on that girl that is bigger than she is. And when she comes in the room, you go, who is that?

PHILLIPS: Then --

Six years after launching her career in country, Swift releases "Red." An album with a whole lot of pop.

Why test the waters there? You know, she's doing so great in country?

BIG KENNY: It just had to be because she was being true to herself.

COMER: She really diversified her sound, which was not only a way for her to just expand her song writing overall, but also a way to get a new audience.

PHILLIPS: In truth, Taylor Swift style, the songs were personal and focused on a recent string of rocky romances.

COMER: "Red" is a breakup album, so songs like "I Knew You Were Trouble," "We are Never Ever Getting Back Together," are quintessential Taylor Swift songs of her taking the heartbreaks from her relationships and putting a great hook behind them and turning them into huge pop hits. PHILLIPS: The album's lead single was an instant success.

Becoming Swift's first song to ever hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

HALPERIN: The word play in those songs, they're sassy, they're meant to sort of sting a little bit. It was a little bit of like a F-U to anyone who had basically gotten in her way or in her heart's way.

PHILLIPS: Brilliant, sassy, and instantly relatable.

SWIFT: You can only hope that what you are saying resonates with people and that you're saying something that maybe helps them get through what they're going through.

A song like "I Knew You Were Trouble" where you're singing about I've fallen for the wrong person before I've gotten my heart broken. If you're heart is broken right now you're not alone.

PHILLIPS: That message clearly resonated with fans, "Red" sold 1.2 million copies in its first week. Becoming the fastest selling album in a decade.

HALPERIN: Red was massive, she was no longer just segregated to country radio, that was a really big sort of catalyst in just launching her to the stratosphere.

PHILLIPS: But personal songs about the boys she dated --

COMER: John Mayer, Taylor Lautner, Conor Kennedy, Harry Styles.

PHILLIPS: Had its downside.

COMER: She does have a tendency to have these relationships, she falls too hard, too fast, sometimes for the wrong guy for short periods of time.

PHILLIPS: Yet the bumps with the boys didn't diminish the brand.

BALLARD: Do you know how hard it would be to maintain such an image or such a reputation if you weren't that person? It would be damned near impossible.

PHILLIPS: Taylor Swift handpicked country sensation Frankie Ballard to tour with her in 2011.

BALLARD: When things go good, you get the credit and when things go bad, it's your fault. So I still think about her in the back of my head, what would Taylor do? You know? What would Taylor do?

PHILLIPS: WWTD.

BALLARD: I got it tattooed on my chest.

PHILLIPS: By 2014, Swift was ready for reinvention. She moved from Nashville to New York, and swore off the boys, something John Rich and Big Kenny fully support.

BIG KENNY: Honestly, she's too young for a man in her life. But John and I --

RICH: Listen, she's too young.

PHILLIPS: So your advice to her then in the love life?

BIG KENNY: Advice to her is a shotgun.

PHILLIPS: Swift released a new album, "1989," trading country for straight pop.

SWIFT: I think it's really important to evolve musically. I think it's easier to stay the same, but I really like to challenge myself musically and kind of push the envelope.

PHILLIPS: And if there was any risk in leaving Nashville behind, it paid off the first week of the album's release.

COMER: Not only is it the biggest week for an album in over a decade, it's also Taylor's third consecutive record to sell more than a million copies. And if that doesn't cement her as one of the biggest stars on the planet, I don't know what does.

BALLARD: All of the fans she's had with her since the beginning, then she makes a record like "1989" and of course all these people are growing up with her.

PHILLIPS: But after her evolution to pop, country music was missing her and she heard about it at the CMAs.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can't turn on the TV or open up a newspaper or click on a Web site without being reminded of the epidemic we're all facing. And of course we're talking about post-partum Taylor Swift disorder.

PHILLIPS: What do you say to the critic who say, how can you leave country behind?

RICH: Can we just get off her back for a minute? She's an artist, she's a songwriter, let her make whatever music she wants to.

PHILLIPS: And John Rich says Taylor Swift is still country at heart.

RICH: Taylor Swift can make a pop record all day long, but if you look at the lyrics, that is the way country songwriters write songs. She's a country songwriter. She knows what writing a song is all about. She knows what it means to, you know, not sand off the rough edges but put a magnifying glass on it.

PHILLIPS: And with her new single, Swift told "Good Morning America" she has an entirely new message.

SWIFT: People will find anything about you and twist it to where it's weird or wrong or annoying or strange or bad. You have to not only live your life in spite of people who don't understand you, you have to have more fun than they do.

PHILLIPS: At the moment, Taylor Swift is having a whole lot of fun. And shaking it off just fine.