Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. An influential figure in popular culture, Swift is known for her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time.
Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and debuted as a country singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008). The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" found crossover success on country and pop radio formats. Her songs began incorporating stronger rock elements with Speak Now (2010) and electronic styles with Red (2012). She subsequently recalibrated her artistic identity from country to pop with the synth-pop album 1989 (2014), while ensuing media scrutiny inspired the trap-imbued Reputation (2017). Through the 2010s, Swift accumulated the US 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 eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and re-recorded four of her first six albums due to a dispute with Big Machine. She explored indie folk on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, followed by mellower pop subgenres on Midnights (2022) and The Tortured Poets Department (2024), as well as soft rock on The Life of a Showgirl (2025). The singles "Cardigan", "Willow", "All Too Well (Taylor's Version)", "Anti-Hero", "Cruel Summer", "Is It Over Now?", "Fortnight", "The Fate of Ophelia", "Opalite", and "I Knew It, I Knew You" topped the Hot 100. Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) and its associated film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023), are the highest-grossing concert tour and concert film of all time.
Swift is the only artist to have been named the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year six times. A record eight of her albums have each sold over a million copies first-week in the US. Publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard have ranked Swift among the greatest artists of all time. She is the first individual from the arts to be named Time Person of the Year (2023) and the youngest female inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (2026). Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards—including a record four Album of the Year wins—and a Primetime Emmy Award. Swift is the most-awarded artist of the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards. A subject of extensive media coverage, she has a global fanbase known as Swifties.
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania. She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor; her parents chose a unisex name, hoping it would help her succeed in business. 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. Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor who manages her film projects. Taylor and Austin are of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Irish and Italian ancestry; they are paternal great-great-grandchildren of Charles Carmine Antonio Baldi, a prominent Philadelphia businessman. Their maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music.
During childhood, Swift spent her holiday seasons on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, and summers at her family's vacation home in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she occasionally performed acoustic songs at a local coffee shop. Raised Christian, she attended preschool and kindergarten at a Montessori school run by the Bernardine Sisters of St. Francis before transferring to the Wyndcroft School in Pottstown. When her family moved to Wyomissing, she attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School. At age nine, she aspired to a career in musical theater, performing at local festivals and in Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions, and traveling regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons. After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, she changed her goal and became determined to pursue a country music career in Nashville, Tennessee.
At the age of 11, Swift traveled to Nashville with her mother to visit record labels and submit demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers. She was rejected by all the labels, which led her to focus on songwriting. She started learning the guitar at the age of 12 with the help of a computer repairman and local musician who assisted Swift in writing an original song. In 2003, she and her parents started working with the talent manager Dan Dymtrow. With his help, Swift modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch, had an original song included on a Maybelline compilation CD, and was given an artist development deal from RCA Records at 13. To help Swift break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch's Nashville office when she was 14 years old, and the family relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee. Swift attended Hendersonville High School for two years before transferring to Aaron Academy, which offered homeschooling.
2004–2008: Career beginnings and Taylor Swift
Swift signed with Sony/ATV Tree Music Publishing in 2004; at 14, she became the youngest person in that publishing company's history. In Nashville, she worked with experienced Music Row songwriters, including Liz Rose. Rose and Swift would write songs every Tuesday afternoon after school. After one year on the development deal, she left RCA Records, which was planning to keep her in development until she turned 18. Swift made this decision because she wanted to release the songs immediately to ensure that they still resonated with her teenage experiences.
Swift organized a showcase concert at the Bluebird Cafe on November 3, 2004; among the attendees was Scott Borchetta, a music executive who was planning to establish an independent record label called Big Machine Records. She signed a recording contract with Big Machine two weeks after the concert, on the condition that her albums would be self-written; her father purchased a three-percent stake in the company. The contract was finalized by July 2005, when Swift ended her working relationship with Dymtrow. She spent four months near the end of 2005 recording her debut album, Taylor Swift, with the producer Nathan Chapman.
Swift's debut single, "Tim McGraw", was released in June 2006. She and her mother spent mid-2006 sending promotional copies of the song to country radio stations across the US. Taylor Swift was released on October 24, 2006. On the US Billboard 200 chart, the album peaked at number five and spent 157 weeks on the chart—the longest chart run by an album in the 2000s. With Taylor Swift, she became the first female country music artist to write or co-write every track on a platinum-certified debut album. Swift promoted the album with a six-month radio tour and by opening for other country artists, including Rascal Flatts in 2006, and George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in 2007. She opened for Rascal Flatts again in 2008, when she dated the singer Joe Jonas.
Taylor Swift was supported by four more singles in 2007 and 2008: "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Our Song", "Picture to Burn", and "Should've Said No". "Our Song" and "Should've Said No" reached number one on the Hot Country Songs chart; with the former single, Swift became the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country single. "Teardrops on My Guitar" was Swift's breakthrough single on mainstream radio and charts, reaching the top 10 of the Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, and Adult Contemporary charts. Her next releases were the Christmas extended play (EP) The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection in October 2007, and the Walmart-exclusive EP Beautiful Eyes in July 2008. Swift became the youngest person to be awarded with the Nashville Songwriters Association's Songwriter/Artist of the Year in 2007.