Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield first heard Swift’s music in the summer of 2007. At the time, Sheffield had a ritual where he’d eat lunch while watching CW Network reruns of “Clueless” and “What I Like About You.” During one such lunchbreak, the CW happened to broadcast Swift’s “Our Song” music video between those sitcoms. “I was in the kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich and totally transfixed by the song,” Sheffield recalls now, via phone from his Brooklyn, N.Y. home. “That chorus just floored me. I googled to see who the songwriter was - I was shocked it was the same person who sang it, which was so unusual for country hits in that era. I had no idea who ‘Taylor Swift’ was but I was already wondering if this brilliant song was some kind of fluke. As it turns out, the girl was just getting started. ... “You go back and listen to it now,” Sheffield says of the debut album, “and all the seeds of greatness are already there. She was going to make a great country record, and yet with all the other strains of music that she’s already working in, you can already hear that she’s a pop classicist. A song that cracks me up is ‘Should’ve Said No.’ That’s not a very country song. To me it sounds incredibly like an Oasis song - it’s definitely got the British mod feeling to it. From the very beginning, she wanted to be a country singer but with an unbelievably big appetite for the whole realm of pop music and really wanting to take inspiration from every corner of pop music history.” In hindsight, a Southern accent is much more prevalent on Swift's 2006 LP vocals, too. ... Sheffield’s favorite Swift album is 2012’s “Red.” A lifelong Clash fan, he says this is probably because it’s her most “rock” LP to date, yet he also loves the title track’s disco-banjo alchemy. He first saw Swift perform live on the singer’s “Speak Now” tour. But it was a “1989” show at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium that convinced him that she was operating in rare stratosphere. “As a performer she has that unique ability to make everyone in the audience feel seen,” Sheffield says. “She really communicates that in a way Bruce Springsteen does. It’s like seeing The Replacements in a way. I saw an afternoon all-ages hard-core Replacements show in Rhode Island when I was a teenager, and it was a thing where I felt like the guy onstage was reading my mind and reading my own diary back to me. And it’s funny all these years later, I can still have that feeling listening to a Taylor Swift song. ... I tell Sheffield that’s pretty much how fans interviewed for this story described Swift’s effect on them as teenage girls. How personal, how relatable her songs were for them. “It’s funny because I feel that way about those songs too, and I’m three times as old as she was when she wrote them,” Sheffield says with a chuckle. “That song ‘Tied Together With a Smile,’ that’s a feeling she really captures that’s not restricted to teenagers. She was already extraordinarily accomplished as a songwriter at that point. I love ‘Reputation’ and all the pop stuff and production that she does on that album. People understandably get distracted by what a celebrity she is, but just in the songwriting she is such a character. Any time she wants to, she can just sit down with the guitar and write a song that’s just unlike what anybody else does.” Fans who've been there since Swift's early days will be listening. Still hanging on every word.
Al.com
Did Taylor Swift once play a festival gig for just $1,000?
