Taylor Swift on Songwriting, Yoga and Basketball
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9/4/2007 In anticipation of her upcoming concert in Ottawa, Canada, writer Patrick Langston of The Ottawa Citizen writes that CMA Horizon Award nominee Taylor Swift “sounds more like a friendly but efficient executive on the rise than a 17-year-old country music artist.” He adds, however, that “it's immediately clear that [Taylor’s] own focused determination, not just some giant marketing machine, is behind her success: a publishing contract at 14; a self-titled debut album that went gold within three months of being released last year; a debut single, “Tim McGraw,” that shot into the country chart Top 5; opening slots on the Brad Paisley tour … and the George Strait tour earlier this year. Allowing that her drive to succeed comes from her parents, both of whom have high-powered business backgrounds, Taylor says, "My [mom] decided to stay home to raise me. She totally raised me to be logical and practical. I was brought up with such a strong woman in my life and I think that had a lot to do with me not wanting to do anything half-way." Of her father, a stockbroker, Taylor says, “Business-wise, he's brilliant. I'm constantly getting business advice and what to invest in. I think you should be in charge of every single aspect of your career.” Discussing her songs -- she's written about 200 of them since the age of 12 – Taylor admits most of them are about love. But one of her first songs was about a subject she knew too well – loneliness. “The Outside,” she tells the newspaper, sprang from being an outcast at school. “On weekends, I was going to festivals and fairs and karaoke contests to play my guitar in front of people, and my friends were always going to parties. For me, it was not being a part of that because of what I wanted to do with my life. Now when I look back, I'm so glad I wasn't doing bad things.” The hardest part of songwriting, she says, is waiting to perform the song for the first time. "You think it's amazing. You totally get what you're saying, but it's the most vulnerable state right before you play it for someone else." A confessed perfectionist, she'll spend days editing a tune. “I'm totally like that. With school, I was always a perfectionist and an overachiever.” Yet, she admits, her overachieving ways didn’t translate to the athletic field. “Everybody thought I'd be good at basketball,’” she says, “but then I tried out and it was, like, ‘Oh.’ I was awful at anything that's sports.” She is, however, getting good at yoga. It's one of the things she's incorporated into her band's schedule as a way of staying limber and controlling stress while on the road. Taylor’s Canadian trek this weekend takes her to London, Ontario (9/6), Ottawa (9/7), and Toronto (9/8), with additional dates in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and St. John, New Brunswick, before returning to the U.S. with a show in Portland Maine on Sept. 12.
