Taylor Swift doesn't bat a blue eye at rewriting history.
Take the 18-year-old's latest single, "Love Story." It's all about romance and destiny -- two subjects that often occupy her teenage brain. She even invokes the names of the world's most celebrated star-crossed lovers in this sunny hit that's steadily climbing the country singles chart.
It's Romeo and Juliet with a significant difference: Nobody dies.
"I was going through a situation like that where I could relate," the energetic singer-songwriter said recently on a whirlwind visit to Los Angeles. "I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story.
"Except for the ending," she quickly added. "I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?"
Whether it's Shakespeare, dating or a disintegrating music business, Swift is only too willing to reshape the rules according to her own ideas about how things ought to be. She's demonstrated that repeatedly since she was a brazen 12-year-old who went door to door down Nashville's famed Music Row of record company offices saying, "Hi, I'm Taylor! I write songs and I think you should sign me."
When most of her peers were busy with after-school sports or drama club, she would head off every day to her job at Sony/ATV Music Publishing where, at 14, she was hired to write more songs, as a professional in the country music capital.
Now, after selling more than 3 million copies of her 2006 debut album, "Taylor Swift," the tall and perky blond with the thick curly tresses is gearing up for another onslaught of activity with the impending arrival of her sophomore album, "Fearless," due out Nov. 11. Although it's poised to be one of the big-gun releases of the holiday season, that doesn't intimidate Swift or her record company one iota.
"I think any time you've had this kind of success it starts to get weighty," said Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, who signed Swift even before his label was fully up and running. "But she's delivered a brilliant record.
