'Taylor Swift: The Debut Years' review: mastermind from the start

Calling Taylor Swift a “household name” is an understatement: she’s a billionaire and pop culture fixture with 16 full-length albums, sold-out world tours, and a massive fan base eager to do her bidding, especially when she drops a surprise release. Taylor Swift: The Debut Years rewinds from the start.

In the early 2000s, Swift was a Pennsylvania teen who wanted to write country songs about crushes. The new Taylor Swift biography chronicles the musician-turned-mogul’s first decade and first four albums. Washington Post entertainment journalist Emily Yahr interviews co-writers, producers, and others who knew Swift back then for a deep dive into a young phenom’s creative process and business savvy. The result? A fascinating peek behind the curtain for diehard Swifties and new fans alike.

Write what you know

At 13, Swift signed a development deal with RCA, and her family moved near Nashville. Unlike LeAnn Rimes and other teen stars before her, Swift—who signed a publishing deal with Sony a year later—wanted to sing about what she knew. “I want to write something like Avril Lavigne,” she told an early collaborator, “only country.”

Inspired by Faith Hill, Shania Twain, and the Chicks, Swift was confident in country’s largely untapped audience: girls and women who might not gravitate toward tractors-and-beer tunes but knew, and remembered, what it felt like to yearn.

And she did the work. That meant after-school cowriting sessions with prolific Nashville songwriters and grueling radio station promo tours. It also involved cultivating “Swifties” through everything from daily MySpace vlogs (at a time when the industry largely eschewed social media) to stopping her car to greet a pedestrian in a Taylor Swift T-shirt, to attending a fan’s bridal shower.

Fan or not, there’s no denying that the now-36-year-old Swift has staying power and marketing genius. According to The Debut Years, she’s been that way since middle school.

Both those who remember the MySpace days and fans like me, who heard the first chords of folklore during the pandemic and thought, “I think I like Taylor Swift now?” will relish this detailed origin story of an artist who always knew who she was and which genre best served her style.

As Yahr observes, “The underlying theme of country music is telling real stories, and it’s hard to get more real than a teenage girl pouring out her feelings.”