Playing guitar until your fingers bleed is usually reserved for leather-clad rockers, but this 16-year-old is right there with them.
Taylor Swift is as sweet as fairy floss, but her debut album comes from a place that’s as raw, sophisticated and challenging as something produced by a superstar ten years her senior. Swift wrote or co-wrote every one of these tracks and uses love as her muse. The first single, Tim McGraw, is not a gushy ode to one of country’s finest, but rather a sad memoir of love-turned-sour that precedes an album full of tunes showing her songwriting talents.
Practising guitar for four hours a day until her fingers bled is only a snapshot of the perseverance and dedication Swift has, and she meshes songwriting confidence and sweet naivety perfectly, making for a debut that’ll leave other teens in her wake.