A couple days later, Taylor has started four days of rehearsal at a studio on the outskirts of Nashville for her upcoming tour. She picks the alfalfa sprouts out of a sandwich (she avoids vegetables, hates sushi and in general gravitates away from anything healthy) and straps on her guitar, strumming as she gives her tour manager instructions on the set list. As much as she engages in good-natured banter with her band, she's clearly in charge of this show. With a faintly sex-kitten stage presence (punctuated by many pumps of her very long arms in the air) she cues fiddle licks, restages a number and shuffles the orchestration in a mash-up. Then she stops.
"Omigod," she giggles. "For Love Story the stage is going to become a church, and I'm going to get into a white dress." She bites her lip. "There's so many cool sets," she gushes. "We're going to have a giant castle!"
After rehearsal, we return to her parents' home, which is set on a promontory over Old Hickory Lake.
"In the summer, people fish off the dock," she tells me as we walk up the porch, then deadpans, "More people now. Apparently, there are more fish now."
The mantle of their living room is crammed with bulky glass awards, and posters of Taylor line the hallways. A large sitting room is devoted to racks of clothes that she has worn in performance or public, with a sign affixed that reads "Please go through: Keep or give to Goodwill." Her younger brother Austin, a sixteen-year-old lacrosse player and academic overachiever, has moved into a room on the garage level, doubtless to have some space away from the Taylor Nation, but she still lives in her childhood bedroom.
It's a small room, decorated almost exclusively in pink and purple. Her closet is itty-bitty, with clothes organized in neat rows above her shoes and a drawer of padded bras. Any sign of her life as a superstar has been scrubbed, with the exception of a postcard from Reba McEntire. She rifles around in her armoire (careful not to show its contents, which she considers too messy for guests) and pulls out a cardboard box of colored wax, which she used to seal envelopes.
"I wrote my Valentine's Day cards yesterday," she says, holding up a thick stack. "It's not going to be a big shindig for me. I didn't have that one person." She smiles. "So I had to write 30."
It's almost 8 p.m. and Taylor is planning to work on her set lists for a few hours tonight, but first she needs a Frappuccino. She hasn't started her car, a champagne-colored Lexus, in a couple of months (her brother has to jump-start it) and when we finally pull out onto the road, she seems a little less perfect. She's an unsure, semi-reckless driver, hitting the brake too hard, pointing the car this way and that at various intersections like she's tacking a boat. She screams, "Five-oh!" as she spots a cop, then pulls into a drive-through Starbucks.
"I've been in three accidents, but none of them were my fault," she wails, slurping from her vanilla Frappuccino as I sip on my hazelnut one.
Soon she comes to a complete stop, pointing to an expanse of lawn.
"This summer, the guy from the Fifteen song came back into Abigail's life," she informs me. "He got me to bring her here, and while we were on the way he texted her 'We need to talk.' When they arrived, the guy was standing in the center of this field in a big heart made of candles, holding a bunch of roses. It was so romantic," she gushes, smiling dreamily. "I love that kind of stuff."
Then we start pulling away.
"You know, I totally burned a CD for him to play that night, because he wouldn't have known Abigail's favorite songs otherwise," she says, tapping the steering wheel. "And as usual, I had to clean up the mess the next day." She sighs. "But that's OK," she says. "I didn't mind."
