The day after our dinner, Taylor headlines the Z100 Jingle Ball, an annual concert at Madison Square Garden featuring a bevy of tween-friendly acts. It's late, and some fans are looking blearyeyed, out well past their bedtimes.
Justin Bieber, the mop-topped hormonal heartthrob, has just delivered a rousing set, appearing in a leg cast (defying doctors' orders, or so he claims, to a chorus of "Awww"), and it seems a tough act to follow. But then Taylor appears, skipping across the stage in black knee-high boots, belting out You Belong With Me and Bieber Fever is soon forgotten. Within seconds, the only thing shinier than Taylor's spangled dress is the thousands of glinting braces in the audience as her fans, some weeping, sing along to every word.
After the song, Taylor stands there for a generous while, smiling radiantly, her slender arms outstretched, just sort of marinating in it. A minute or so goes by and, just when our palms are beginning to sting, she gooses the applause with the merest side-flick of her electric blue eyes and stands there some more.
As talented a performer as she is, I think it's her genius as a songwriter that's made her a star. Tales of unrequited crushes and teenage yearning, her pastel-color country-pop lullabies are (for the most part) stripped of grown-up temptations. Cozy, enveloping, and altogether irresistible, they're a perfect balm for a time when we seem to have run out the string on cynicism. Not merely innocent, they reaffirm the whole idea of innocence, transforming youthful naïveté from a fleeting embarrassment into an exalted form of Shakespeare. Approach a song such as Love Story or Fifteen with an open heart (playing it loud, over headphones, say, while running through the park at dawn) and the impact is so redemptive and affecting and true, you might be moved to wonder why you ever grew up at all.
Not for nothing has Taylor been tagged the "anti-Britney." Whereas that other precocious blond songstress insisted she was "not that innocent," and then went on to prove it every way she could, Taylor is still a veritable Girl Scout.
"Taylor's the perfect person for this media moment," Scott Borchetta tells me once I finally make it backstage, journal in hand. He's the guy who signed her to a deal at his then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, back in 2005. "She really is the girl next door. She hasn't been drunk at a party, hasn't been in any crazy photographs. In this moment of total madness in the culture, her fans know they can count on her."
Whatever experiences she's forsworn, Scott insists that Taylor is somehow more composed and sophisticated than people many years her senior.
"I think parents just go, 'Oh, thank God my kids love Taylor Swift'."
Taylor - a committed abstainer who likes to joke about her cookie baking habit and is about to come out with her own line of greeting cards (there will be kittens, she promises, and glitter) - takes her role very seriously. One of her biggest fears involves making a bunch of bad decisions and embarking on a painful, slow, devastating tailspin. She discovered VH1's Behind the Music and E! True Hollywood Story as a child and remains a diligent student of the genre.
Asked to name the biggest mistake she's ever made, the only thing she can come up with is forgetting to scribble any diary entries during her week of SNL rehearsals. Still, she insists, "I've had countless opportunities to do some really bad things."
Let's say she chose to hang out with the wrong people, she explains, once we're finally sitting alone in her dressing room. They might influence her to make a bad decision, which would then hit the tabloids...
"And then people start combing through everything that I do trying to find the next mistake and misperception," she goes on, clutching her sweater sleeves with her long fingers and pressing her fists together under her chin, "which leads to more scrutiny. Like, if I go to a bar, even if I'm not drinking, who's to say that a source isn't going to say that I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing? So it's not only about your own moral compass, but the moral compasses of other people that you don't know." She pauses, noticing my dumbfounded expression. "You're thinking, 'This is a giant boatload of fear.' "
