A Couple Months Later
June 2010
Taylor loves a lot of things, but maybe nothing quite so much at this moment as her new Prevost tour bus. "It's amazing!" she gushes, bounding through the backstage labyrinth of the Save Mart Center in Fresno, California, where she'll be performing tonight; long Goldilocks curls bouncing behind her as she goes. "My mom and I just redid the whole thing. Come see!"
Inside, the bus is a lush girly fantasy in chocolate brown and peacock blue, complete with a tufted brown velvet couch and pearly blonde laminated wood paneling, an electric fireplace ("Because I'm always freezing!"), a big champagne marble bathroom, and a Star Trac treadmill that folds up like a Murphy bed.
"We bought the old bus from Cher," explains Andrea, who goes on every tour, watching from the sidelines, keen-eyed and silent as an eagle. "So it was all black and gothic." For the new bus, she says, "We wanted to brighten things up."
In Taylor's bedroom, a big turquoise satin jewelry box has the word Barbie written across it in rhinestones, and her first two multiplatinum albums shine above her silky, pillow-piled turquoise-and-brown bed like twin full moons. A sign over the door reads Never, Never, Never Give Up in curling bronze script.
"Did you have that made?" I ask her.
"No. I got it from T.J. Maxx," she chirps. She may be the world's least snobbish pop princess. In Taylor Swift's world (or "Taylor Nation"), Urban Outfitters T-shirts and $900 Christian Louboutin stilettos are embraced with equal fervor. All the crew members are presented with cakes on their birthdays and serenaded by Taylor herself. And everyone (literally everyone) is greeted with a hug and an enormous smile. It's kind of like meeting Mickey at Disney World. The weeping 8-year-old fan in a pink cowboy hat gets a hug. The mayor of Fresno gets a hug. Even the sweaty, walrus-shaped teenage boy with the slightly crazed glint in his eye gets a hug (though when he starts pawing Taylor and kissing her all over her face, two beefy security guys step in and carry him off.)
"It scares the daylights out of me when she goes around hugging everybody," Andrea admits. "I have to turn my head when she does it during the concerts. But you couldn't stop her if you tried; she's just a born hugger."
Taylor's gasping love for most things she sets eyes on (Starbucks coffee, low-fat strawberry Pop-Tarts, and members of the band Def Leppard included) might get old quickly if it weren't accompanied by a big winking dose of sass that gives her a Tinker Bell-ish quality. At twenty now, she is tall and skinny as a string bean, with long, gangly white arms and a plump, angelic face. Her eyes are still blue as forget-me-nots, with that slightly Asian tilt and thick curling lashes that she flirts with expertly and shamelessly, like Scarlett O'Hara.
Though I know she was born in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, and lived there until she was fourteen, there is a specifically Southern flavor to much of her appeal. She loves flouncy miniskirts and candy-colored strapless dresses and halo-style headbands with silk flowers sewn on. She says "Y'all" and "Thay-nk ewe!" She prays. She bakes. (When she's home in Nashville, she regularly delivers homemade pumpkin-spice cookies with cream cheese frosting to the construction guys working on her new condo.) But there's a clear-eyed, laser-focus quality to her attention, too...you sense there's a mighty brain ticking beneath all those blonde curls.
"I love having a goal, feeling like I'm on a mission," she tells me. "I love trying to beat what I've done so far."
At the moment, that's a tall order. Her second album, Fearless, was the best-selling album of any genre in 2009. An addictive confection of country/pop love songs, Fearless stole the hearts of little girls and not-so-little girls all over America, sitting at number one on the Billboard Top 200 for 11 weeks, which is longer than any other album in the last decade. Come awards time, she took home four Grammys (including Best Album of the Year) and the MTV Moonman for Best Female Video (aka The Kanye Incident), along with a truckload of other trophies, including the CMA award for Entertainer of the Year in 2009. Last year, she earned 18 million from albums and touring alone.
