BTG
Pennsylvania
To interview her is to pay a state visit. You know you’re dealing with a star of astronomical proportions when the record company sends a car to pick you up at the airport.  And there is someone from her management team to bring you to a waiting room on the 10th floor of a grand hotel straight out of a Bond movie. What follows is almost ritualistic. You sign a confidentiality agreement form. Then, after a while, someone comes to take you to a suite where you are given an iPod. Then another person hands you earphones and presses play so that, amid much secrecy, you get to hear three songs from the star’s new album, called 1989, after the year of her birth. Once that is finished, you are brought to another, much bigger, much grander suite, where the star awaits your questions. The correspondent from a Japanese magazine is leaving just as I am going in. ‘She is very talkative,’ he says, as another journalist sits down to his turn after me at the iPod. It is quite an operation.
Taylor Swift - for it is she - is a megastar with bells on. In person, she looks like a 1930s flapper siren, reimagined for a new age, with a touch of the girl-next-door thrown in. She is extremely polite and almost impossibly normal and, above all, fun. The Guardian described Ms Swift’s supersonic rise from ‘ringletted country artist, teenage sweetheart of the American heartland, to feminist role model and the world’s most charming pop star’ to become ‘the kind of culturally titanic figure adored as much by gnarly rock critics as teenage girls, feminist intellectuals and, well, pretty much all of emotionally sentient humankind.’
Pretty much all of emotionally sentient humankind appears to have bought at least one of Swift’s albums. She’s sold over 30m copies of them.
And when you factor in world tours that sell out in the blink of an eye, and endorsements and what-have-you, it is not that difficult to see why Forbes magazine estimated that the 24-year-old made something in the region of $64m (£39.6m) last year. Her every utterance and action is world news, or at least trending on Twitter. Her lyrics are dissected by culture vultures as though they are the Dead Sea Scrolls of post-teen angst.