How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Pt. 3

Part 3: In which I fulfill my need to talk mostly about Ashlee Simpson, but eventually get back around to the topic at hand

Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?

You think you know me?

All installments: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 // Part 5 // Part 6 // Postscript 1

I understand now that I underestimated Taylor Swift because I was too angry about Ashlee Simpson’s career.

I met someone once who knew a person in Ashlee Simpson’s orbit — a lawyer or something — well enough to have met Ashlee Simpson personally a few times. Our mutual acquaintance, my family friend, introduced me giddily as someone who was obsessed with Ashlee Simpson. I like to think I was not entirely unhinged as I described what I loved about Ashlee Simpson’s music, especially her debut album, Autobiography. This person just winced and said, “I think you would need to meet her. You’re giving her way too much credit.”

I think that person was probably wrong, but one thing I like about music is that someone can sound (and therefore be) incandescent on a record, change your whole life forever, and you can never take that away from them, no matter what happens if you meet them in person. Is it possible that Ashlee Simpson, actual person rather than avatar for an incredible songwriting team, was nothing more than the sum of her collaborators? Sure, but I’m skeptical: those folks had plenty of opportunities to make an Autobiography with someone else and they never did.

The more I look back on Ashlee Simpson’s career, though, the more it seems like that first album was something special and unreplicable, that there was no roadmap to keep it going; there’s no universe where Ashlee Simpson is in year 15 of world domination. I don’t think Autobiography was a fluke—her other albums are good, too. It just turned out to be much smaller than I wanted it to be.

Now, if you’d asked me at the end of 2006 whether Taylor Swift was going to be a big deal, I might have said yes, though I’d be very wrong about how she was going to be a big deal, and I wouldn’t be anywhere in the ballpark of how big “big” could be. I also thought Ashley Monroe, who at the time was attempting to release her debut album Satisfied, was going to be a big deal; specifically, I thought the two of them were going to change the country charts together. They would form the bittersweet yang to Miranda Lambert’s outlaw country yin. But that wonderful Ashley Monroe album got trapped in a roll-out purgatory that stalled her career for years (it finally got an official release in 2009), and Taylor Swift jumped ship for the Hot 100 by 2007 and never really looked back.

At the end of 2006 I was in a series of email exchanges with Frank Kogan and another music critic friend, and this friend was telling anyone who’d listen (i.e. the two of us) that the debut Taylor Swift album was a really big deal, in a way they couldn’t quite put their finger on yet—and that it reminded them of Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography. We worked out trades for a CD copy: Frank swapped a copy of Satisfied and I sent Finally Out of P.E. by future Academy Award™ winner Brie Larson.

(My email on December 16, 2006: "Brie is in the mail. Don't expect too too much, her best days are probably ahead of her.”)

I was slow to warm up to the self-titled album that December, even with Frank making a direct comparison between “A Place in This World” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes” by Kelly Clarkson: a sweeter and sadder take on the Max Martin/Dr. Luke chorus formula. All three of us liked “A Place in This World” (we just referred to it as “track 4”), though most popular accounts of Taylor Swift’s oeuvre now see it as a minor effort at best. Rob Sheffield ludicrously ranks it as the 235th best out of 237 Taylor Swift songs.

The parallels between Autobiography and Taylor Swift seem obvious to me now: Chapman-Rose-Swift as a juggernaut songwriting unit, producer/songwriter/performer in generous creative conversation, each person taking on elements of each role, reminds me of Dioguardi-Shanks-Simpson, right down to both trios sounding a bit like terse sentences. Nathan Chapman and John Shanks provide the genre cohesion, while the songwriting duo in each case, Kara DioGuardi/Ashlee Simpson and Liz Rose/Taylor Swift, act as complementary muses bringing out the best in each other. Kara DioGuardi talks about this directly in her autobiography Helluva High Note:

With Ashlee, songs came to me quickly and ferociously. Like they had been waiting for years to flow out of me. I buried my teen angst, broken heart, and longing for love in her first album. She was the perfect person to carry these pieces into the world. She was on a hit MTV show, and she was young and fearless. She was an embodiment of everything I wasn’t as a teenager. I was happy a piece of me was on her record.

My favorite synchronicity is between “A Place in This World” and “Unreachable”: both songs were written with songwriters who don’t appear elsewhere on the album (industry hacks, mostly—a Sugar Ray guy here, a Kings of Leon guy there), and both catch their creators tiptoeing into the spotlight with a few borrowed moves (Ashlee swipes the piano from Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” Taylor attempts something like a Max Martin/Dr. Luke soaring chorus but her voice only lands a glancing blow on the high note). It’s like how you can hear Paul McCartney practically clearing his throat with nervousness in the Beatles’ “There’s a Place,” session one take one of the Please Please Me recording, even though this was a band that could barrel right into “I Saw Her Standing There,” too.

And there are the two songs that each of them wrote solo: there’s no Kara DioGuardi on two of my favorite songs on Autobiography, “Love Makes the World Go Round” and “Undiscovered,” which are credited to Simpson/Shanks. Meanwhile Taylor Swift is the sole writer on “Should’ve Said No” and “Our Song,” the former being maybe the most direct portal into Taylor Swift’s songwriting future, and the latter a country song so well-crafted if you squint it could almost read as pastiche—a glimpse of Swift’s canniness and adaptability to the assignment at hand. (It’s still a little jarring to go back to the debut, especially to “Should’ve Said No,” and hear her put her shoulder into that country twang when you can also hear post-2008 Taylor in there.)

I said up top that how Taylor Swift would be big eluded me. I thought it would happen in country music, which seemed logical in 2006. The only data point I had in 2006 was the “Tim McGraw” single, which did well on country radio that year: debuted at #60 on the country charts in July and rose within a few months to #10 in December, when I was finally listening to my burned copy of her CD.

Taylor Swift was released in October, but I couldn’t find the album anywhere in the wild. I wasn’t desperate for a physical copy, which I could have ordered online: I already had the music. But I wanted to pay for it and carry it home with me, I’m sentimental that way. I remember at some point around Christmas of 2006 asking someone at the chain record store on Broad Street in Philly, whatever it was called at that point (it transitioned from Tower to FYE in 2006), whether it was in the country section or the pop section, and they said they didn’t carry it. Yes, there was a time when Taylor Swift released music and you couldn’t find her album in a store and most people had no idea who she was.

There was no real indication in calendar year 2006 that Taylor Swift was poised to cross over from country to mainstream pop. But by 2007 she’d done it, and with a genuine country song, too, without any particular overtures to the wider pop marketplace. This, to my mind, is the strangest, luckiest, and possibly most important thing that ever happened to Taylor Swift.