Andrea Swift

Swift's paternal great-great-grandfather, Charles C. A. Baldi, was an Italian immigrant entrepreneur and community leader who opened several businesses in Philadelphia in the 1800s.

Her maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (née Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer, whose singing in church became one of her earliest memories in music that shaped her career.

Swift is a sixth cousin thrice removed of American poet Emily Dickinson.

Swift spent her early years on a Christmas tree farm that her father had purchased from one of his clients.

She is a Christian.

She attended preschool and kindergarten at Alvernia Montessori School, run by Bernardine Franciscan sisters, before transferring to the Wyndcroft School.

The family moved to a rented house in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where Swift attended Wyomissing Area Junior/Senior High School.

At the age of nine, Swift became interested in musical theater and performed in four Berks Youth Theatre Academy productions.

She also traveled regularly to New York City for vocal and acting lessons.

Swift later shifted her focus toward country music, inspired by Shania Twain's songs, which made her "want to just run around the block four times and daydream about everything".

She spent weekends performing at local festivals and events.

After watching a documentary about Faith Hill, Swift felt she needed to move to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a career in music.

She traveled there with her mother at age eleven to visit record labels and submitted demo tapes of Dolly Parton and Dixie Chicks karaoke covers.

She was rejected, however, because "everyone in that town wanted to do what I wanted to do. So, I kept thinking to myself, I need to figure out a way to be different."

She spent summers in Stone Harbor, New Jersey until she was fourteen years old, performing in a local coffee shop.

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter.

Her reinventive artistry, songwriting and entrepreneurship have influenced the music industry, popular culture, and politics, while her life is a subject of widespread media coverage.

Swift began professional songwriting at 14.

Swift recalibrated her image from country to pop with 1989 (2014), a synth-pop album supported by the chart-topping songs "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", and "Bad Blood".

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania.

She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor.

Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), worked for a time as a mutual fund marketing executive.

Swift's younger brother, Austin, is an actor.

Swift's mother is of Scottish and German descent, and her father is of Scottish and English descent with distant Italian ancestry.

In 2002, when Swift was around twelve years old, local musician Ronnie Cremer taught her to play guitar.

Cremer helped with her first efforts as a songwriter, leading her to write "Lucky You".

She signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and achieved prominence as a country pop singer with the albums Taylor Swift (2006) and Fearless (2008).

The singles "Teardrops on My Guitar", "Love Story", and "You Belong with Me" were crossover successes on country and pop radio formats and brought Swift mainstream fame.

She experimented with rock and electronic styles on her next albums, Speak Now (2010) and Red (2012), respectively, with the latter featuring her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together".

Media scrutiny inspired the hip-hop-influenced Reputation (2017) and its number-one single "Look What You Made Me Do".

After signing with Republic Records in 2018, Swift released the eclectic pop album Lover (2019) and the autobiographical documentary Miss Americana (2020).

One of the world's best-selling musicians, Swift has sold over 200 million records as of 2019.

She is the highest-grossing female touring act, the most-streamed woman on Spotify and Apple Music, and the first billionaire with music as the main source of income.

Six of her albums have opened with over one million sales in a week.

The 2023 Time Person of the Year, Swift has appeared on lists such as Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, Billboard Greatest of All Time Artists, and Forbes ' World's 100 Most Powerful Women.

Her accolades include 14 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, 40 American Music Awards, 40 Billboard Music Awards, and 23 MTV Video Music Awards; she has won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year, and the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year a record four times each.

She explored indie folk styles on the 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, subdued electropop on Midnights (2022), and re-recorded four albums subtitled Taylor's Version after a dispute with Big Machine.

These albums spawned the number-one songs "Cruel Summer", "Cardigan", "Willow", "Anti-Hero", "All Too Well", and "Is It Over Now?".

Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) and its accompanying concert film became the highest-grossing tour and concert film of all time, respectively.

Swift has directed videos and films such as Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (2020) and All Too Well: The Short Film (2021).