Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
How Courtney Marie Andrews learned to let the light in
thefader.comCourtney Marie Andrews didn’t expect to be nominated for a Grammy, and she definitely never expected her first Grammys would look like last year’s. “The one time I was nominated, it was a Zoom call,” she chuckles. “It was hilariously what you would not want for your first Grammys.” Her sixth album, Old Flowers — a mournful and unsparing country record about a shattering break-up — had been shortlisted for Best Americana Album.
And while the nod itself was a shock and the night not what people have in mind when they imagine an awards ceremony, it was all oddly fitting. “In some ways, it was perfect for Old Flowers.
It should have been quite up-close and personal. I had a few friends over for an outdoor fire and we celebrated together. That was its own sort of beauty.” Old Flowers may have been the apotheosis of this peculiar beauty, an album so intimate and delicately rendered that listening to it felt at points like eavesdropping.
But Andrews had been working in that deeply melancholy atmosphere since releasing her first albums as a teenager. It’s what makes her new album, Loose Future, such a revelation.
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