LOS ANGELES — Taylor Swift doesn’t bat a blue eye at rewriting history.
Take the 18-year-old’s latest single, “Love Story.” It’s about romance and destiny — two subjects that often occupy her teenage brain. She even invokes the world’s most celebrated star-crossed lovers in this sunny hit that’s climbing the country singles chart.
It’s Romeo and Juliet with a significant difference: Nobody dies.
“I was going through a situation like that where I could relate,” the singer-songwriter said recently on a whirlwind visit to Los Angeles. “I used to be in high school where you see (a boyfriend) every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn’t so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story.
“Except for the ending,” she added. “I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told.”
Whether it’s Shakespeare, dating or the music business, Swift is only too willing to reshape the rules about how things ought to be.
She’s demonstrated that repeatedly since she was a brazen 12-year- old who went door to door down Nashville’s famed Music Row of record company offices saying, “Hi, I’m Taylor! I write songs and I think you should sign me.”
When her peers were busy with after-school sports or drama club, she would head to her job at Sony/ATV Music Publishing where, at 14, she was hired to write songs as a professional in the country music capital.
After selling more than 3 million copies of her 2006 debut album, “Taylor Swift,” she is gearing up for another onslaught of activity with the impending arrival of her sophomore album, “Fearless,” due Nov. 11.
Although it’s poised to be one of the big-gun releases of the holiday season, that doesn’t intimidate Swift or her record company.
“I think any time you’ve had this kind of success it starts to get weighty,” said Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, who signed Swift before his label was fully up and running. “But she’s delivered a brilliant record.”
TV talk-show hosts love Swift. With her cover girl beauty and effervescent personality, she’s great on camera, and brings songs that voice the perspective of a living, breathing and sometimes heartbroken teenager.
“I usually generalize it and say I like to write songs about boys, but it’s more than that,” she said. “I like to write songs about relationships, and the steps that take us to a heartbreak, or the steps that take us to falling in love and all that’s in between. It’s my favorite thing to write about (because) you never run out of material and you keep coming back to it.”
“It could be years, but you will be attracted to love again.”
That’s the thing about being a teenager: Love is always a matter of life and death, every relationship either Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming. Swift has figured out how to view her experiences with an artist’s eye.
“I think as a songwriter you need to have a completely wild imagination about what could be and what might have been,” Swift said. “Some of your most heartbreaking material is what could have been, and some of your most romantic material is what could be.”
