How Taylor Swift went from outcast to the Mastermind of her success

Taylor Swift might be one of the world’s biggest pop stars but her grapple with validation is something all women can relate to, and it’s what makes her human. It’s shown in her song lyrics and her actions. Swift often talks about loneliness, and feeling like an outsider at school.

Most recently, Taylor Swift fans who missed out on tickets to The Era’s Tour due to Ticketmaster’s failings were relieved to receive an email with access to tickets this week, it’s been reported that more than 100,000 extra tickets have been made available. This is not a surprising move from Swift and her team, as she is known for her connection to fans, even inviting a number to her houses across the globe to listen to new music for the first time.

While Taylor’s success has skyrocketed even higher in recent years, she still addresses ideas of loneliness and how she wasn’t always the record-breaking star we see today. This is part of how fans, new and old, continue to stay connected to the work she releases. It’s still very human, and the core meanings in her songs very much echo that. Most recently, her chart topping album Midnights, which made her the first artist to hold all top ten spots on the Billboard 200, addresses the loneliness she experienced as a kid in her song Mastermind in which she sings: “No-one wanted to play with me as a little kid/so I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/to make them love me.”

This vulnerability and honesty has never wavered in her songwriting process and she is known as one of the greatest songwriters of all time with billions of streams, and multiple GRAMMY’s to go along with the praise.

Swift has been open about publicity, and how she believes most people seek fame from a deep rooted need to be liked, which for herself stemmed from her time at school. Swift spoke about her experience in an interview with In Style magazine for their April 2015 issue, where she admitted that her classmates left her isolated because they thought she was ‘weird and different’.

She said: "When you’re dealing with something like loneliness or confusion or rejection or frustration, those emotions are so jumbled up in your head. For me, the only way to condense them down into one thing is to write a three-and-a-half minute song about it.

"I first started writing songs because I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to. As sad as that sounds, I was going through this really hard time at school where I didn’t have any friends. Songwriting for me just started out as therapy."

Swift addressed the idea of her loneliness as a child being a springboard for her determination and a component in her success during her 2020 documentary Miss Americana. The documentary follows the singer over several years of her life, including her year off following a high profile feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West she admitted that the media scrutiny was too much so she disappeared, and thought ‘nobody wanted to see me.”

Swift said that a big part of her trauma surrounding fame came down to a misunderstanding during the infamous incident with Kanye West at the 2009 VMAs. The venue was “so echo-y” that she thought the crowd was booing her. She said:“For someone who’s built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you, the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.”

In the InStyle Interview, Taylor addressed her fear of loneliness and confessed that her biggest fear in life is becoming self-obsessed and ending up alone saying: "What I worry about is that I never want to end up kind of a self-centred, vain human being. My fears circle around me making the wrong choices and messing this up for myself. I don’t wanna end up being awful and intolerable.

"Alone. Laying in a marble bathtub by myself, like sad, with a glass of wine just complaining that my life ended up alone because I pushed everyone away because I thought I was too good to hang out with anybody.

"The typical Hollywood sad cliché of the poor lonely starlet with no-one because she put up all these walls and didn’t trust anyone. That’s my fear. And that’s why I live my life the way I live my life because I’d so much rather feel everything than end up like that."