The first song I ever heard from Taylor Swift was 'Teardrops on My Guitar'. It sounded so different from what was in the charts at the time and got me intrigued in this young artist, barely older than I was. I listened to the rest of her album that summer and fell in love with everything about her. She was a musician first and foremost. She felt 'real'. She wrote her own songs. She played guitar. She showed me it was possible to be a girl and a musician without having to be oversexualised like most of the other pop singers dominating the charts at the time.
But most of all what I fell in love with was her lyrics. They way they spoke to me- it could've been something I had written in my diary. She was unafraid to voice insecurities that I felt. Insecurities I was sure I was the only person in my class to suffer from.
She has always been a master of turns of phrases and rhyming couplets that hit hard and this was evident in her early songs. The line 'She's got everything that I have to live with out' does the expert thing of showing rather than telling. A lesser artist wouldn't have done it so elegantly. The story also builds up and travels, a relic of her country upbringing. 'I'll put his picture down and maybe get some sleep tonight' speaks to the idea of moving on. Accepting life doesn't necessarily work the way you wanted it to and making peace with that. At the tender age of 16, she was wise beyond her years. That's why I loved 'Teardrops on My Guitar'
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