A few days later, Taylor is sitting in a dressing room in MTV's New York studio, wearing a fluffy blue bathrobe and borrowed hotel slippers, talking business on her phone. Her two beauty coordinators are ministering to her wavy hair with a flatiron as she speaks. She waves me in, mid conversation.
"I resent the idea that you can just start a sentence with 'respectfully' and then you can just say whatever you want," she says, sounding like someone with whom you wouldn't want to negotiate. "I don't understand how we resolve this - is it him giving points? Ah, OK, good call. Absolutely, if he calls me I'll tell him that. OK, cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah, respectfully." Instead of a manager, Taylor has a management team, which she leads herself.
Her parents, Scott and Andrea, both have business backgrounds and have been involved in her career from the start.
"I think my earliest memory is my mom would set up an easel in the kitchen when I was three," she recalls. "And she'd give me finger paints and I'd paint whatever I wanted, and it was always good enough. My mom would have conversations with me before I could talk," she says. "So I started talking really early." Her first word was 'yellow,' which had something to do with fellow tall creature Big Bird.
The rest is already a familiar story: She grew up on the Christmas-tree farm in rural Pennsylvania, became unaccountably obsessed with Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks, started singing and writing songs, and by age 14, persuaded her parents to move near Nashville. They signed to the fledgling label called Big Machine Records, founded by a former Universal executive named Scott Borchetta. Taylor's dad, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, was a minor investor in the label, which was more of an idea than a company when they signed.
As she prepares to release her fourth album, Red, Taylor is at the very center of pop, more than any other putatively country artist before her. That's why MTV is sacrificing valuable Teen Mom airtime to debut her new video in a live segment tonight. But first, she has to endure nine or so taped interviews with various network offshoots. Now in a tight red top and blue pants, she displays such ease with a parade of interrogators (and the random little kids who come by for autographs) that it's not hard to imagine her running for office someday.
"Really? I might have to be a college graduate, though," she says. "I guess I better start figuring out my platform." This ease with glad-handing comes from her father, who, as she says, "never meets a stranger. You send him into a room, and he'll walk out and go, 'Hey, I just met a guy on the board at Papa John's.'"
True to form, when I eventually meet Scott Swift again (an affable silver-haired guy in a Brooks Brothers-y suit and rimless glasses) he immediately goes for common ground, sharing tales of a brief stint in journalism.
Taylor's maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was a professional opera singer who sang around the world. "I feel like my karma in life is being in a backstage area or being in front of the house," says Andrea, whose also in the studio and whose mother died around the time Taylor was signing her record deal. "We were in Nashville when she passed away, and it was a surreal moment, because I knew we were doing what she wanted us to do. There was a kind of passing of the torch."
Taylor is convinced she's an exact mix of her parents' personalities - she thinks like her mom but acts like her dad. "My mom is, like, all about the worst-case scenario," she says. "My brother and I call her Central Intelligence Andrea. If you have a headache, she could tell you 15 different things it could be, all of which end in emergency room or death. But she also knows how to throw the best party. She's also really compassionate and kind and disciplined and has a really good head on her shoulders for advice." Her father is the designated dreamer, though she won't say if her lyric about "a careless man's careful daughter" is autobiographical: "My mom thinks of things in terms of reality and my dad always thinks in terms of daydreams - and, 'How far can we go with this?' " He was the one who envisioned her success. "I never really went there in my mind that all of this was possible. It's just that my dad always did."
As Taylor waits for her video debut, racing around the room on a wheeled ottoman, network executives Van Toffler and Amy Doyle show up. Many smiles and hugs ensue.
"How huge is that single?" says Van, who's wearing jeans and a blazer, his hair slicked back. "It's like the most ginormous thing in history."
"It's the highest female debut in iTunes history," Taylor says. "I'm, like, what?"
"And you know," says Van, "or I don't know if you do know, but you're going to be closing the VMAs."
"Oh, my God," gushes Taylor. "I'm gonna pass out. What? When were you guys gonna tell me that? Thank you, that's amazing. Now I really do feel like I might pass out." She's happy, but there's a familiar hint of terror in her eyes. Ohmygod.
A viral video called "Taylor Swift Can't Believe It" shows her winning award after award, acting lottery-winner astonished every time, continually mouthing, "What?" (See Kristen Wiig's brutal Swift impression.) Needless to say, Taylor has never seen it.
"I really get my feelings hurt when people make fun of me," she says. "I never won anything in school or in sports, and then all of a sudden, I started winning things. People always say, 'Live in the moment' - if you really live in the moment at a big awards show and you win, you freak out!"
"Those are just her mannerisms," says one of Taylor's best friends, stylist Ashley Avignone. "She does the same thing if I tell her something on the couch at home."
The morning after the VMAs, we meet for breakfast in Beverly Hills (her security sneaks her through the back of the restaurant.) Us Weekly's headline for the performance was Taylor Swift Gets Sexy - because she wore shorts. "It's a really interesting idea that you wear shorts and all of a sudden it's very edgy," she says. "Which, you know, on the bright side gives you room to grow, I don't have to do too much to shock people."
It's 11 a.m. and she's totally bright-eyed and un-hung-over in her cream-colored blouse and polka-dot pants ("not shorts," she says, "that would be too sexy"). She skipped the afterparties and had sushi with her band instead. When she hears that Lady Gaga tweeted, "Swifty is so cute" after her performance, she offers a taste of jaw-drop-awards face.
"No way! Are you serious? I need to see that! Thank you for telling me that." She spends three minutes trying again and again to load the tweet on her phone, without success.
It would be easy to watch Taylor at those awards shows and conclude that she's a phony (in her terms, a cheerleading captain pretending she still belongs on the bleachers.) But if she lacks self-consciousness, that's the idea.
"I just don't want to live that way," she says. "I never want to get jaded, because then you get really protective and hard to be around. That's what can happen if you're too aware of people second-guessing every move you make. So I try to be as blissfully unaware of that as possible." She laughs. "Please don't ruin it. I'm living in such a happy little world!"
Taylor may just experience life a little more intensely than the rest of us, which is one reason her songs can hit so hard - along with the ache in her voice, and her instinct for the minor fall and the major lift. Her songs sneak past our emotional defenses because she has so few of them.
Taylor has one more thing to do before she leaves L.A. - a performance at a Stand Up to Cancer telethon, broadcast live on more than 20 channels. She has a bunker-buster of a song for the occasion, called Ronan. Her eyes grow wet telling me about it: It's the true story of a not-quite-four-year-old boy who died of cancer, told from the perspective of his mother. (She incorporated ideas from the mom's blog, giving co-songwriting credit.) Nearly every line is unbearably upsetting - it makes Streets of Philadelphia sound like Party Rock Anthem. (The lyric that keeps getting me: "It's about to be Halloween/You could be anything you wanted if you were still here.") Andrea - blond, warm-eyed - passes out tissues as she rehearses the song at the Shrine Auditorium. I take one.
As showtime approaches, Taylor keeps her mind off the song, doing her extensive vocal warm-ups (which, at one point, involve actual meows) and discussing food options for tonight's plane back to Nashville. She's sprawled sideways in a director's chair; her flats have cartoon-cat heads by the toes. "Buffalo tenders? OK! And rigatoni with truffle meat sauce - can I get it with spaghetti, though? Rigatoni makes me feel weird. It's like a wheel, and what's it trying to do? It's like an unfinished ravioli."
Soon, trailed by a small entourage that includes her mom and her stylist, Taylor enters the theater's darkness. She stands just offstage, biting her lip, head down, as Alicia Keys sings. In a similar moment before this year's Grammy performance (which earned her a redemptive standing ovation) Taylor told herself, "This is either where you prove the people who like you right, or prove the people who hate you right. It's up to you. Put on your banjo and go play."
She un-hunches her shoulders, breathes deep, and walks toward the stage. "Come on baby with me," she sings with exquisite tenderness, over a hushed guitar. "We're gonna fly away from here/You were my best four years."
Taylor makes it through the song. But afterward she breaks into a jog toward her trailer, weeping uncontrollably the whole way, smudging her eye makeup into wild streaks. Ten minutes later, when I say goodbye, she hasn't stopped.
"I was trying not to cry the whole song," she says, shrugging helplessly.
Some of the event's stagehands were watching Taylor from the sidelines, beefy arms folded. Goateed, ankle-tattooed, wallet-chained, they would've looked at home wielding pool cues at Altamont. But they're soon frozen in place, transfixed by Taylor Swift, and by the time she's halfway through Ronan, I catch one of them silently brushing away a tear.