The Very Pink, Very Perfect Life of Taylor Swift

Self-preservation is one of Swift's favorite phrases, and she uses it in reference to both her professional and personal lives. She wants to have a long career, not get tossed away like most teen stars. "I've not seen many people work as hard as Taylor," says Kellie Pickler, a good friend. "She's a very competitive girl, and those people go far." Along with the Jonas Brothers and a gaggle of young Disney stars like her pals Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, she's part of a backlash against the pantyless TMZ culture of earlier this decade, which proved to be a career-killer for Lindsay Lohan and her clique. Swift admits that she was fascinated by girls like Paris Hilton when she was younger — in a rare moment of prurience, she notes that her high school football team was named the Commandos, then laughs wryly — but says that she never thought the gossip about these women was true. "You should never judge a person until you know the full story," she explains, matter-of-factly.

Swift is certain she would never let herself get caught up in such shenanigans. "When you lose someone's trust, it's lost, and there are a lot of people out there who are counting on me right now," Swift says. She cocks her head. "Rebellion is what you make of it," she says. "When you've been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious."

If this is Swift's game face, it must be tattooed on, because it never drops during hours of press on a recent weekday in New York, a day that includes mind-numbing patter on Sirius XM and Clear Channel, a voice-over for a new style show on MTV and a sickeningly saccharine luncheon for her L.e.i. sundress line sold at Walmart. It's a tour de force: Swift engages easily with the teen-fashion journalists following her around, bantering about blow-dryers and bachelorette parties; then, she's gracious to the misshapen radio hosts, calling everyone by their names and administering warm hugs by the dozen. But there's a moment, at the Walmart luncheon, when she gets a little testy with a young fan — Swift asks the fan where she's from, and when the girl answers, "New Jersey," Swift makes fun of her accent — but this is literally the only sin against a human she commits during a 10-hour day in which she's barely fed, never stops smiling and signs hundreds of autographs with a pink Sharpie pen.

This politesse is part of Swift's character, a way of treating others taught by her loving family. Her parents intentionally raised their kids in the country, on a Christmas-tree farm with a grape arbor and seven horses, in eastern Pennsylvania, while Swift's father commuted to work. "I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head," says Swift. But her parents also prized success in the real world: They even gave her an androgynous name, on the assumption that she would later climb the corporate ladder. "My mom thought it was cool that if you got a business card that said 'Taylor' you wouldn't know if it was a guy or a girl," says Swift. "She wanted me to be a business person in a business world."

Swift rode horses competitively as a child, but her main hobby was making up fairy tales and singing the songs from Disney movies by heart. At six, she discovered a LeAnn Rimes record, which she began to listen to compulsively. "All I wanted to hear from then on was country," she says. "I loved the amazing female country artists of the Nineties — Faith, Shania, the Dixie Chicks — each with an incredible sound and standing for incredible things." She began to act in a children's musical-theater company but found that she preferred the cast parties, which featured a karaoke machine, to the stage. "Singing country music on that karaoke machine was my favorite thing in the world," she says. As is the Swift-ian way, even at 11 she was determined to "pursue other venues" where she could perform, and soon found the Pat Garrett Roadhouse, which had a weekly karaoke contest. "I sang every single week for a year and a half until I won," she says. Her prize: opening for Charlie Daniels at 10:30 a.m.; he played at 8:30 at night.

Newly emboldened, Swift began to perform the national anthem at local sports games, and even landed a gig with her favorite team, the Philadelphia 76ers. But tragedy soon befell our young songstress. It seems that her classmates did not agree that country music was cool. "Anything that makes you different in middle school makes you weird," she says. "My friends turned into the girls who would stand in the corner and make fun of me." She was abandoned at the lunch table. She was accused of possessing frizzy hair. She tried to fit in by joining teams but proved to be horrible at every sport. Then redemption came in the form of a 12-string guitar. "When I picked up the guitar, I could not stop," she says. "I would literally play until my fingers bled — my mom had to tape them up, and you can imagine how popular that made me: 'Look at her fingers, so weird.'" She takes a deep breath. "But for the first time, I could sit in class and those girls could say anything they wanted about me, because after school I was going to go home and write a song about it."

This is Swift's tale of triumph, and she likes to tell it a lot when she's interviewed. It sounds canned, in a way — who hasn't been made fun of in middle school? — but she's managed to keep the feelings raw, and access to them is part of her appeal. The sun is starting to set as Swift heads downtown, near the World Trade Center site, to play a live acoustic set on the radio station Z100 for about 50 "Caller 100s" — a group that happens to be almost exclusively plain, primly dressed girls between 12 and 17. The fans listen raptly as Swift chats about bad-hair days and ex-boyfriends. They hold up their camera phones, sometimes with a Sidekick in the other hand. Swift keeps insisting that they sing along with her, and at first they're shy, but soon the scene resembles a teenage-girl "Kumbaya" session, all the alienation and hurt that they feel in their real lives melting away, replaced by a deep sense of peace. "Taylor is so down-to-earth," gushes Darlane Shala, a ninth-grader from Manhattan. "She's just such a good person."