Taylor Swift’s first Florida concert was at Chili Cookoff in a park. She wasn’t the star
Taylor Swift breaks the internet when she announces a run of concert tour on-sale dates — as she did Thursday when she told fans Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium would be the venue for the next leg of North American shows on The Eras Tour.
GET TICKETS: Taylor Swift is bringing Eras Tour to Miami for three shows. Here’s how to get tickets
Swift, now 33, sold out major Miami venues on her Speak Now Tour, Red Tour, 1989 Tour and, lastly, her Reputation Tour at Hard Rock Stadium in February 2019.
But her first South Florida concert was as the third-billed act on a Kiss Country radio station-sponsored Chili Cookoff event held at Pembroke Pines’ C.B. Smith Park on Jan. 27, 2008.
Swift was 18. Country duo Big & Rich with their guest Cowboy Troy and Gretchen Wilson topped the bill over Swift.
Swift, promoting her eponymous debut album and the Miami appearance, spoke to the Miami Herald back then. Here’s what she had to say to her fans when she was en route to breaking the internet with her My Space account.
Sweet Sensation
By Howard Cohen
Originally published in the Miami Herald on Jan. 25, 2008
If Taylor Swift continues her skyrocketing success, one day some enterprising country artist might write a song called “Taylor Swift.”
When you say Taylor Swift / I hope you think my favorite song / The one we danced to all night long.
After all, such name-checking worked for Swift when she wrote her Top 5 single, “Tim McGraw,” while in math class during her freshman year of high school. The song became her first hit in 2007.
While her peers were struggling with algebra, Swift scribbled the lyrics to “Tim McGraw” in her notebook and sneaked out of class to record a voice memo into her telephone when the melodies to “Tim McGraw” and her next country/pop crossover hit, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” came to her.
“When [teachers] conducted random notebook checks they’d be freaked out — but they learned to deal with me,” Swift muses in a telephone conversation from Hendersonville, Tennessee.
The swift Swift wrote “Our Song,” currently in its sixth week at No. 1 on Billboard’s country singles chart, for her ninth-grade talent show.
Swift’s popularity is such that, at this moment, she’s outpacing the real Tim McGraw, not to mention Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts and Kenny Chesney at retail and radio.
At 18, she’s a phenomenon.
▪ The youngest solo female ever to write or co-write every song on a No. 1, double platinum, debut country album. (Even Dolly Parton didn’t accomplish that).
▪ The only serious threat to gifted, yet trouble-prone, Amy Winehouse for Grammy’s Best New Artist award on Feb. 10.
▪ The Country Music Association’s Horizon Award winner.
▪ Has more than 35 million song streams on MySpace.
“She’s on fire,’ says Ken Boesen, program director for South Florida’s WKIS 99.9-FM (Kiss Country), host station for Sunday’s 23rd annual Chili Cookoff at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines. Swift performs, along with Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson, Joe Nichols, Sawyer Brown, American Idol finalist Phil Stacey and others.
Forget the billing. (Big & Rich is in headline position). No one tops Swift there.
“Of the newer artists, she is the most requested artist on the station,” Boesen says. “She’s everywhere, the hottest thing country has seen [lately].”
It’s not difficult to understand why Swift has struck such a chord. She writes her own music — an accessible blend of “Wide Open Spaces”-era Dixie Chicks-styled country and pop (Dixie Chicklets, anyone?) — so she’s able to tap into the same emotions her young audience feels. Nashville’s power structure isn’t feeding Swift her lines.
“I’m not going to write songs about what it’s like being on the road. I know 99 percent of my fans can’t relate to that. I will write songs about things I can relate to and the people buying my album can relate to,” Swift says. “If I have to go back to when I was 13 and had a crush on the basketball player — who didn’t notice me — that’s what I’ll do, those feelings are universal.”
Somewhere in Hendersonville some basketball boy is feeling like a big ol’ loser right about now.
“It’s been a long time since young people have had somebody they could relate to who was their age writing songs and singing about things in their lives,” Boesen says.
For Swift, whose parents moved from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, so that, at age 11, their daughter could shop her demo tape around Nashville, the songs come for many reasons. She’s already writing tunes for a second album, planned for late 2008, featuring a songwriting collaboration with that other hot newcomer, Colbie Caillat. In addition, Swift and pal Kellie Pickler, the “American Idol” alum, wrote a song “as personal as it gets” for Pickler’s coming sophomore album.
Yet, even someone like Swift, for all her poise, obvious good looks and gift of gab, says she sometimes felt like an outsider.
“’The Outside,’ I wrote when I was 12, and not fitting in at school,” Swift recalls. “Being able to face the rejections of Nashville is nothing compared to facing the rejections at middle school. Songwriting is the best kind of therapy for me. I’m never tempted to drink to ease the pain of something.”
But mostly, Swift’s songs come about because of boys.
“When you go through a horrible breakup — from someone you should never have dated in the first place — it’s a waste of effort. But if you write a song about the experience it’s not a wasted experience, it helped the career. ‘Tim McGraw,’ that was about a guy I was dating who was going off to college. I wrote that in my freshman year,” she says.
“Teardrops on My Guitar” is about a guy, Drew, that Swift had a crush on except, somehow, he missed her signals. Maybe he was paying more attention in math class. Radio listeners, however, now know all about poor Drew, whose name is the first word she sings in the song.
Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see / That I want and I’m needing everything that we should be.
“Drew showed up on my driveway the other day!” Swift says. “Kellie Pickler and I were going to a hockey game and this guy pulls up. I didn’t have my contacts on and didn’t see him right away. He’s a little older, a little taller, the guy I wrote that song about 2½ years ago. I hadn’t talked to him. I didn’t know what to say and here he is walking toward me. Oh my God!
“We had a civilized conversation.”
Drew’s gotten wise — lest he wind up on “Taylor Swift II.”
“I think the coolest thing about being a songwriter is you can call out anyone you want to,” Swift says. “Sometimes I feel bad for the guys I’ve written songs about. They are permanently branded.”
Call Swift “the anti-Britney.” She won’t mind.
“I want her to get well and come back and everyone wants her to win,” Swift says, serious for a moment. “I want to go to another Britney concert.
“But I don’t party. It’s just not my thing, never has been. When someone calls me a role model that is the greatest compliment.”
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