One afternoon this spring, the twenty-one-year-old country pop star Taylor Swift was in the back seat of a black Escalade going up Madison Avenue, on her way to the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum. Swift is known for sparkly, beaded dresses that make her look like a flapper, but she had adopted a more polished look for the ball: a gauzy, black-and-peach dress by the designer J. Mendel spilled its train around her feet; her hair was up; her lips were dark red and her eyes were smoky. Swift was sending text messages. None of the car’s other passengers—her bodyguard, Greg, a burly former Washington, D.C., cop; her publicist, Paula Erickson, a tall blond woman in a black blazer—spoke. The only sound came from Swift’s iPhone, which emitted an occasional ding!

After a minute, Swift looked up from her phone. “It’s so fun!” she said, talking about the ball. “One of my best friends”—the actress Emma Stone—“is here tonight. So that’ll be really fun, because the past two times I’ve been at this party I haven’t had any of my close friends.” She exhaled loudly. “Whew!”

Swift is sometimes called a twenty-one-year-old 2.0—the girl next door, but with a superior talent set. She has an Oprah-like gift for emotional expressiveness. While many young stars have a programmed, slightly robotic affect, she radiates unjaded sincerity no matter how contrived the situation—press junkets, awards shows, meet and greets. (Both Winfrey and Swift made appearances at a recent Target sales conference, where Swift performed a funny song she’d written for the company, called “Red Shirt Khaki Pants.”) As the car turned onto Fifth Avenue, Swift recalled making a midnight trip, last fall, to buy her most recent album, the triple-platinum “Speak Now,” at a Starbucks in Times Square. She said, in a solemn whisper, “I was so stoked about it, because it’s been one of my goals—I always go into Starbucks, and I wished that they would sell my album.” I found it hard to believe that she could feel enthusiastic about a sales opportunity at Starbucks, but Swift was insistent. “You go to Starbucks and there’s only, like, two CDs for sale,” she said. “And I felt like that would be a really big deal if they wanted to sell one of my CDs.”

The limestone hulk of the Metropolitan Museum came into view. There was a tent in front of the entrance, covering a red carpet, and across the street a mob of screaming spectators stood behind a barricade. The car door opened, and Swift got out to chants of “Tay-lor! Tay-lor!” Easing herself onto the sidewalk, she proceeded to the base of the stairs, and struck a pose before a phalanx of cameras: a sultry, fierce expression, one hand on her hip, her eyes narrowed, her head cocked back. She seemed to age ten years.

Swift has the pretty, but not aggressively sexy, look of a nineteen-thirties movie siren. She is tall and gangly, with porcelain skin, long butterscotch hair that seems crimped, as if from a time before curling irons, and smallish eyes that often look as if they were squinting. She loves to wear makeup, but it tends to resemble stage makeup: red lipstick, thick mascara. In a world of Lohans and Winehouses, Swift is often cited as a role model, a designation she takes seriously. “It’s a compliment on your character,” she told me. “It’s based on the decisions that you make in your life.” She is in the midst of her second world tour, and every show begins with a moment in which she stands silently at the lip of the stage and listens to her fans scream. She tilts her head from side to side and appears to blink back tears—the expression, which is projected onto a pair of Jumbotron screens, is part Bambi, part Baby June.

Swift’s aura of innocence is not an act, exactly, but it can occasionally belie the scale of her success. She is often described using royal terminology—as a pop princess or, as the Washington Post put it recently, the “poet laureate of puberty.” In the past five years, she has sold more than twenty million albums—more than any other musician. And, in an era of illegal downloading, fans buy her music online, too. Swift has sold more than twenty-five million digital tracks, surpassing any other country singer, and she holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling digital album, for “Speak Now.” Forbes ranked her as last year’s seventh-biggest-earning celebrity, with an annual income of forty-five million dollars—a figure that encompasses endorsements, products (this month, she releases a perfume with Elizabeth Arden, which is estimated to generate fifty million dollars during its first year of sales), and tickets. Her concerts, which pack both stadiums and arenas, regularly bring in some seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a night. These feats are all the more impressive because Swift writes her own material—a rarity for a country singer, but especially unusual for a teen star.

That Swift is a country star at all might come as a surprise to the casual music fan, who probably knows her as a generic teen queen, supplying background music for slumber parties and shoppers at Forever 21. On her first album, which was released in 2006, when she was sixteen, Swift sings with a twangy Southern accent, and makes references to God and pickup trucks. But she veered deeper into pop territory with her second record, “Fearless,” which won four Grammys in 2010. It is a collection of guitar-driven hits with a slick, commercial sheen. The typical Taylor Swift song is gentle but full of insistent hooks; it features Swift’s delicate voice, singing about love in all its variations—or, as she told me, “Love, and unrequited love, and love that didn’t last, or love that you wish had lasted, or love that never even got started.”

The setting, on her first two albums, is high school, but the lyrics are layered with dreamy images that could have come from the romantic imagination of a much younger child—princes, fairy tales, kissing in the rain. One of her hits, “Love Story,” recasts the tale of Romeo and Juliet in a small town, with a happy ending: “Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone!” Others are wistful, and sometimes theatrically sad. In “Forever and Always,” Swift sings about a failed relationship: “It rains in your bedroom / everything is wrong! / It rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone!” It’s easy to imagine a chorus of young voices belting out the words from the back seat of the minivan.

But Swift has also won the approval of people in the music industry, from Neil Young (“I like Taylor Swift. I like listening to her”) to Dolly Parton (“Taylor Swift is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to country music”) to the rock critic Robert Christgau, who said of her previous album, “The level of craft made the narrowness of focus forgivable.” She has won virtually every industry prize—an A.C.M. Award for Entertainer of the Year, a C.M.T. Award for Video of the Year, and a Grammy for Album of the Year—and she has been nominated for six categories at the upcoming C.M.A. Awards, more than any other solo artist. Her work has received almost uniformly positive reviews, although most of them portray her more as a skilled technician than as a Dylanesque visionary. “Swift is a songwriting savant with an intuitive gift for verse-chorus-bridge architecture that . . . calls to mind Swedish pop gods Dr. Luke and Max Martin,” Jody Rosen wrote in Rolling Stone. “If she ever tires of stardom, she could retire to Sweden and make a fine living churning out hits for Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry.”

Like Parton, Swift writes autobiographical songs, a technique that, in the Internet era, is a clever marketing device. After “Speak Now” was released, last fall, Swift became known for writing about her celebrity boyfriends: the “Twilight” actor Taylor Lautner, the Disney star Joe Jonas, the singer John Mayer. “Dear John” includes the line “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” (Mayer was thirty-two when they dated.) After the album’s release, public scrutiny of her love life blossomed into something like a stalker school of literary criticism. One blogger analyzed the lyric “I ran off the plane that July 9th,” and figured out that the song was about Jonas: “She flew to Dallas on July 9, 2008, to sit in the audience for a Jonas Brothers show.” In its first week, “Speak Now” sold more than a million copies.

Swift is tolerant of her fans’ interest in her love life, as she is of gawkers who approach her on the street. “It’s human nature!” she told me. While she doesn’t talk about dating in interviews, she helps amateur sleuths along, using capital letters to spell out coded messages throughout the lyrics in her liner notes that indicate which boyfriend the song is about. Swift has an affinity for codes and symbols. Onstage, she shapes her fingers into a heart—“I did it at a concert one time, and people screamed, so I just kept doing it,” she said—and appears with her lucky number, 13, written on her right hand in Sharpie. More recently, she has been scrawling lyrics, such as U2’s “One life, you got to do what you should,” on her left arm; deciphering the references has become another fan activity. Swift’s ability to hold her audience’s interest reflects, in part, a keen understanding of what fuels fan obsession in the first place: a desire for intimacy between singer and listener. She told me that the best musical experience is “hearing a song by somebody singing about their life, and it resembles yours so much that it makes you feel comforted.” Her Web site includes video journals and diary-like posts to her online message board, which Swift does not outsource. Her fans, who call themselves Swifties, respond with passionate testimonials—“i would drink her bathwater”—and confessions about their own crushes: “Jake. Jake. Jake. Jake. I can’t say it enough. I just love the sound of his name.”

On the red carpet at the Met, Swift stood still before the cameras. Then she walked up the stairs, letting Erickson usher her through a series of TV interviews. She addressed each reporter, “Hey! I’m Taylor. Nice to meet you.” Paparazzi swarmed for a better angle. “Miss Swift, right here!” one shouted. When a civilian wandered into their sight lines, a photographer bellowed, “Please! Step away from the beauties!”

As other guests arrived—the brown-haired “Twilight” star Ashley Greene, Harvey Weinstein—the crowd formed a bottleneck. Swift neared the top of the stairs and froze. She grabbed Erickson’s sleeve in a panic: “Am I supposed to talk to him or not?” Standing by the door was the rapper Kanye West.

To some, Swift is best known for an episode at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. As she began to deliver a heartfelt acceptance speech for Best Female Video—“I always dreamed about what it would be like to maybe win one of these”—West, in sunglasses and jeans, strode onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from her hands. Hunched over, he announced, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé”—another nominee—“had one of the best videos of all time!” The moment, which had started out like a coronation, turned into something closer to a public shaming. Swift’s happy expression dissolved into shocked dismay as West handed the microphone back to her and walked offstage. Her mouth dropped open, and she seemed to sway a bit. She eventually left the stage without speaking. (Later that night, Beyoncé invited her back onstage to finish her speech.)

The event—replayed endlessly on television and online—ended in mortification for West. He unleashed an apologetic rant on his Web site (“I’M SOOOOO SORRY TO TAYLOR SWIFT AND HER FANS”) and eventually took a year off to recover. President Obama called him “a jackass.” Swift will say only that the fallout was “handled very privately,” but she added, “I think that you learn a lot of lessons as you’re growing up, and one of them has to be human compassion.” Her last album includes a mournful song called “Innocent,” which is, presumably, about West. It concludes, “Who you are is not what you did / You’re still an innocent.” It’s a nice thought, although the tone is a bit grave: listening to it, you could get the impression that she is forgiving him for armed robbery.

If the Kanye West incident did not reflect badly on Swift, it did forecast some backlash about her ascent. Critics have always gone after her voice, which sounds warbly and sweet on albums but has sometimes been off pitch in concert. A few months later, at the 2010 Grammy Awards, she gave a disastrous live performance in which she harmonized off key with Stevie Nicks. Although she won Album of the Year that night, her singing prompted a flurry of comments along the lines of one made by the “Family Guy” creator, Seth MacFarlane, who said, “Maybe Kanye was right.”

At the Costume Institute Gala, Swift hesitated for a second, and then, realizing that there was no time to wait for advice, continued walking up the stairs toward West. As she neared the door, he held a hand out, and the two exchanged a studiedly casual, “down low” high five. When it was over, Swift stopped just inside the museum, looking giddy. Erickson let out a breath and exclaimed, “That wasn’t bad!”

Feeling my eyes on her, Swift didn’t comment on what had just happened. Instead, she said, “I’m so glad I didn’t bring a purse this year!” Erickson handed her a ticket for the ball, and she ran upstairs to the party.

Swift wandered through the museum’s Alexander McQueen exhibit, passing mannequins in bondage-inspired ensembles, ominous quotations painted on the walls: “There is no way back for me now.” During the cocktail hour, in the Petrie Sculpture Court, waiters in kilts held trays of champagne, but Swift sipped soda water and chatted with Gwyneth Paltrow. “I met her at Faith’s house,” she told me, referring to Faith Hill. “She is the best. You just end up telling her everything!”

Wendi Murdoch eyed Swift with approval. “I have a seven- and a nine-year-old daughter, and they love her music,” she said. “She makes me want to listen to country music more. Also, she’s such a professional and an artist. You don’t hear about any of the bad kind of behavior all the other famous young stars have. I love her music.”

Early adulthood is an awkward time for teen stars, but Swift’s has been free of embarrassing incidents. She doesn’t drink or go to clubs, and she has avoided the trip to rehab that marked the coming-of-age of the former Disney star Demi Lovato. She also hasn’t made the jarring transition to the darker, sexier material embraced by former teenyboppers Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears. Swift describes this decision as an artistic rather than a moral one. “I don’t feel completely overcome by the relentless desire to put out a dark and sexy ‘I’m grown up now’ album,” she told me. Still, her most recent record makes subtle references to more adult relationships, including lines such as “There’s a drawer of my things at your place.”

According to reports in the press, Swift recently bought a Colonial-style house in Beverly Hills that would be right at home on Nantucket. (“I just love New England-y things,” she told me.) But her primary residence is in Nashville, a city that she said “is just everything. It’s just my favorite place ever.” A little over a year ago, she moved out of her parents’ house, in the suburbs, into a four-thousand-square-foot duplex penthouse in a Trump-like glass building called the Adelicia, in midtown Nashville. The building has concierge service and a pool scene, where a crew of Vanderbilt grads like to socialize around a fire pit. Swift bought the apartment when she was nineteen, when her friends all went off to college, and spent two years decorating it with antiques. “I was obsessive about turning my apartment into an art project,” she told me. “Everything’s mismatched, everything’s quirky.” The condo has an indoor moat, a night-sky motif on the ceiling, and a birdcage-shaped observatory.

At home, Swift spends most of her off time with band members, friends, and family—going out for coffee, cooking group dinners. When she’s on tour, she watches TV on her computer: “Teen Mom,” “C.S.I.” (on which she has guest-starred), and, recently, History Channel documentaries. “I’m just so obsessed with the whole history of J.F.K. and R.F.K.,” she said. She recently announced that she had completed a nine-hundred-page book called “The Kennedy Women.”

When I visited Swift, she was rehearsing inside the Bridgestone Arena, home to the Nashville Predators. Twenty-two eighteen-wheelers were parked outside, bearing gauzy portraits of her face, along with the logo of Covergirl, which is sponsoring her tour. In addition to her perfume, she has sold greeting cards, a line of fourteen-dollar Walmart sundresses, Jakks fashion dolls—they wear Swift’s outfits and carry mini versions of her Swarovski crystal-encrusted guitar—and, on her Web site, calendars, iPad skins, Peter Max posters, robes, headbands, journals, and gift bags. Swift professes a kind of auteur approach to marketing. “I don’t believe in endorsing a product that you don’t want to endorse,” she said, with feeling. “I’ve always wanted to be a Covergirl. I’ve always wanted to have a fragrance, and so when it comes time to go on ‘Good Morning America’ and wake up really early in the morning to promote that fragrance I’m going to do it with a smile on my face.”

Swift approaches her career with the seriousness of a C.E.O. Every two years, she puts out an album, for which she writes about forty songs. She composes by singing melodies onto her iPhone as voice memos, and writing down lyrics in the Notes section. “When I’m eighty,” she told me, “I imagine that I’ll wish that when I was twenty-one I’d gotten up early and gone out and walked to Hillsboro Village”—a shopping area near her condo—“and gone out and hiked and taken pictures of everything. And written in my diary more.”

Swift clacked around the arena’s empty concrete halls in gladiator sandals, a flowered skirt, a tank top, and a long, droopy orange sweater. (She gets cold easily.) Her hair was in a loose ponytail, with curly tendrils falling down around her face, and she had on her bright-red lipstick.

One of the dancers in the show ran by in a hillbilly outfit. “That’s cuuuute!” Swift said, pointing. The dancer did a little curtsy and said, “Do you want some grits?”

“That’s Charity, who’s one of my best friends,” Swift said. She is especially close with Liz Huett, a backup singer, and Caitlin Evanson, her violinist. The three share a dressing room, and, when I was there, they were all lying on a couch with their legs draped over one another.

Despite this coziness, the atmosphere of a Taylor Swift tour is professional, if not downright corporate—less “Almost Famous” than Apple board meeting. The tour is run by Robert Allen, a pudgy, gray-haired Englishman whose brother is the drummer for Def Leppard. Allen is given to rah-rah statements about the size of the production. He told me, “On the scale of all the tours that I’ve done, personally, it’s as big as it gets. The fact that we’re in seventy-one arenas and eight stadiums and two of those stadiums are back to back—that’s a ‘wow.’ That’s rarefied air there.” The other major player is Swift’s mother, Andrea, a large, imposing woman with a blond bob and Swift’s narrow eyes. When I arrived, she was holding a list of statistics to recite when giving backstage tours—“all my facts,” she called them. She handed the list to Swift, who read them out: “We travel an average of three hundred and fifty miles per night. Eighty-two set carts. Ninety instruments—violins, percussions, banjo, a harp. Approximately eight miles of electric cable get put up per day.”

“Eight miles,” Andrea Swift repeated, proudly.

Taylor Swift contributes to every detail of the show. “You have to,” she told me, “or else you’ll have these surprises pop up. And you don’t ever want to be caught by surprise when you’re touring.” As a manager, she cuts a figure not unlike that of the teen-age monarch in the 2009 film “The Young Victoria,” gracious and vulnerable but also, given her position of power, a bit terrifying. People bring her things: bottles of water, a Styrofoam bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

At one point, Swift and her mother were backstage, preparing for a meeting about onstage video content. Swift said, “Do we have the DVD? Because the ones that they gave me yesterday I left in my condo.”

It turned out that an assistant had forgotten them. Andrea Swift groaned. “How many ways did we express to Britney that we needed those DVDs?”

Swift took the fall. “It’s my fault, ’cause I was watching them last night,” she said, sounding dejected.

Her mother adopted a gentle tone: “Honey, if we had to count on you to remember every little detail it certainly wouldn’t work.”

Swift’s businesslike approach could be considered a natural result of her background. She was born not in the small-town South but in Reading, Pennsylvania. She was brought up in the nearby suburb of Wyomissing, where, she told me, “it mattered what kind of designer handbag you brought to school.” The older of two siblings—her brother is a student at Vanderbilt—she grew up on a Christmas-tree farm, but her parents were not exactly farmers. Her mother worked in finance, and her father, a descendant of three generations of bank presidents, is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. (He bought the tree farm from a client.)

Early on, Swift assumed that she would follow her parents into business. “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be,” she recalled, during an online Q. & A. with fans. “We’d be at, like, the first day of school and they’re, like, ‘So what do you guys want to be when you grow up?’ And everybody’s, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ Or, like, ‘I want to be a ballerina!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna be a financial adviser!’ ” But she eventually had a country-music epiphany, inspired by listening to nineties crossover hits—Faith Hill, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. The melodies were good, but she especially liked the storytelling. “It was just such a given—I want to do that!” she said.

Swift’s adolescence was dominated by a yearlong period of exile, when a group of friends ditched her, pronouncing her “annoying.” “That’s quoted,” she said. “We had these catty little I.M. conversations when we were in sixth grade.” The ditching probably had something to do with the fact that Swift was becoming recognized for her singing: she had performed at a 76ers game. (There is a YouTube clip of a chubbier Swift, in a headband and cardigan, belting out the national anthem.) But it might also have been related to her natural primness. She recalled an incident from seventh grade: “At the beginning of the year, we were all sleeping over at somebody’s house and”—she broke into a mock whisper—“they were all talking about how they wanted to sneak over to this guy’s house because this guy had beer. And I was just, like”—she affected a panicked voice—“ ‘I want to call my mom! I want to call my mom! I want to call my mom!’ ” She told me, “My whole life I’ve never felt comfortable just being . . . edgy like that.”

Swift had already decided to become a songwriter. When she was ten, her mother began driving her around on weekends to sing at karaoke competitions. Then she persuaded her mother to take her to Nashville during spring break to drop off her karaoke demo tapes around Music Row, in search of a record deal; they didn’t succeed, but the experience convinced Swift that she needed a way to stand out. Songwriting became a sanctuary from the horrors of middle school. “I couldn’t wait to get home every day and write,” she said.

The Swifts continued to return to Nashville, where Taylor played in industry showcases; at thirteen, she was offered a development deal by RCA, a Sony Music subsidiary. The following year, the Swifts moved. Her father transferred to the Nashville office of Merrill Lynch, and the family bought a large house on a lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a borderline rural area where Johnny Cash used to live. (It provided the small-town imagery for Swift’s lyrics.) Swift enrolled at a public school and experienced a social revelation: “Everybody was so nice to me! They’re all, like, ‘We heard you’re a singer. We have a talent show next week—do you want to enter?’ ” The RCA deal eventually fell apart—Swift walked away, after the label decided to keep her in development for too long—but by then she had also secured a songwriter’s publishing deal with Sony/ATV Nashville: she was the youngest songwriter the company had ever signed. Arthur Buenahora, the Sony executive who signed Swift after she played a few songs for him on her guitar, said, “The songs were great, but it was her, really. She was a star. She lit up the room.” He added, “I liked her attitude. She was very easy to root for.”

Swift, as a teen-age singer-songwriter, was an anomaly in the country-music industry. The predominant model is the songwriter workshop: writers churn out material in groups of two or three, and the results are hawked by a song-plugger, so that superstars like Tim McGraw can pick their favorites. There had, of course, been other teen-age singers—from Tanya Tucker to LeAnn Rimes—but they often performed material written by and for middle-aged listeners. Swift recalled, “I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me”—she adopted a snobby voice—“ ‘Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we’ll talk.’ ” It’s since become a Nashville truism that Swift tapped into an audience that hadn’t previously been recognized: teen-age girls who listen to country music.

Swift’s songs were different both in their personal dimension and in their subject matter. Peter Cooper, of the Nashville Tennessean, suggested that the best precedent might be Janis Ian, whose song “At Seventeen” swept the charts in the seventies with its raw portrayal of adolescent angst. “At its best, country music is a reality format,” he said. “What Taylor did was to write her own experiences, nearly in real time, and speak directly to her audience about what she was going through—which was what they were going through, too.”

She didn’t do it completely alone. As part of her publishing deal, she was matched with professional songwriters. Her mother would set up the writing sessions and drive her there. She eventually began writing regularly with Liz Rose, a middle-aged Texan who co-wrote many of the songs on her first two albums. Rose perhaps has a career incentive to play up Swift’s role in their collaboration, but they both describe it as an equal one, with Swift providing a line, a scenario, or a hook—often about something that was going on at school—and the two of them improvising the rest. For the hit “You Belong with Me,” a song about having a crush on a boy who is with someone else, Swift said, “I just came in and played the pre-chorus and the first half of the chorus for Liz”—she started singing—“ ‘She wears short skirts / I wear T-shirts,’ and she goes, ‘Something about bleachers!’ ” The finished line: “She’s cheer captain / and I’m on the bleachers.”

Some have objected that Swift promotes a noxious, fifties-style ideal of virginal, submissive femininity. Critics take issue with “Fifteen,” a song that Swift wrote, at seventeen, about the joys and pains of first relationships. The song sketches out the experiences of Swift and her best friend from high school, Abigail, a University of Kansas student who has become a demi-celebrity among Swifties. It moves from Swift’s positive memory (“And then you’re on your very first date and he’s got a car and you feel like flyyyyyin’!”) to Abigail’s disappointing one (“Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind”) and concludes with a coy hint about Swift’s future: “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.” Sady Doyle, the author of the blog Tiger Beatdown, interpreted “Fifteen” as an implicit morality tale. “The narrative here goes as follows,” she wrote. “There’s a girl who gets semi-sexual and regrets it (because BOYS want SEX, and GIRLS DON’T), and a girl who doesn’t get up to much of anything sexual and ends up wise and happy.” One mother recently wrote on the Huffington Post, “Speak Now tour? More like Speak softly and smile a lot.”

But Swift’s lyrics, though they are not subversive, have a certain sophistication. There’s often a tension between the words and the music: angry songs sound upbeat, and sentimental songs are laced with intimations of future disillusionment. In person, Swift has a quietly ironic sense of humor. When I first met her, discussing the Costume Institute Gala, I asked, “So how do you feel about balls in general?” Swift seemed confused. Then she let out a cackle and said, “A-ma-zing! That was incredible. It’s going to be my new moment of the century.”

In her sophomore year, Swift bought a car with the money she’d earned from songwriting—a silver Lexus SC430 convertible. “It was the car that Regina George drives in ‘Mean Girls,’ ” she said. “Because all the girls back in Pennsylvania idolized her, and I think I just thought it would be fun to have that car.”

Swift’s story is often framed as an underdog saga, the triumph of a nice girl over mean ones, and of teen-age pluckiness over industry gatekeepers. It’s a legend that deëmphasizes the role of adults, although Swift’s parents have been a constant presence in her life—she has even written songs about them. I spoke to Andrea Swift one afternoon in Nashville, in what is called the T-Party Room. At every stop on the tour, six workers take five hours to transform a cinder-block holding room into an exotic tented emporium to greet fans. It feels like the refuge of a prosperous Bedouin teen-ager: a central column is decorated with snapshots (Swift making a heart symbol with Stephen Tyler), and swaths of purple, yellow, green, and red silk are draped from the top, Maypole style, forming a billowy ceiling. “Virtually everything in this room she’s picked out, either herself or through text,” Andrea Swift told me.

During each show, Andrea Swift or an assistant scouts the arena and selects the most enthusiastic fans. She gives each lucky girl (they are usually girls) a wristband and invites her backstage later. The idea behind the T-Party dates to Swift’s early years, when she was opening for other country stars—Rascal Flatts, Brad Paisley, George Strait. “She would wait until the headliner got back to his bus, was having his nightcap, and was going to bed,” Andrea Swift told me. “And that’s when we would hit the concourse level for her to sign autographs.” She said that her daughter was unimpressed with the way meet and greets usually worked. “She was, like, ‘You know, if I was ever a headliner I would want to pick out people in the audience that were just so crazy and fanatical—they’d be the ones that got to come back.’ She didn’t want you to V.I.P. your way in or bribe someone or sob-story your way in. It’s just basically the fans who it would really mean the world to just sit down and have fun and talk to her.”

Andrea Swift affected a note of nonchalance when I asked her about her involvement in her daughter’s career. “Well, you know, she’s just been doing this for so long that, to me, this is just like soccer practice,” she said. Swift’s father, Scott, whose look includes tasselled loafers, was more direct. He said, “I’m not taking her money, if that’s what you’re saying.”

While I was in Nashville, I went to see Scott Borchetta, the head of Swift’s record label, Big Machine. Borchetta, a former Universal executive, left to start his own operation, and Swift was his first client. At the time that he signed her, he already had a reputation for being, in the words of the songwriter and producer Robert Ellis Orrall, “one of the best radio-promotion guys in the business.” His office is on Music Row, in an unmarked frame house whose exterior state of dilapidation, an assistant explained, is a disguise: “So we don’t have eight-year-old girls knocking on doors giving us their CDs.” Behind the peeling paint, the building resembles an outpost of Soho House—diamond-plate steel-covered doors and scores of gold and platinum records on the walls. In the basement is a map of the world stuck with multicolored pins. “Those are our territories,” Borchetta, a paunchy man with a goatee, told me. Swift has sold more than three million albums internationally—an extraordinary number for a country act—and Borchetta outlined the plan of attack: Australia is next. “We were able to really infiltrate Japan over the last year,” he said. “I think she’s at the point now where it’s probably time for her to do a movie and soundtrack. Because she’s gotten to this kind of embeddedness, if you will, with where we are in American culture.”

Since 2007, the Swifts have been in litigation with Dan Dymtrow, a former manager of Britney Spears, who claimed that they had violated a 2004 contract with him before Taylor signed with Borchetta. In papers filed in a New York court, Dymtrow challenged Swift’s origins story: “How does an eighteen-year-old singer from a small town in Pennsylvania make it to the cover of Rolling Stone’s ‘Best of Rock 2008’? If you believe the version of the story being told to the world, Taylor Swift knocked on record-company doors when she was just thirteen years old.” Dymtrow argued that, instead, he had launched her career by bringing in branding consultants, setting up performances (one, he noted, was a venue known as Rudy Giuliani’s Camp), and securing marketing deals with companies like Abercrombie & Fitch. The case is being settled out of court; a judge threw out all of Dymtrow’s claims except one, for unjust enrichment. While the litigation didn’t derail Swift’s career, it did provide glimpses into the adult negotiations inevitably at work behind a teen-age success story. At one point, Dymtrow’s lawyers released an e-mail written by Swift’s father to Borchetta that was quoted in the press: “Enough with the Dymtrow. You asked me to break both his legs, wrap him in chains and throw him in the lake. I did.”

“Hey, check, one, two. Hello? Hello, hey. Stadium. Hello?” Swift’s phone was not getting a signal. It was late afternoon, and she was now in Detroit, preparing to play the first stadium of her tour: Ford Field, which seats fifty thousand people, and, five years ago, hosted the Superbowl. Like all her tour dates, it had sold out in less than five minutes. “The only time when I’m alone is when I come into the venue earlier than everybody else,” she said. She sat on the floor of her dressing room, a bare stadium space accessorized with scented candles, puffy purple couches, and lamps with the tags still on them. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a red plaid shirt, with her hair in a ponytail. Except for a certain high-sheen exquisiteness—thinness, the lipstick—she looked like a regular college student.

“Yeah, check, one, two,” Swift said. She was talking to her management office about an album of pictures from the tour, which would be sold at merchandise stands. Beside her on the floor was a stack of dummy pages, which she’d covered with Post-it notes. She flipped through the pages and read off critiques: “I’d really like to take out the 3-D element”; “Does it bother you that I have a hair scrunchy on my wrist for some of the pictures?”; “O.K. ‘Love Story’? The one where I’m coming down the stairs? I look like a big, giant cat.”

When I arrived, she had been bent over a glass coffee table, writing thank-you notes to local radio-station managers. The cards, which she had helped write and design, were from the American Greetings line. Some of the styles are glitter-encrusted, with Swift’s handwriting on them, and messages that echo her song lyrics: “You know how sometimes—right in the middle of a moment—you already know it’s one you won’t ever forget?” Swift had contacted American Greetings with the idea for the cards. “Part of the reason I wanted to do it was because I go through so many cards on a weekly basis,” she said. “I like writing ’em. And I like stamps.” As she wrote her thank-yous, Swift referred to notes about each radio-station worker that she had made on her iPhone. She signed a card:

Eric!

Thank you so much for coming to my show the other night, it meant a lot to see so many of my friends from the station. And thanks for coming to say hi to me backstage!

Love,

Taylor

Swift’s penchant for thank-you notes and thoughtful gestures may be a talisman against the fickleness of public opinion—or fate. She is an incessant worrier. “I’ve been watching ‘Behind the Music’ since I was five, and I became fascinated by career trajectories,” she told me. “Like”—she adopted a TV-announcer voice—“ ‘This artist peaked on their second album. This artist peaked on their third album. This artist peaked with every album. These are singles artists. These are album artists.’ ” She went on, “And I sometimes stress myself out wondering what my trajectory is—like, if I sleep in and wake up at 2 P.M., because I’m so tired from the night before, sometimes I’ll beat myself up, because what if I was supposed to wake up earlier that day and write a song?”

Swift’s career role models are not the Madonnas and Beyoncés of the world but the singer-songwriters—Bruce Springsteen, Kris Kristofferson, and Emmylou Harris. “They’re so known for their thoughts, and the things that they’ve written, and the things they’ve created,” she told me. “They’ve evolved, but they’ve never abandoned their fans.” (Robert Christgau thought that Harris made sense, but he said that the Springsteen aspirations were a stretch: “She has a much more contained and crafty relationship with words.”)

Swift told me that she is taking control of her career, now that she’s no longer a teen-ager. Her parents, she said, “have been staying home more” (although one of them was at all the shows I attended). And, although she has acted in the movie “Valentine’s Day,” and hosted “Saturday Night Live,” and plans to do more acting, she flinched when I mentioned the plan for global domination that Borchetta had mapped out for her.

In Detroit, Swift seemed somewhat melancholy. Once in a while, I had the feeling that she was on the verge of bursting into tears. She said that she had recently decided that life is “about achieving contentment. . . . You’re not always going to be ridiculously happy.” She had written about ten songs so far for her next album. Asked to characterize them, she said, “They’re sad? If I’m being honest.” The most recent one, she said, “is about moving on.”

At one point, her security guard, Greg, came in, carrying a pair of portable iPod speakers. “Yes!” Swift said. “Where did they find them?” (Swift’s life sometimes resembles an extended iPhone commercial.) She plugged her phone into the speakers, and played a mournful country song: “Well, they ain’t gonna make a movie about a couple of fools like us.” “This is my time to hang out with Lori McKenna, who I want to be when I grow up,” Swift said, of the singer. “She’s a mom, and she lives in New England with her five kids. And she wrote ‘Stealing Kisses,’ by Faith Hill. She wrote that!” She fixed me with an intense look before cuing up another song, and asked, “Have you ever had your heart broken?”

Listeners to Swift’s most recent album will get the impression that she has. The songs, which she wrote without collaborators, are extra long, and cover a multitude of relationships, in moods that range from regret to a surprising, and somewhat satisfying, cattiness. Besides “Dear John,” about John Mayer, the upbeat, guitar-driven “Better Than Revenge” is, according to fan speculation, a takedown of the actress Camilla Belle, who dated a former boyfriend of Swift’s. The chorus rhymes “she’s an actress” with “she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

A perusal of the songbooks begs a logistical question: where does she find the time to date so many people? The answer seems to be that a little goes a long way. Many of the songs are based on a memory or on a flirtation. In “Enchanted,” Swift murmurs in a pleading voice, “Please don’t be in love with someone else.” It was inspired, apparently, by a brief conversation that she had, in New York, with the musician Adam Young, who performs under the name Owl City. The interaction was “just small talk and stuff,” Young told me. “She talked about how she grew up in Pennsylvania, I talked about how I grew up in Minnesota. She’s very genuine.” Swift’s hint in the liner notes spelled A-D-A-M. Her fans decoded it by tracking a word, “wonderstruck,” which Young had used on his blog. The word is now the name of Swift’s perfume—a seamless mixture of reality, romance, and marketing.

When I asked why so few of her songs are about work, she said, “I don’t want to write songs like”—she switched into a monotone voice—“ ‘Today, I woke up in a hotel and went to a venue and wrote cards.’ Nobody wants to hear a song about that.”

One song from her current album is, however, about a professional dustup. “Mean,” an upbeat, unusually twangy number, calls out a bully (“You, with your switching sides and your wildfire lies and your humiliation”), and alludes to her success (“Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me”). At one point, Swift taunts, in a singsong way, “All you are is mean, and a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life.”

The consensus is that the song is aimed at Bob Lefsetz, a former L.A. entertainment lawyer who blogs about the music business. Lefsetz, who had at first praised Swift, reversed himself after her live performance at the 2010 Grammys, announcing, “Now, everyone knows that Taylor Swift can’t sing.” I talked to Lefsetz, who said that the song “Mean” had brought him daily hate e-mail. “I wrote that she couldn’t sing. People are saying, ‘Little kids like her, so who the fuck are you to speak the truth?’ ” But he stood by his argument: “Let’s say that you’re ugly, and you’re on the cover of Vogue, does that work for you? And the defense is ‘I’m a good person!’ Let’s say that you’re a really nice guy and play baseball for the Yankees and bat .100. ‘Oh, but he’s a nice guy!’ ”

Swift refuses to defend her singing voice. She told me, “I write songs, and my voice is just a way to get those lyrics across.”

A Taylor Swift concert begins with the massing, hours before showtime, of little girls outside the concert venue—the Hajj at Mecca, if it were sponsored by My Little Pony. There is a uniform: sundresses, cowboy boots. (Swift’s look during her early years.) Fans curl their hair into loose ringlets and write the number 13 on their hands. Many also carry signs, in the hope of being selected by Swift’s mother for the T-Party. For example: “I would be ENCHANTED to see you.” Inside, video screens above the stage project text messages from the audience:

Taylor you’re my idol <3

We love you more than we can say!!!

At one concert I attended, Tom Petty’s “American Girl” was playing on the sound system as fans filed in, a nod to the middle-aged chaperones in the arena. There are lots of mother-daughter pairs at Swift’s shows. In New Jersey, a mother accompanying her thirteen-year-old said, “There’s nothing like Taylor. I’m not worried about the words coming out of her mouth. Growing up, I remember my mom making me return a Rod Stewart album because of the song ‘Hot Legs.’ ” (For a contemporary example, one can attend a concert by Katy Perry and listen to a stadium full of thirteen-year-olds chant along with the song “Peacock,” which goes, “I want to see your peacock-cock-cock! Your peacock-cock!”)

Swift’s entrance is all pomp and circumstance. First, her mother appears on the floor, and a wave of screaming breaks out. Andrea Swift walks the aisles of the arena, smiling and waving like a political wife, giving the occasional hug, and takes her place near the soundstage. Then Swift’s entrance is announced by sonic rumbling and by her recorded voice: “There’s a time for silence and a time for waiting your turn. But if you know how you feel and you so clearly know what you need to say, you’ll know it. I don’t think you should wait, I think you should Speak Now!” As the music starts, she sprints onstage in a glittery dress, and launches into the first song. Then she does her standing-still ritual, her eyes misting over while the audience screams.

Swift’s songs may be wistful expressions of a teen-ager’s inner life, but her shows are huge externalizations of them—featuring a two-story stage, “pyro” displays, dancers, aerialists, and nine costume changes. Although the stories in her songs are somewhat oblique, her dance troupe acts them all out literally: “Speak Now,” a fantasy of a woman interrupting her crush’s wedding, is performed on a church set, complete with pews and bridesmaids. Swift, her hair in a ponytail, bobs and sings, “Don’t say yes / run away now / I’ll meet you when you’re out of the church at the back door,” and runs offstage with the dancer dressed as the groom. Cheesy, yes, but once, during this song, I noticed a grizzled rock critic in the row in front of me, cotton stuffed in his ears, tapping his feet.

Eventually, Swift moves to the B-stage, a little island with a glittery tree. She plays the ukulele and banters about love, saying, “We’re all hopeless romantics,” and “I think there’s really something special about a first kiss.” The subject of the songs, it becomes clear, is not really men—it’s more about the love affair between Swift and her audience. In Detroit, she said, “You know when you know someone really well and they can finish your sentences? I’m curious to know what it would be like to have fifty thousand people finish my sentences.”

She began to sing a soft, acoustic version of “Fearless”—“In a storm in my best dress, fearless”—and the entire stadium sang along. Standing on the floor in front of the stage were six sixteen-year-old girls holding hands and swaying, and a girl in a hijab sobbing as she sang the words. It was hard not to be a little moved, and not to feel relieved that the words being sung were, more or less, safe. At the show’s high point, the crowd-pleasing song “Love Story,” silver and gold confetti rains down, and Swift, wearing a princess gown, is launched above the crowd in a flying balcony.

Toward the end of the show, I followed a production assistant, Gabby, up to a row near the nosebleed seats, where two girls were holding a sign that read “Speak Now,” illuminated by clip-on book lights. They were Lidia Hencic and Anna McWebb, fourteen, of Waterloo, Ontario. They wore braces and Birkenstocks, and were jumping up and down like pogo sticks.

“Have you ever met Taylor?” Gabby asked.

“No!!!!!”

“Want to meet her?”

“Yes!!!!!”

She handed them wristbands and said, “Taylor’s mom hand-picked you.” The girls began convulsing with screams.

In the T-Party Room, the lights were low, and the anointed fans stood around in stunned clumps. An assistant had briefed each person on the protocol: “They have one group photo and absolutely no video. Taylor signs one thing per person. When she’s coming, that’s when to start the ‘Tay-lor!’ chant.”

Hencic and McWebb stood in a corner. They said they had sleepovers oriented around watching Swift’s videos. “We’re not really the boy-crazy type,” McWebb said. “We just want to be her friend.”

Hencic said, “I can relate to what she’s saying, even though I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

As the fans chanted “Tay-lor! Tay-lor!,” Swift appeared, in a baggy pink striped sweater, her hair in loose braids and her skin showing a faint layer of sweat. She started giving out hugs, her eyes crinkling as she smiled.

Swift approached Hencic and McWebb, and said, calmly, “Hey, dudes!,” and gave them each a hug. She stood back to admire their sign, with its book lights. “This is so good,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’ve never seen anyone do this before. It’s so crafty.”

“You’re our idol,” McWebb said. “We watch all of your blogs.”

Swift put a hand to her heart and said, “Thank you. That’s awesome.”

They stood there while she worked the rest of the room, very close, but very far away. ♦