Taylor made

She's just 20, beautiful, exceptionally talented and immensely successful. And as January 31 draws near, Taylor Swift looks set for another phenomenal achievement: A multiple Grammy win.

She has been nominated in eight categories - Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for You Belong with Me, Best Female Country Vocal Performance, Best Country Song for White Horse, Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals for Breathe, and Album of the Year and Best Country Album for Fearless.

Swift has perhaps lost count of the number of caps she has collected in a short career span (the pretty young thing has hardly started her career). On November 11, 2009, Swift won four CMA Awards: Album of the Year for Fearless, Music Video of the Year for Love Story, Female Vocalist of the Year, and Entertainer of the Year. And with this win, she became the first woman to hold that title in a decade and the youngest recipient of the CMA's top prize. Swift also won five 2009 American Music Awards.

The Pennsylvania-born Nashville transplant, who sold more albums in 2008 than any act in any genre, also gracefully weathered a high-profile celebrity bullying incident when rapper Kanye West snatched a microphone out of her hands in what should have been her moment of glory for taking best female video honours at the MTV Video Music Awards.

How has the singer, songwriter and, more recently, producer with the wavy blonde tresses and a penchant for sundresses and cowboy boots become so spectacularly successful?

She's done it by employing the four T's of pop music: talent, tenacity, technology and teens. And she's done so without relying on overt sexuality, which makes pop music's new teen queen a family-friendly performer and role model whom many parents enjoy as much as their teenage kids.

The elder of Scott and Andrea Swift's two children, Swift grew up in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, knowing from childhood she wanted to be a songwriter. At 11, she talked her parents into taking her to visit Nashville.

Swift recalls going door to door and announcing, "Hi! I'm Taylor. I write songs and I think you should sign me!"

She didn't land a deal then, but an executive she met on an early trip, Scott Borchetta, then at DreamWorks Nashville, was impressed by her forthrightness, as well as the song samples he heard, and asked her father to keep him informed about her activities.

That's where her tenacity paid off. Periodically checking back with publishers and labels while continuing to write songs regularly at home in her bedroom, Swift was offered a deal when she was 14: not as a recording artist but as a fledgling songwriter for Sony/ATV Music Publishing. That was enough for the Swifts to sell their home and move to Hendersonville, Tennessee.

By this time, DreamWorks Nashville had folded, one of many labels that went under in the mid-2000s. Borchetta, widely respected for his skills in music promotion, had a vision of a label at which he could implement the new strategies he felt were needed in light of the changing, and shrinking, music business.Other labels began to approach Swift, but most saw her only as a fresh-faced singer. Borchetta, on the other hand, liked the honesty in her songs of teen romance and heartbreak, and felt she had the potential both to connect with existing country music fans and possibly attract younger listeners who weren't necessarily committed country enthusiasts.

He made Swift an offer allowing her to record her own songs and have a voice in how those recordings would be produced - highly unusual for a 15-year-old with no track record. But Swift had impressed him with her dedication to her songwriting duties - and her fluency in the language of the new generation: the internet and MySpace.

It was a gamble for both. Borchetta's label, to be known as Big Machine Records, hadn't opened its doors yet, and 2005 wasn't an ideal time for a start-up record company. Swift joined staffers, sitting on the floor of the spartan office, stuffing news releases and copies of her debut CD into envelopes for mailing. "Obviously, creative control is the most important thing for me," Swift said, "or I wouldn't have left the biggest label in Nashville for a label that didn't have any furniture."

Her first single was a savvy love letter to one of country's biggest stars, a song called Tim McGraw, which because of the name-dropping title caught the ears of hard-to-reach radio programmers and started the album's climb toward platinum.

Unlike many teen musicians who have tried to sound preternaturally grown-up, Swift embraced the agonies and ecstasies of life as a teenager, in some ways similar to what Chuck Berry had done during the nascent days of rock 'n' roll a half-century before her.

She had realised early on that "There are thousands of girls going up and down Music Row who are gorgeous and who have amazing voices and who can sing higher and louder than me," she once said. "Somehow I had to find a way to stand out and try to be the different one."

Where irony does show up in her world is in the realisation that this young woman, named one of People magazine's 100 most beautiful people in the world in 2008 and again in 2009, only a few years ago still thought of herself as an ugly duckling. She and her best friend, Abigail Anderson, would sit out school dances, throwing slumber parties for themselves while their classmates danced the night away in rented tuxedos and ball gowns.

"We kind of came to the conclusion in ninth grade that we were never going to be popular," she recalled, "so we should just stick together and have fun and not take ourselves too seriously."

Swift has demonstrated a gift for making friends, not enemies, even eliciting a couple of public apologies after the MTV Awards incident from the normally unrepentant West.

She cleverly has exploited the expansive audience she has carved out in the MySpace universe and on Facebook. She also recently logged the millionth follower on her popular Twitter account.

Her passion for texting, emailing, Twittering and other au courant forms of e-municating is a big part of the connection she's formed with fans. In the spring when her publicist received an email praising her performance at the taping of a CBS special honouring George Strait, Swift grabbed the BlackBerry and shot back a personal thank you - while the show was still in progress.

"Blogging has been really fun because I like to let people into my life as much as possible. I think it's important for the people who keep you going and support you and have your back out there in the world to know that you're thinking of them all the time."

Her new-world model of success is a strong reason for her win in the CMA's entertainer of the year contest, a category that was designed to recognise "the act displaying the greatest competence in all aspects of the entertainment field (including) recorded performance... the in-person performance, staging, public acceptance, attitude, leadership and overall contribution to the country music image."

"I think Taylor could stun people and win," said Lon Helton, publisher of Nashville-based Country Aircheck, which monitors airplay nationally on country radio stations.

"One of the things that excites the record labels, now that young people who are inspired by Taylor have come to Nashville, is that they are often internet savvy, and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter-savvy," Helton said. "Many of them already have a little bit of a following in that world. Hopefully that will bode well in terms of digital sales in the future...Taylor really is just in the infancy of this phenomenon."

Lucky number 13

Taylor Swift says she loves the number 13 because it's lucky for her. "I was born on December 13, my first album went gold in 13 weeks; every time I win an award at an awards show I've seen 13 hundreds of times leading up to that awards show. The other night, I saw 13 so many times before they announced the Grammy nominations and it ended up being a really good night for me."