My first impression of Taylor Swift had nothing to do with music. I saw her appearance in a movie—Valentine’s Day (2010) by the late Garry Marshall—in a bit of stunt casting. The film’s a diversion I enjoyed for its lightness and sentimentality. Swift’s fine in a small role. In retrospect, its sensibility matches hers, then and now, even as an adult artist at age 33. Swift, the oldest sibling from a small city in America’s Keystone state, favors romance, true love and wearing your heart on your sleeve, as the saying goes, like Garry Marshall’s shamelessly romantic ensemble picture.
My early notice also goes to what I regard as the crux of her appeal and what propels her as an artist who’s both a singer and a songwriter. Taylor Swift, Time magazine’s “person of the year,” comes across in Valentine’s Day as a plain, awkward, ordinary girl—she possesses herself and dominates the screen, if as an unusual-looking, sinewy athlete, with offbeat earnestness as her utmost quality.
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