Swift hooked a previously unrecognized audience: teen-age girls who listen to country music. Photograph by Katy Grannan

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.

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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.”