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Post by Admin on Oct 9, 2019 18:58:23 GMT
http://instagram.com/p/Bx7QABnjEPM Swift’s first instrument was the guitar, which she started learning how to play when she was 12 years old. The person who taught her was a computer tech. Swift shared in a 2009 promotional DVD: “When I was about 12 this magical twist of fate (happened). I was doing my homework [when the tech fixing my computer] looked over and saw the guitar in the corner. And he said, ‘Do you play guitar?’ I said, ‘Oh. No. I tried, but . . . .’ He said ‘Do you want me to teach you a few chords?’ and I said, ‘Uh, yeah. YES!'” http://instagram.com/p/B1rqZzFjieV The tech — a man named Ronnie Cremer — revealed to New York Daily News that he came over to Swift’s house two times a week to teach her how to play the guitar and write songs. He was paid $32 an hour by her parents. “In all honesty, I thought she was a pretty good student,” Cremer shared. “I said, ‘Here’s your chorus. Here’s your verse. Move these around, and look what you’ve got. You can write one verse, one chorus, and then you’ve got a song.’ That just clicked to her, and made sense.” http://instagram.com/p/BtMEPfRlu5C Swift has revealed that country artists like Shania Twain and Faith Hill inspired her to learn the guitar. However, the first song that she learned to play on the instrument was not actually a Twain song or a Hill song. It was not even really country. During an interview with Vogue in 2016, as well as the Name That Song Challenge with Jimmy Kimmel, Swift shared that the first song she learned on the guitar was the 1998 hit “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer.
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Post by Admin on Oct 14, 2019 18:20:28 GMT
The pop star, 29, was joined by the show’s culinary expert, Antoni Porowski, at Madonna’s final Madame X theater tour show in Brooklyn on Saturday. Swift documented the fun outing with a selfie of her and Porowski, as well as other friends, on her Instagram Story, praising the “Like a Prayer” singer for putting on an incredible performance. “Thank you Madonna for an outstanding show,” she wrote. “Shout out to the phenomenal dancers, singers, musicians, set designers, crew, wardrobe, glam and M who gave it EVERYTHING.” The setlist for the show was packed with tracks from Madonna’s latest album, Madame X, but also included classics like “Human Nature,” “Vogue” and “Like a Prayer.” After multiple gigs at Brooklyn’s BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, the concert series will have a short residency at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago in late October, then another at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater in November.
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Post by Admin on Oct 23, 2019 18:05:48 GMT
Swift has never been shy about voicing her support for Gomez’s work. In fact, she was one of the first to hear Gomez’s 2014 single about Bieber, “The Heart Wants What it Wants.” Gomez said her close friend listened to it “three times” immediately. Apparently, Swift was in the early listening party for this song, too. Shortly after Gomez shared her new single, Swift took to her Instagram stories to speak out about how much she adored it. “This song is a perfect expression of healing & my absolute favorite song she’s put out yet. A triumph,” Swift wrote in the post. http://instagram.com/p/B38lB_OCoLz She added, “I love you so much @selenagomez.” Gomez wrote of her new single, “This song was inspired by many things that have happened in my life since releasing my last album. I want people to feel hope and to know you will come out the other side stronger and a better version of yourself.” “Lose You to Love Me” paints a picture of broken promises and Gomez’s frustration over what her ex swore he’d give her. “You promised the world and I fell for it/I put you first and you adored it/Set fires to my forest/And you let it burn,” the song begins.
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Post by Admin on Oct 24, 2019 23:08:56 GMT
Taylor Swift took to social media on Wednesday (Oct. 23) to share that she’ll be making a special appearance during BBC Children in Need’s upcoming Get It Covered documentary. In a BBC clip retweeted by Swift, the star makes a surprise visit to the iconic Abbey Road Studios while British actor Shaun Dooley is recording a cover of her Speak Now album cut “Never Grow Up.” As Dooley lays down his vocals in the booth, Swift sneaks into the studio clad in a green sundress. “Can you do it a little bit more American?” the singer jokingly asks from behind the soundboard, leaving a shocked Dooley with his mouth agape. The heartwarming documentary will air in the U.K. on Oct. 30 on BBC One and is set to feature a host of British celebrities including Olivia Colman, David Tennant and Yesterday’s Himesh Patel recording cover songs for a good cause: the Get It Covered charity benefit album for BBC Children in Need.
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2019 7:09:44 GMT
While it's no secret that Taylor has made confessional lyrics her bread-and-butter, these last five years have painted the picture of a woman who has found her voice outside of the recording studio and off the stage, as well, and isn't afraid to use it. Whether she was taking on the streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, forcing them to change the ways they compensated artists before she would release her highly sought-after catalog to stream, as she did in late 2014 and 2015, taking radio DJ David Mueller to court in 2017 in a sexual assault counter-suit after he dared to sue her for damages for his loss of employment after she complained to his bosses that he'd groped her four years prior and ultimately winning a symbolic $1, or, after taking much heat for her silence during the heated 2016 presidential election, endorsing candidates for the first time ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, the Taylor heading into the 2020 election is a much different one, unafraid to speak her mind and fight on behalf of causes she believes in and communities she supports. For proof, look no further than the way she used recent single "You Need to Calm Down" to encourage the Senate to pass the Equality Act. She's also proven that she's not afraid to stand up for herself, either. The Mueller lawsuit aside, she also found herself embroiled in perhaps the greatest media scrutiny of her career courtesy of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and a narrative that, at this point, we'd all very much like to be excluded from. After being branded a snake for supposedly feigning shock over lyrics in Kanye's track "Famous" that name-checked her after she approved them--she maintained that she never OK'd him calling her a "bitch," an assertion Kanye and Kim couldn't disprove with the secretly-recorded audio Kim released--she wrote a whole album about it and brought out a 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn on stage every night on tour. When Reputation was released on November 10, 2017, it made her the first act in the United States to have four albums sell over one million units in one week. That's what we call a checkmate. The release of Reputation also saw Taylor fulfill her 12-year contract with Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Records and exactly a year later, she signed a landmark deal with Universal Music Group that not only gave her ownership over her master recordings, but allowed for her to do something that would benefit thousands of other musicians as well. "As part of my new contract with Universal Music Group, I asked that any sale of their Spotify shares result in a distribution of money to their artist, non-recoupable," she wrote in an Instagram post. "They have generously agreed to this, at what they believe will be much better terms than paid out previously by other major labels." She added that the provision "meant more to me than any other deal point" and was a sign that "we are headed toward positive change for creators — a goal I'm never going to stop trying to help achieve, in whatever ways I can." We love a magnanimous queen. While Taylor's new deal at Universal Music Group, under which her latest album Lover was released via subsidiary Republic Records, meant that she would own her masters going forward, unfortunately, the rights to her first six albums remained Big Machine's. And when Borchetta sold the company to famed music manager Scooter Braun, who repped Kanye during the whole "Famous" debacle, in June, Taylor was, well, less than thrilled. In a lengthy Tumblr post, she admitted that she learned of the sale of her life's work to a man she labeled an "incessant, manipulative bully" through the press and accused Borchetta of betraying her. "Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it," she wrote. "Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter." While both men have presented their own sides to the story that conflict with Taylor's, she's maintained her version of events and even vowed to rerecord all six albums next year so as to devalue the originals and give herself some ownership over the material she created. Over these last five years, Taylor's much-documented love life has also gone through some changes. Shortly after releasing 1989, in March of 2015, she began dating DJ and producer Calvin Harris, staying with him until June of the following year and even helping to co-write (under the now-legendary pseudonym Nils Sjöberg) one of his biggest hits, "This Is What You Came For." After a brief dalliance with actor Tom Hiddleston--never forget those Fourth of July 2016 photos!--she began dating actor Joe Alwyn in September of that year, a relationship she's been in ever since. While much of Reputation and Lover was written about him, she's made the concerted effort to maintain ownership of the relationship, keeping public appearances and comments at an all-time minimum. This period of growth has also been a been a period of great success for Taylor. Aside from the record made with Reputation, the release of Lover saw her make more history when all 18 tracks entered the Billboard Hot 100, something that had never been done before. And back when 1989 took home Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2016, she became the first woman and only fifth act to win that coveted award twice. All told, in these last five years, she's been the recipient of seven American Music Awards (with five nominations at this year's ceremony just announced), 11 Billboard Music Awards, three Grammys, eight MTV Video Music Awards and six People's Choice Awards, with four nominations pending at this year's ceremony, held on Sunday, Nov. 10 only on E! TIME Magazine included her among the "Silence Breakers" named Person of the Year in 2017 and placed her on their list of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2019. And this past July, Forbes named her the highest-paid celebrity in the world, reclaiming the title after previously receiving it in 2016.
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