She means show business

TAYLOR SWIFT knew early on that the odds were against her getting noticed in this town, filled as it is to the Stetson brim with men and women chasing dreams of stardom.

That was apparent to her on her first trip here six years ago, when she began knocking on doors in hopes of landing a recording contract.

“I realized 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 said during an interview in a bunker-like basement office of her label, Big Machine Records. “Somehow I had to find a way to stand out and be the different one.”

She knew she had to stand out, rather than up: She was 11 years old at the time and probably 4 feet tall. Yet, about a year later, convinced of her talent and commitment, her parents moved the family from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. At 14, she won a publishing contract for her songwriting and at 16 got a record deal with the fledgling Big Machine.

Her debut single last fall took as its title the name of one of her own favorite singers. “Tim McGraw,” took her straight into the Top 5 of the country singles chart and propelled her debut album, “Taylor Swift,” to gold status (for sales of 500,000 copies) in just three months.

Swift is 17 now, and if there’s a word to sum up this newly minted country star, it would have to be “driven.” And not just because she recently become old enough to drive here, there and everywhere as her career has been defying those odds and taking off.

“I made it a point from Day 1 that I didn’t want my age to be highlighted,” she says. “If I wanted one thing to be showcased, I wanted it to be my writing, not ‘Look what she can do for a 17-year-old girl.’ I want it to be ‘Look what I can do ... with my writing, with my guitar playing, with my performance.’ ... I never wanted to use the age thing as a little gimmick to get me ahead of people. I wanted to fight fair.”

She landed high-profile opening slots for Rascal Flatts last fall, spent the early part of this year on country kingpin George Strait’s spring tour and will be on the road during the summer touring with Brad Paisley.

And she’ll be in Las Vegas on Tuesday to find out whether she takes home the Academy of Country Music’s award for the year’s top new female artist, a field in which she’s vying with “Nashville Star” grad Miranda Lambert and “American Idol” contestant Kellie Pickler.

“That’s just mind-blowing to me,” says this tall, slim and energetic teen with curly blond tresses, a chiseled upturned nose and steely blue eyes. “Last year I went and nobody knew who I was. And this year, I’m nominated for top new female vocalist, and there are only three artists that get nominated for that.... If you think about that, it’s a huge honor.”

Her career was kick-started last year when she starred in a reality miniseries on the GAC (Great American Country) cable channel, which followed her during her senior year in high school to see how she and her classmates dealt with her launch of a recording career. Short snippets were shown in breaks between other programs, tracing her path from average high school kid to featured performer playing to tens of thousands of fans on Strait’s tour.

Even at that point, however, she was already a professional songwriter, having become the youngest person ever signed to Sony Publishing, at the wizened age of 14. Because Swift’s grandmother had been a professional opera singer, her parents knew something of the music business. So they moved the family from Wyomissing, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, to Hendersonville, Tenn., outside of Nashville, to help their daughter pursue her dream.

The charm of her debut album is that, unlike many young artists who choose songs dealing with topics light years beyond their experience, Swift largely writes and sings like a teenager. “Picture to Burn” disses a boyfriend who dumped her, “Teardrops on My Guitar” pines for a boy who hasn’t a clue about the crush she has on him, and the leadoff single cleverly dropped the name of one of country’s biggest stars in a wistful memory of a faded love. She digs a little deeper in “Wrapped Up With a Smile,” which she wrote about a beauty queen friend who was hiding an eating disorder.

“A lot of my writing on my album is just honest,” she says. “I have this habit of writing blatantly honest songs about people, and even mentioning their names, then when they find out, I’m like, ‘How’d they know?’ [laughing] ... For me it’s always been about keeping it as real as possible. Because I felt that people can identify with that.”

That’s particularly true of her hit “Tim McGraw,” a sweet farewell to a love who has moved on.

“I was dating this guy who was about to go off to college, and I knew we were going to break up,” she says. “My favorite song at that time was a Tim McGraw song, and every detail of that song is the truth. I feel like the reason people can identify with it so much and relate to it is it’s such a simple song.... I got the idea for the song in math class and wrote it after school on piano in 15 minutes. I didn’t have time to complicate it or overthink it. I just wrote it.”

Spoken like a true teenager.

randy.lewis@latimes.com