Taylor Swift As You’ve Never Seen Her Before

BY NOW YOU KNOW that the past few years have been extraordinary ones in the life of Taylor Swift. Even if you have only casual knowledge of Swift’s music—there may be six or seven souls left on the planet who can’t sing all the words to “Shake It Off”—you’re aware that Swift has become not only one of the most successful recording artists ever, but also an unrivaled power broker who has prevailed in a volatile media economy and brought today’s music overlords to heel. Swift’s 2015 stare-down of Apple—she declined to put her hit album 1989 on Apple’s nascent streaming-music service when the company said it would not pay artists during its initial launch; Apple changed its policy immediately and paid everyone—was a seismic example of a single artist’s toppling corporate might. At 26, Swift is world famous, wealthy, critically celebrated, a style influencer, and a cultural movement unto herself, recognizable everywhere she goes. She also has two awesome cats.

WE NEED TO TALK about the Christmas-tree farm.

A treasured footnote to the Taylor Swift backstory is that she spent much of her childhood being raised at, of all places, a Christmas-tree nursery called Pine Ridge Farm. It is the kind of quaint, Norman Rockwell–ian detail that sounds a bit too precious, too good to be true. Weren’t her parents in finance? Didn’t she grow up in the burbs? How was this possibly real? Come on.

The Christmas-tree farm is real. She showed me herself.

It’s the morning of the wedding, and I am riding in an SUV with Swift and her mother, Andrea. Andrea is powering down the road, and Swift, dressed in a caramel-colored Reformation jacket and a pair of black jeans, is sitting pᴀssenger side. This area around Reading and its adjacent town, Wyomissing, is rich with pastoral roads marked by open fields and stone homes, and the kind of rolling countryside that makes you want to saddle up and ride a horse—which Swift did as a child.

“That was kind of my mom’s thing,” Taylor says. “She really wanted me to be a horseback rider, and I did it compeтιтively until I worked up the nerve at age twelve to tell her I didn’t really love it like she loved it.

“I just wanted to make music and do theater,” she says. “So I’ve been a big disappointment.”

“I’ve gotten over the bitterness, finally,” Andrea says sarcastically.

Soon we arrive at a clearing with a barn and a small farmhouse. This is the place, they tell me. Taylor and Andrea have not made any calls or arrangements about visiting. It’s going to be a random drop-in from a pop star, like the Taylor Swift Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes or something.

Taylor notices a man stepping into his car in the driveway. We pull up alongside, and Andrea rolls down her window. Taylor leans over. “I used to live here,” she says brightly.

The man immediately gives what can only be described as a Holy crap–it’s–Taylor Swift look. “I know,” he says, as if on cue.

Everyone laughs. The man’s name is Dave Schaeffer, and he has lived here with his wife, Debbie, for about six years. He invites us to have a look around, and we all pile out.

“This must really bring back some memories,” Dave says.

“Yeah, this is crazy,” Taylor says. She surveys the fields behind the driveway, which include a small grove of pine trees her parents once planted. They now look tall enough for Christmas at Rockefeller Center. “It’s beautiful.”

This is where, Andrea tells me, Taylor Swift was brought home from the hospital in, well, 1989—I guess everyone knows the year of Taylor’s birth by now. The split-rail fence that’s still standing—Scott and Andrea built that themselves. Scott, a stockbroker, actually purchased and lived on the property before he’d met Andrea; on their first date, she came to a party he hosted in the farmhouse.

Debbie comes outside and introduces herself. “I always thought you might want to stop by,” she says. “But I never wanted to bother you.” The Schaeffers confess they lived here for a while before they learned about the famous former resident. “The pizza guy told us,” Debbie says. “We had no idea.”

She invites everyone inside. As we step into the cozy two-floor home, Taylor takes out her phone and starts filming. There’s the living room where the Swifts put their family Christmas tree. There’s where they once put the piano.

Casey, Dave and Debbie’s daughter, arrives. She actually owns the house with her husband and lives nearby. She’s thrilled but also beside herself that her two daughters are away skiing for the day.

“You want to see your room?” Debbie asks Taylor.

We go upstairs into a small corner room where a tiny Taylor used to demand three books and five songs every night. Taylor gathers the family together to make a quick video for the Schaeffers’ granddaughters, Siena and Tarah.

“Hi, Siena and Tarah,” Taylor says cheerily. “This used to be my room. We wish you were here so bad.”

I can’t lie: All I can think of is Siena and Tarah returning from their ski trip to learn that Taylor Swift was hanging out at their grandparents’ house, and deciding right then they will never go skiing ever again.

On the ride back, Andrea and Taylor sound almost overcome by what has just happened—by the sweet and polite and utterly un–freaked out mood of the whole experience. “My faith in humanity is restored,” Taylor says.

And then she turns her head quickly away from the window: paparazzi.

YES: I SHOULD NOTE that when we arrived at the farm, we were informed by a couple of Swift’s security people that there were at least a trio of uninvited pH๏τographers who had followed us to the location to catch some H๏τ, Sєxy farm-visit action. To Swift, this is about as surprising as . . . what is the exact opposite of surprise? This is her constant state. She lives with it, adapts to it. Just a few years back, Swift was so excited about relocating to New York City—it was the creative basis for 1989—but when she’s in the city now, within a couple of days, there is a circus of pH๏τographers outside her apartment building.

“But that kind of happens everywhere,” she says. The wedding ceremony has finished—Britany and Ben made it official to applause—and Swift and I have huddled downstairs at the church during a break before the reception.

I ask her: When was the last time you were in a place where nobody in the press had any idea you were there—no reporters, no pH๏τographers?

“Mmmm, Colorado’s good,” she says. “If I go somewhere and stay in a house, nobody knows.”

Swift says she is ready to lie a little low. After the wedding, she will go to New York, where she will be spotted dining with her friend Lena Dunham, and then be seen a week later in Los Angeles with her brother, Austin, and her friend Lorde at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. As for future plans . . . who knows? For the first time in years, Swift is not sure exactly what is next.