Taylor Swift Was Named After Another Famous American Singer

The name origins of a lot of today’s pop stars are usually impossible to track since so many of them go under pseudonyms rather than what was on their birth certificate. Taylor Swift is one of the few who decided to stick with her birth name to make sure she made a name for herself as a music icon.

Fortunately, her parents were thinking ahead, because they named her after a famous American singer. In turn, it created a unique name that sounded made up.

Swift’s parents were also seemingly preparing her for showbiz at a young age.

Was Swift destined to become a music star?

Swift was already interested in musical theater and country music before she even turned 10. You can add the benefit of her parents being very marketing savvy. According to reports from Cosmo, they got a MySpace page set up for their daughter in the mid-2000s, including a website.

Not many people had the foresight to do this back in the earliest days of social media. Plus, it helped that Taylor’s mom (Andrea Gardner Swift) was a mutual fund marketing executive, bringing marketing smarts to the table from the get-go. Her dad, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a financial advisor as well.

It’s possible her parents had a sense their daughter would be a superstar someday. Yes, you have to wonder when you see who she was named after.

Creating a gender neutral name

There really was a strategy to why Taylor Swift was named the way she was. According to official biographies, Andrea Swift thought creating a gender neutral name would help Taylor carve out a more effective career in business.

The “Taylor” was taken from pop star icon James Taylor. Not too many people knew this until recent years, but you have to wonder what would have happened had Swift been named something else.

This shows fate and early strategy has so much more to do with the trajectories of those who become household names.

Has Taylor’s success been fate, or just from controversy?

We’ve covered all the controversies Swift has weathered since her career began. So many have occurred, we’ve almost lost count. In most cases, they weren’t directly her fault and more about others trying to go after someone powerful.

While you can argue all of her failed relationships are her own doing, it makes you ponder just how much strategy she’s put into her life. Did she realize controversy often helps get your name into the media as much as a website and marketing prowess?

We hate to insinuate she looked at marketing so calculatingly, yet look at how much more media attention Taylor’s received due to her scandals and incorporating those situations into her music.

Without being controversial in her songs, she might not have been such a powerful force in music. Or, you can look at this in a different way.

It still couldn’t happen without talent

If you look at Taylor’s career trajectory from another perspective, you could say she just ran with the controversy rather than creating it herself.

She’s obviously created a very insightful way to write songs: As a personal diary or therapy session. Almost anything could have happened in her life and she could have written a compelling song out of it with her fan demographic lapping it up.

When you put this in perspective, you see Swift had innate skills to succeed, followed by a strong support system from her parents. Latter is so essential to success in the first place, and far too many artists have self-destructed due to lack of parental support.

Even if Taylor’s parents wanted their daughter to be famous, Swift took her own steps to nurture her talent and used it so the world’s troubles wouldn’t consume her.