For the past decade, the term singer/songwriter has been liberally applied to hot young artists who rely on more experienced collaborators to hone their tunes, and to provide the savvy production that usually upstages the melody and lyrics anyway. But Swift cut her creative teeth in Nashville, where storytelling still matters; and for her sophomore album, Fearless, she wrote more than half the songs independently, and clearly had a big hand in the rest.You just can't fake the kind of innocence and wonder that ring through the glowing title track and the moonstruck single Love Story, or the guileless urgency and unmannered precociousness marking more bittersweet songs such as Fifteen and White Horse.
Swift's grainy-sweet vocals have a similar freshness, even on the less memorable cuts. It's a pleasure to hear a gifted teenager who sounds like a gifted teenager, rather than a mouthpiece for a bunch of older pros' collective notion of adolescent yearning. — Elysa Gardner