Has anyone ever made more of the sparkly little dress? “I just love them,” says Taylor Swift from her parents' kitchen in Nashville. “Especially onstage, because I think it's kind of fun when the spotlight hits you and your dress, for a millisecond, blinds people.”

For two years Swift has been dazzling, if not blinding, people with her astonishingly grown-up knack for crafting sublime pop songs about high school subject matter—boys, being sixteen—that somehow everyone can relate to. It doesn't hurt that those gems come from such a dreamy package: She is tall, beautiful, and poised, with that fairy-tale cascade of curls. In a pop-cultural landscape where vulgarity and controversy are the coin of the realm, she dares to be a young lady.

Swift calls herself a “spillover artist”—her music fi

See Full Page