1989

She is, quite simply, a global superstar. Taylor Swift is a seven-time GRAMMY winner, and the youngest recipient in history of the music industry s highest honor, the GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year. She is the best-selling digital music artist of all time, and the only female artist in music history (and just the fourth artist ever) to twice have an album hit the 1 million first-week sales figure (2010 s Speak Now and 2012 s RED). She s a household name whose insanely catchy yet deeply personal self-penned songs transcend music genres, and a savvy businesswoman who has built a childhood dream into an empire. But the numbers don t tell Taylor's story half as well as she could. After all, it s the intangibles that elevate Swift into the stratosphere of our pop culture planet, allowing the 24-year old singer-songwriter to orbit in a more rarified air.