If popular music is an ocean, for the past two years there's been a tsunami swelling across it named Taylor Swift.
Starting as a country music star who first hit the charts with '' Tim McGraw'' in 2006, the Berks County native has become a cultural phenomenon.
She's already had 19 Top 40 hits. In the past year alone, she's sold 6 million copies of her album ''Fearless'' and won four Grammy Awards (including Album of the Year), five American Music Awards (including Entertainer of the Year) and five Country Music Association Awards (including Entertainer of the Year and Album of the Year).
Thursday and Friday, she brings her first headlining tour -- already 11 months old and extended once -- to Wachovia Center in Philadelphia.
But all waves eventually must crash into shore. And for anyone fearless enough to look, there's evidence Swift's wave has crested.
Her duet with Stevie Nicks at the Grammy Awards in January unleashed a wave of its own: Her pitchiness on Fleetwood Mac's ''Rhiannon'' highlighted criticism of Swift's ability to sing well live that's been talked about in lower tones since her start. (Pat Garrett, at whose Strausstown roadhouse Swift first sang, has long said she ''wasn't the best singer'' and that, when she was 11, it took her a year to win a karaoke contest there.)
And after seven straight singles that hit the Top 5 on the country chart, ''Fifteen'' stalled at No. 9 in December.
Certainly Swift still is wildly popular: She's sold out all but one of the 29 dates on the latest leg of her tour, which started March 4 in Tampa, Fla., and concludes June 2 in Washington, D.C. But unlike the start of the tour, when a Madison Square Garden show sold out in one minute, these dates sold out in weeks.
Another LeAnn Rimes?
All of that begs the question of how long Swift -- who released her first CD when she was 16 and her second album at 18 -- will be able to convincingly sing songs about idealized and romanticized young love now that she's turned 20.
Swift's success has unquestionably come because of her uncanny ability to tap into that 'tween psyche. Her songs, it has been noted, aren't about teenage love as much as they are about junior high-schoolers' ideals of love.
But that also means her target demographic is shifting quickly -- as quickly as those that made New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync huge hits, only to outgrow them.
Country music, perhaps more than any genre, is forgiving of young artists who age. Obvious examples are Tanya Tucker and LeAnn Rimes.
Tucker had her first hit, ''Delta Dawn,'' in 1972 when she was 13. She since has released more than two dozen albums -- including a run of top-sellers 15 years into her career, a platinum disc in 1993, and, at age 51 last year, an album that hit the Country Top 30.
Rimes also rose to fame at 13 with a No. 1 country album in 1996. Like Swift, Rimes had two discs that sold a combined 10 million copies, and she's had eight of her 10 discs hit at least gold. At 25, Rimes had a No. 2 country album in 2007.
Swift told Rolling Stone magazine last year that it was Rimes' records that introduced her to country music. In 2008, Swift became the first artist to hold the top two positions on the Country Albums chart since Rimes did so in 1997.
But both Rimes and Tucker made their marks singing essentially adult music at 13, meaning they didn't have to evolve their images -- or their fans. Swift's success also has depended far more on her pop success.
Through her tour publicist, Claudine Ottinger, Swift declined an interview for this story. Ottinger said ''her schedule is just slammed with the tour starting.''
Promising and troubling signs
There are signs Swift will be able to catch another wave when the one she's riding now crashes.
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