Nineteen-year-old Taylor Swift currently has singles climbing both the country and pop radio charts, and sold more albums in 2008 than any other recording artist, in any genre of music. Taylor released her second studio album, Fearless, which scored the biggest-selling debut week in 2008 for a female artist in any genre, and was the year's fourth biggest debut over all. Fearless had the best-selling debut for a country title in over a year, and Taylor currently holds the Billboard all-genre record for most Top 20 debuts in a calendar year. Fearless sold more than two million copies in its first six weeks in stores.

At 17, Taylor became the youngest person to single-handedly write and sing a number-one country single entirely on her own and she is the first female solo artist in country music history to write or co-write every song on a platinum-selling debut CD. At 14, she signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music, and in 2006 released her self-titled debut CD on Big Machine Records. Taylor Swift has surpassed triple-platinum (three million sales) status and spent more than 20 weeks in the #1 position atop Billboard's Country CD Sales Chart. Taylor was named 2008’s Favorite Female Country Artist at the American Music Awards, Top New Female Vocalist by the Academy of Country Music and won 2008 CMT Music Awards for Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year. In 2007, she received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and won the CMA Horizon Award. Taylor plans to headline a tour in 2009 and has toured in the past with Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw & Faith Hill and Brad Paisley.

Taylor will also guest star in an upcoming episode of the CBS TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Taylor will play Haley Jones, a teenaged girl whose family runs a seedy Vegas motel. Over the course of a year, Haley goes through a series of changes that have tragic consequences.

DCM: Your album Fearless consists of mostly songs about guys. Do you prefer writing love songs or break up songs?

Taylor Swift: I really like to write songs about relationships. I like to write about boys and I love to write about every aspect of love. I think that it’s really fascinating to me how many angles there are to a breakup. There are so many different things you can write about one breakup. So right now, that’s my favorite thing to write about. But also when you’re falling in love with someone, when you’ve just gone on the best date ever and you write a song about it. I think capturing that moment in time is really important and really fun. I am just fascinated by the whole relationship thing and that’s my favorite thing to write songs about.

DCM: What advice would you give to other girls going through a heartbreak?

Swift: Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again. And you’ll appreciate it more when you can go back and read your journal and realize that the happiness you have is special because yesterday, you cried. I’m so lucky that I get to look at journals from when I was 13 and wanted a singing career so bad, but never thought that I would be able to have it.

DCM: So you didn’t expect success at al?

Swift: No! The reason I was so driven was that I didn’t expect that anything would just happen for me. But that doubt fueled me to work harder. My attitude was the opposite of people who are like, “It’s gonna happen for me. It’s gonna happen for me.” My mantra was always, “It's not gonna happen for me. Go out and play that show or it won’t happen.” I never expected anything to be given to me.

DCM: After the success you’ve had, what makes you happy now?

Swift: What makes me happy is just curling up with my mom in her bed and watching a marathon of CSI and Grey’s Anatomy episodes with pints of ice cream. It’s amazing when we get to do that. I think that what people always want is what they don’t have a lot of, and the thing that I haven’t had a lot of lately is getting to curl up and watch a marathon of my favorite shows!

DCM: There a story that I had read about all your middle school students deserted you for one day when you first started to get noticed. If the story was true, how did that affect you overall?

Swift: It’s true. I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are. I’m not quite sure how it affected me to lose all my friends and have to walk into school and go at it alone, but I can only hope that it made me a stronger person. And I got to write songs about it — my first songs were written because of trying to deal with that emotion. I will never be able to thank those people enough because it’s like, you can’t write a song if you’re not feeling anything, and sometimes, even though you have to be feeling pain, it’s worth it in the end. But it’s so funny because even when I go back to high school now, when I go back to functions like a football game or a band concert, it doesn’t matter how many people come up and ask me for my autograph, if I seem like one of those popular people, I still feel like my hair is frizzy and people are looking at me weird.

DCM: You’re also known for being more career-focused and not partying. Do you try to stay away from that scene?

Swift: No, I’m just being myself. I’m not a party girl at this point in my life. It’s not a priority for me. I have to get up early and do interviews and I have to sing every night. I don’t have any interest in going out to clubs right now. I love people, and I love socializing, I just don't have any interest in being drunk. I don’t worry about people who say I’m too much of a good girl because the people who say that, it’s like, wow, you are really trying to find something you don’t like about me. And, honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!

DCM: When you went on tour with Brad Paisley there were a lot of pranks played. Which one was your favorite?

Swift: Going out on the Brad Paisley Tour, that was a notorious tour for pranking. Before I went out on tour, I knew that he pranked a lot of his opening acts a lot towards the end of the tour. I was out on the road with Kellie Pickler and Brad and we became best friends, Kellie and I, and we decided that we were gonna start pranking him the first week. He had a brand new song out then called Ticks, so Kellie and I ordered these huge, gigantic, full body tick costumes and dressed up in them and ran out on stage during his performance of that song. And then we had the other opening act – Jack Ingram – come out dressed up like an insect killer guy with the mask and the spray gun and everything and he proceeded to come out on stage and spray us and kill us. It was great, it was really fun. We have it on video and that’s definitely my favorite moment of the tour.

DCM: Do you play any other instruments besides the guitar, and how do you write most of your songs?

Swift: The instrument that I write on most of the time is a guitar. I’ll be sitting in my room and I’ll get an idea. I’ll just grab my guitar and start adlibbing. I think that when you write a song on piano it gives you a different feel. I’m not the best piano player, but I do know chords and I do know how to play and how to write a song on piano. It’s fun to switch it up every once in a while. There are a few songs on the new CD that I wrote on piano. DCM: What’s been the biggest splurge since you made it big?

Swift: I think my biggest splurge so far has been my tour bus. If I’m spending money, it’s gonna be putting it back into my career. I don’t like to be extravagant any other place. My tour bus is really important because I live there. So, I put a fireplace on my tour bus and a flip-down treadmill and a really comfortable bed.

DCM: You will now be acting on CSI, which is one of your favorite TV shows. Did the acting bug bite you as it has others?

Swift: No. I think it was a fun opportunity and it felt to me like I’d regret it somehow if I didn’t do it... so I did it. I love the show so it’s an honor to be on it. I’m obsessed with crime shows…All my friends know that my dream is to die on CSI. I’ve always wanted to be one of the characters on there that they’re tryin’ to figure out what happened to them. I don’t know where acting will be in my life though since I’m still completely focused on my music career.

DCM: Tell us three things that people don’t know about you?

Swift: I think three things people don’t know about me are that one – I have really bad eyesight. So I have these huge glasses that I wear that are the ugliest pair of glasses you’ll ever see in your life. They were the ones in the glasses store that no one was going to buy. They were in the corner, they’re all dusty, I’m like, ‘no one is going to buy those, and they’re so ugly’. So I had to buy them. That’s one. Two is that if I don’t have coffee in the morning, I get a headache at night. Three is that I like to paint. I’m not a serious art student or anything, but it’s relaxing to just sit and paint in the evening. Whenever I have downtime, and whenever I’m home, I’ll turn off all the lights and light candles and listen to music and paint. I like to paint. It’s relaxing for me.