Jake Brennan (19:56)
No matter what she did, she couldn't tune out the things Eric Swarbrick vowed to do to her. Eric. She hated that she knew his name. Hated that she had dedicated anything more than half a brain cell to his existence. But he kept barging his way into her life over and over again. She had no choice. Especially if she wanted to make it out of this sick situation unharmed. If she wanted to make it out alive. All those letters about his desire to tear her limb from limb to Rape her? To kill her? To end her. She shimmied into a sequined purple dress as the threats looped in her mind. He didn't even make it into Big Machine this time, her security team assured her. The guards spotted him the second he stepped out of his car. He left the property in handcuffs before he could even try to break into Big Machine's headquarters. Easy, well handled, but still terrifying. Another shimmy in the snug suit as she felt an invisible hand zipper up. She tried to be patient, tried to evaluate it from a kinder, more human perspective. Surely this man could not be well. But the letters kept stacking up, and so too did the threats. Dozens at this point. Signed, sealed, delivered, deranged. It was so concerning that her team now used facial recognition technology at each of her concerts. Cameras programmed specifically to single out Eric or any other notable stalker in Taylor's sea of superfans. Imagine that you're so famous and so harassed by a small army of stalkers that facial recognition technology is specifically programmed and installed to identify the link. Lunatics who want to kill you. Insane. At the very least. All this madness had been buffered by Scott. Scott Borchetta at Big Machine always had Taylor's best interests at heart. He had them at heart from the very beginning, when he had no label to speak of and she had no massive following. But one day in 2004, sitting in the cozy ambiance of the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, Scott saw a future star on stage and made her a promise. A promise to sign her Taylor Swift. When Big Machine, his record label, was actually in business and no longer just an idea floating around in his head. Now Big Machine did some of the best business in the music industry, thanks to six albums from Taylor that all could have belonged to rca. Could have. But Taylor decided to opt out of that deal so she wouldn't have to record other people's songs. RCA called it a development deal, a promise to dangle in front of a teenage girl. As the label observed her growth as an artist, her songwriting, her musicianship. RCA dangled it for 12 months before Taylor got wise and got out. In the record label's eyes and RCA's eyes, Taylor Swift was just a wait and see in the case that country music went more mainstream and thus she would have been more profitable for them. But apparently RCA hadn't been watching closely enough. They hadn't learned yet that Taylor Swift didn't sit still. And if she was still, it was only because she had her head down for the few moments it took to write her own ticket. Because Taylor Swift didn't dream, she planned. She ditched RCA and began working as a songwriter for Sony ATV Publishing. Every day after school she pulled up a chair with writers twice her age, took out her pen and put her 14 year old heartaches on paper. Knocked every breakup banger out of the park. RCA could develop that. After doing that on her own terms for another decade, it was Scott Borchetta, not rca, who was running out of space on his walls for platinum records. Suffice to say, now Scott really had her best interests at heart. Even though their contract had come to a close upon the release of her snarling new album reputation, Taylor started to warm up as an assistant reapplied her lipstick. No, she wouldn't entertain this pity party. Not on her day. On the anniversary of her big win in Colorado. She wasn't going to ever give Eric Swarbrick the satisfaction of free rent in her mind. Never, ever, ever, she muttered to herself. Showtime. A crowbar, an aluminum baseball bat, lock picks, a few pairs of rubber gloves. Taylor stopped reading. She couldn't bring herself to review the full list. Police had caught another one in Rhode island, this time outside her mansion in Westerly Holiday House, as the original owner had called it decades ago, and a man named David Little had traveled all the way from Des Moines, Iowa, to see it, to see her. He packed no suitcase for his interstate journey, just a backpack brimming with more than 30 different tools commonly used when invading someone's home. He told the cops he was there for a visit, swore up and down that he was friends with Taylor, and she had agreed to share some music industry tips, which definitely explained the tool in his bag made specifically for breaking windows. Right, Taylor, aside from the safety of another of her homes, this one in Los Angeles, and poured another round of treats on the dining room table for her cat. Olivia Benson. The fluffy Scottish fold was a cat Taylor had named after one of her favorite on screen. Leading ladies. Olivia named as a tribute to the empathetic law and order. Special Victims Unit detective munched away at her second dinner dubiously. Taylor, aside from the cozy safety of her dining room while she scratched Olivia behind the ears, she wished home always felt this secure, but it was hard to truly unwind when the police reports stacked up as fast as fan mail. There had been one man who came here to this very house in Los Angeles from Colorado with little more than a knife and some rope in his car. Then there was the prick who had climbed onto a roof in New York. He wasn't even deemed mentally fit to stand trial. And now Mr. Little had camped out in Rhode island for her, eagerly awaiting that quote, unquote career advice. With a lock pick in one hand and a crowbar in the other. The threats changed. The weapons changed. But at the end of the day, every one of these men was the same sick bastard. Deep down inside, they all professed love for a woman they never spent a second with, never even held eye contact with, so they could claim they shared a smoldering glance from across the room they were in love with a Google search, nothing more. And she very much wanted to be excluded from their made up narratives. The gloves. Her mind kept going back to the gloves. What did he need the gloves for? A lump slid down her throat. It rested in a familiar spot. The same uncomfortable, comfortable place is when she received a different piece of alarming news just a few weeks prior. As it turns out, Scott Borchetta did not have Taylor's best interest at heart. Even worse, he didn't have her masters. Masters are an artist's official original recording of a song or album. If an artist owns their masters, they can license their music to any artist or third party they want, and they can rake in royalties in the process. If they don't have ownership. If they don't have their masters, their intellectual property can create quite the profit for someone else. In short, if an artist owns his or her masters, they could do whatever the hell they want with their music. But the opposite applies as well. If someone else owns an artist's master recordings, then they can do whatever the hell they want with the artist's music. Taylor found out that her masters were gone in the most impersonal way possible on the news, just like the public did. Scott had sold Big Machine Label Group in her life's work along with it. Through the sale of the record label, ownership of her six albums had been transferred to Scooter Braun, the music industry mastermind behind artists like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, AKA the other biggest pop stars in the world, the other people vying for the number one spots on Spotify playlists and Billboard charts. For years, Braun had been trying to topple Taylor from the top of the pop game so his own artist could commandeer the number one position. Now he'd profit from the very same songs and albums he had been so eager to snub Taylor songs. Braun also just so happened to be the former manager of Kanye west, who not only famously interrupted Taylor's 2009 VMA acceptance speech, but later broke out the B word to refer to her in his song Famous and for what? The sake of a clever bar, A few cruel laughs amongst his guy friends and maybe he thought it was dark humor when he placed a lifelike replica of Taylor's naked body in a bed with mannequins resembling Donald Trump and Chris Brown for the famous music video too. If that was the case, Taylor didn't see the humor. She only saw saw the Internet staring at her likeness in the nude without her consent. Gross no matter how you looked at it. The man who represented her direct competition now owned her hard earned original music. Cue the bad blood. It was a nightmare that was perfectly legal. An overnight vanishing act. A lifetime of Taylor's work, ages 15 to 29 was gone. Scott Borscht saw $300 million from his sale of Big Machine. Taylor saw nothing. Not that she needed the money, although that's what the Internet always made it out to look like. No, it was about the principle. The fact that a man promised her the world and then sold it after a decade long relationship. She had requested to purchase the masters on multiple occasions and the label resisted every time. Not unless she she signed another contract. They said. Not only was that too tit for tat for Taylor's style, it was the exact opposite of what she wanted. She longed to move forward with her career, but in a way that she could take her hard earned musical growth with her fearless speak now Red 1989 Reputation, her self titled debut. Those six albums told the story of her life to date. It felt like such a simple request. She just wanted full ownership of her life overnight. Scott Borchetto wordlessly told her that she couldn't have it. No one would let her have it. Not Scott, not Eric, not David. The men in her life, both welcome and unwelcome, were making sure of it.
