Taylor Swift’s career started in Nashville. We revisit her first ‘era’

Nearly two decades ago, one-time Nashville, Tennessee, songwriter-producer Robert Ellis Orrall made a bold prediction to Taylor Swift’s father.

After an after-school co-writing session with Swift — a virtually unknown teenager with a sharp pen and steadfast dream of music stardom — Orrall told her dad: “[This] first album’s gonna sell three million copies.”