When Taylor Swift was 11, her mother took her to Nashville so she could seek out a record deal. Swift wanted to pursue music from a young age, so the trip felt like a dream come true to her. Reality soon set in, though. Swift realized getting a record deal wouldn’t be as easy as she once imagined.

Taylor Swift said she thought a record deal would come easily to her

After learning that country singer Faith Hill got her start in Nashville, Swift knew she wanted to follow the same path. She spent every day afterward begging her parents to take her.

“I would bug them every day about it until finally we planned a trip to Nashville,” she told CMT. “It was on spring break, and I was 11 and I had this little demo CD — a karaoke CD of me singing songs by Dolly Parton and the Dixie Chicks and LeAnn Rimes. And I marched up and down Music Row with these demo CDs, and I’d walk in and hand them to the receptionist while my mom and my little brother were parked outside in a rental car.”

Swift admitted she thought the process would be so easy that she’d leave Nashville with a record deal. Unfortunately, things didn’t go to plan.

“I thought that they might be like, ‘Oh, cool, you want a record deal? Here you go. Sign right there,’” she said. “I don’t think I knew what was going to happen. I knew what would happen if I didn’t try, and I knew I would end up staying in the same place and never knowing what would have happened if I had tried. What that trip resulted in was not me getting a record deal — ‘Here, sign on the dotted line. Let’s make an album. You’re 11.’”

She wasn’t even sure if anyone listened to the demo tapes she brought in.

“Most of the time, I only reached the receptionist level, and they were like, ‘Oh sure, sweetie. I’ll give this to them.’ Wastebasket,” she said. “But they were very nice.”

Taylor Swift realized she had to set herself apart if she wanted a record deal

Though Swift was young, she did not walk away from the trip feeling discouraged. Instead, she had a new resolve.

“It was really more of me looking around this huge town and this huge place that is Nashville and realizing that there were hundreds of thousands of other people that wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do,” she said. “I realized that there needed to be something about me that was different, and I needed to figure out something more than I had already figured out.”

She began writing her own songs.

“I had figured out the whole performing and singing thing,” she said. “I just realized I needed something else. So I went back to Pennsylvania and started writing songs and playing guitar.”

Swift now prides herself on her songwriting.

Her family moved to Nashville for her career

Swift didn’t have much luck on her first trip, but her career began to pick up momentum on subsequent trips. Eventually, her family decided to move to the city.

“Living in Pennsylvania was great, and it was an incredible place to grow up, but I didn’t have any friends, so I was like, ‘Sure, let’s move. I’ll miss my friends even though I don’t have any.’ So that wasn’t a big deal for me,” she said. “But my dad had to transfer his work to Nashville. For a while, he was commuting back and forth and it was an incredible sacrifice for my parents to make and I’ve never forgotten it.”

Her mother said that while they moved for her career, they still wanted Swift to feel like a regular teenager.