Enlarge By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY Not always a rose-colored view: Taylor Swift's highly anticipated new album, Speak Now, features songs of heartbreak and pain.

"I just got to meet Dolly Parton!" she exclaims.

Later, Swift still can't contain her excitement. "She was amazing!" she says breathlessly. "She was so warm and engaging and so quick and sharp. She said she thinks I'm going to be around for a long time!"

Parton, who later gives Swift a shout-out from the Opry stage ("She's the sweetest little thing!"), has impressive numerical data to back up her opinion. Signed to a record deal when she was just 15, Swift has become one of the most famous young people on the planet in the past five years. Her first two albums, 2006's Taylor Swift and 2008's Fearless, have sold a combined 13 million copies and 25 million song downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Fearless won her a slew of awards, culminating with January's album-of-the-year Grammy — all before she was old enough to legally drink.

The hoopla begins anew as Swift releases her new album, Speak Now, out Monday, amid a promotional blitz that includes a release party hosted by Ellen DeGeneres and a behind-the-scenes NBC special on Thanksgiving night. Single Mine was the sixth-most-played song in America last week, according to Mediabase, with radio play across the top 40, country and adult contemporary formats.

No sex-bomb route

Swift is also at a key transition point in her career, one where many young entertainers stumble. Eighteen when she released Fearless, she's now 20, too old to credibly sing about cheerleading captains and high-school Romeos and Juliets. Speak Now addresses more mature subjects, like getting a first apartment and navigating complex relationships.

"You have all these themes that come into play," Swift says. "All of a sudden, you feel the need to apologize for something you handled poorly. You realize you have no idea how you feel about growing up."

Swift compares her songwriting to a diary that helps her sort out her feelings, saying it's "the only way I know how to get past those things."

"I have this formula for music. If I continue to write songs about my life, and my life is always changing, then my music will always be changing. It's a pretty basic formula, but it answers a lot of questions that I have."

On Speak Now, Swift doesn't, however, try to establish her adulthood by suddenly singing songs that celebrate binge drinking or sexual prowess — something the parents of her youngest fans probably will appreciate.

"When young stars grow up, they almost always go to sexualizing themselves," says entertainment journalist Chris Willman, who recently profiled Swift for New York magazine. "It's pretty clear that's not where Taylor is going to take things. But if you're not going to go the sex-bomb route, how do you prove that you're an adult now?"

Swift is taking a long-range view, looking to artists like Emmylou Harris and Paul McCartney as her adult role models.

"Those are people who have maintained careers of longevity and also grace," she says. "They've taken chances, but they've also been the same artist for their entire careers."

As on previous albums, Swift continues to write songs that correspond to her life. Speak Now takes its title from a line in the marriage liturgy, and Swift has never been one to hold her peace. "That moment is a metaphor for a lot of situations we find ourselves in, where we wait till it's almost too late to say what we actually feel."

Each of the album's 14 songs is something she wanted to say to a particular person or group of people. "I don't factor in the millions of people who might hear that song one day. It's me and the ghost of whoever I'm writing the song about."

Occasionally, though, as on catty Better Than Revenge, when she claims a romantic rival is "better known for the things that she does on the mattress," then sings, "Don't you know I always get the last word?" she seems fully aware of the weight words carry when so many hear them.

"This is my third album," Swift says. "I've never been shy about the fact that if you enter my life, you are basically willingly entering an album."

Since Swift spent much of her past two years in celebrity company, the objects of some songs are easily identifiable. Innocent, which she premiered at the MTV Video Music Awards, clearly is a response to Kanye West, who stormed the stage during her acceptance speech the year before. (On the CD's lyric sheet, where Swift always puts coded messages in capital letters, the letters in Innocent spell out "LIFE IS FULL OF LITTLE INTERRUPTIONS.")

She doesn't like to name names, at least not in interviews. "I get pretty shy and coy about it," Swift says. But she does like to drop hints, so that anyone paying attention can figure things out.

Back to December, for instance, appears to be directed toward actor Taylor Lautner, who briefly dated the singer late last year. "It's the first time I've ever apologized in a song," Swift says. But is it about Lautner? In person, Swift equivocates, but the coded lyrics spell it out: "TAY."

The boys who inspired brush-offs like Picture to Burn and Should've Said No should count themselves lucky Swift didn't go after them the way she does in Dear John, the set's most brutal song. In the waltz about betrayal and manipulation that's widely interpreted as being about John Mayer, Swift sings, "Dear John, I see it all now, it was wrong/Don't you think 19's too young to be played by your dark, twisted games when I loved you so?"

"It's sort of the last e-mail you'd send to somebody you used to be in a relationship with," she says. "The e-mail that says it all. You would just write it to know that you said what you needed to say and not send it. But I guess putting the song on the album is pushing send."

She says Dear John and The Story of Us are about the same person. And her lyrical code for the latter spells out "CMT AWARDS," where she and Mayer both performed in June.

"The Story of Us is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were seated a few seats away from each other," she says. "I just wanted to say to him, 'Is this killing you? Because it's killing me.' But I didn't. Because I couldn't. Because we both had these silent shields up.

"I went home and I sat there at the kitchen table and I said to my mom, 'I felt like I was standing alone in a crowded room.' Then I got up and ran into my bedroom, as she's seen me do many times. And she probably assumed I had come up with a line in the song. And I had. And that was actually the last song I wrote on the album, and after I finished that one, I knew I was done."

High expectations

Swift doesn't direct all her songs toward famous people. The tender Never Grow Up is for her parents. In Mean, she addresses critics of her vocal abilities. "You have pointed out my flaws again, as if I don't already see them," Swift sings to those who lambasted her Grammy duet with Stevie Nicks and questioned whether she deserved vocal honors.

"Mean is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day," she says. "Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer."

Criticism of Swift's singing doesn't seem to have dampened her fans' enthusiasm for new music. Mine already has sold more than 1 million downloads, and additional tracks released on iTunes ahead of the album sold more than 200,000 downloads each in their first week.

Big Machine Records, Swift's label, is shipping 2 million copies of Speak Now, stocking the CD in places like Starbucks, Radio Shack and Rite Aid, in addition to traditional music outlets. It's even being sold through elementary schools via Scholastic books.

"We have a chance to put up a big number," says Scott Borchetta, the label's head. "We could put up maybe 700,000 to a million" in the first week. "It will do whatever the market will bear. It won't be hard to find us."

Sales in that range could put Swift in position to overtake Lady Antebellum's Need You Now and Eminem's Recovery, both of which are approaching the 3 million mark, before 2011.

"I have a really good feeling we'll be 2 million-plus by the end of the year," Borchetta says. "And it has a chance to be the biggest-selling album" of the year.

While Swift almost surely will have the best first-week sales of any country album released this year, she doesn't have an entertainer-of-the-year nomination for next month's Country Music Association Awards, anhonor she won in 2009.

Swift brushes off the slight, noting that she did get a nomination for female vocalist, which she also won last year. "You celebrate nominations, not lack of nominations. You can't live life so presumptuously."

Borchetta isn't so gracious. "It's a mistake by the CMA membership," he says. "Shame on us. As an industry, we looked stupid to the fans."

While much has changed for Swift the past two years, she fiercely defends her time for things that made her happy before she won her first award or dated her first celebrity — like baking, visiting with friends or hiking in Nashville's hilly parks.

"As your career grows, the list of things that makes you happy should not become smaller, it should become bigger," she says. "You can't cross off walking in the park. You can't cross off talking to people, just because you're talking to more people. I still love all the things I used to love, I just love more things.

"There is a tendency to want to get thick-skinned. There is a tendency to block out negative things, because they really hurt. But if I stop feeling pain, then I'm afraid I'll stop feeling immense excitement and epic celebration and happiness. I can't stop feeling those things, so I feel everything. And that keeps me who I am."