A woman who says she went to high school with Taylor Swift before she became famous says that many of Swift’s classmates “hated” her and looked down on her because they were “jealous” of her success in the music business when they were in high school.
Jessica McLane, who is now 30 and is in the picture, said that she and Taylor Swift, who is now 32, went to the same high school for a little less than a year in 2006. McLane was a freshman at the time, and Swift was a junior. Taylor grew up in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. When she was 14, she moved to Tennessee to try to make it as a country music singer. She went to Hendersonville High School for two and a half years before dropping out to become a homeschooled student when her career started to take off. Taylor is now a popular country music performer.
Now, Jessica has told everyone what the Grammy Award-winning musician was really like before she became famous. Jessica says that other students told her that Taylor was an “expletive,” even though she didn’t talk to Taylor much when they were in school together. ‘I went to the same high school as Taylor Swift, we grew up in the same town,’ she said in a viral TikTok video recently, which has been viewed more than 6.4 million times. ‘When she first started becoming super successful, most people hated her. Keep in mind, these are her peers, this isn’t, like, just random people on the internet.’
‘There were not a lot of people in high school who had nice things to say about her…[People would say], “She said this, she said that, she was mean.”‘ During a showcase for the music industry in 2005 at Nashville’s Bluebird Café, Taylor caught the attention of music mogul Scott Borchetta. He signed her to Big Machine Records and helped her start her hugely successful career.
In October 2006, she released her self-titled debut album, which quickly brought her to the attention of the public. It peaked at number five on the US Billboard 200 and stayed there for more than 150 weeks, making it her most successful album. But as Jessica’s career started to take off, she said that her classmates became “jealous” and started spreading lies that Taylor’s family had “bought her fame” and paid off Scott to sign her to his record label.
She said that a lot of other students were “trying to break into the industry,” and that when Taylor made it and they didn’t, these other students were jealous.
‘Jealousy was definitely a thing,’ she stated. ‘The 16, 17-year-olds who were trying to have a career in music at Hendersonville were playing downtown or at the local coffee shop, not winning awards. ‘It’s not that these people weren’t talented, it’s just that most people don’t make it. Also, back then, Taylor didn’t have as good of control over her voice as she does now, so there were a lot of people in high school who [felt they] were vocally a lot better.’
She also said that the guys who inspired some of Taylor’s songs were upset when she started putting out songs about them, which made things worse. ‘Also, the guys she was writing these songs about they were still in school, they were still there,’ she continued. ‘And now they have a hit song about them talking about what a [expletive] boyfriend they are, you know?’
After a few months, Taylor quit school and ended up finishing her schooling at home. Before she became one of the most famous musicians in the world, she was not well known at all.
In 2009, three years after the event, Jessica remembered that Taylor had invited her whole senior class to the Country Music Association Awards, where she had performed her hit song “Fifteen” and won a total of four awards.
Jessica thinks that the musician only invited her old classmates to the event to show them how much she had changed since the last time they saw her. ‘As we all know, 2009 is the year that she killed the game. She invited us to the CMAs to say [expletive] you,’ Jessica theorized in her TikTok video. ‘And we deserved it. So to Taylor, touché, that was a good one.’
A few people said in the comments that Jessica lied about knowing the famous singer. In response, Jessica showed them a page from her yearbook that had a picture of Taylor on it. This was her way of getting back at Taylor.
It looks like this is not the first time that people who say they were Taylor’s classmates have come forward. The year before, a third TikToker with the username @AloneInLondon (pictured) said that he and the Cardigan singer had both gone to Hendersonville High School and that they had even written a song together there. ‘She randomly showed up in eighth grade and my girlfriend at the time went up and introduced herself and we all became friends,’ he said. ‘A few days later she entered the talent show and everyone was like, “Who the eff is this girl?” I used to hangout at her house all the time, I have a ton of stories. We wrote a song together in geometry class.’
When commenters pushed him to give more details, the TikToker said that he didn’t want to invade her privacy, so he didn’t feel comfortable giving away too much information. ‘These memories and stories are personal things,’ he explained.
On the other hand, he did remember one time when he and the singer spent “hours” learning the words to Third Eye Blind’s song “Semi-Charmed Life.” ‘Back then, we couldn’t just type in Semi-Charmed Life lyrics [on Google], we had to learn them ourselves. If you know that song, you know it’s really fast and it’s a lot of words and [the lead singer] slurs his words a lot. So we just sat there with a notebook for two or three hours, deliberating over each word and arguing over what he was saying. That was pretty funny.’
