Singer Taylor Swift’s self-titled first album went double platinum. Her second album is due out later this year.

MCT

If Taylor Swift continues her skyrocketing success, one day some enterprising country artist might write a song called “Taylor Swift.”

“When you say Taylor Swift”/”I hope you think my favorite song”/”The one we danced to all night long.”

After all, such name-checking worked for Swift when she wrote her Top 5 single, “Tim McGraw,” while in math class during her freshman year of high school. The song became her first hit of last year.

While her peers were struggling with algebra, Swift scribbled the lyrics to “Tim McGraw” in her notebook and sneaked out of class to record a voice memo into her telephone when the melodies to “Tim McGraw” and her next country/pop crossover hit, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” came to her.

“When teachers conducted random notebook checks, they’d be freaked out — but they learned to deal with me,” Swift muses in a telephone conversation from Hendersonville, Tenn.

The swift Swift wrote “Our Song,” which just spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country singles chart, for her ninth-grade talent show.

Swift’s popularity is such that, at this moment, she’s outpacing the real Tim McGraw, not to mention Carrie Underwood, Rascal Flatts and Kenny Chesney at retail and radio.

At 18, she’s a phenomenon:

•The youngest solo female ever to write or co-write every song on a No. 1, double platinum, debut country album. (Even Dolly Parton didn’t accomplish that.)

•The Country Music Association’s Horizon Award winner.

Swift now has more than 35 million song streams on MySpace. And it’s not difficult to understand why she has struck such a chord: She writes her own music — an accessible blend of “Wide Open Spaces”-era Dixie Chicks-styled country and pop (Dixie Chicklets, anyone?) — so she’s able to tap into the same emotions that her young audience feels. Nashville’s power structure isn’t feeding Swift her lines.

“I’m not going to write songs about what it’s like being on the road. I know 99 percent of my fans can’t relate to that. I will write songs about things I can relate to and the people buying my album can relate to,” Swift says. “If I have to go back to when I was 13 and had a crush on the basketball player — who didn’t notice me — that’s what I’ll do, those feelings are universal.”

Somewhere in Hendersonville some basketball boy is feeling like a big ol’ loser right about now.

For Swift, whose parents moved from Wyomissing, Pa., so that, at age 11, their daughter could shop her demo tape around Nashville, Tenn., the songs come for many reasons. She’s already writing tunes for a second album, planned for late this year, featuring a songwriting collaboration with that other hot newcomer, Colbie Caillat. In addition, Swift and pal Kellie Pickler, the American Idol alum, wrote a song “as personal as it gets” for Pickler’s coming sophomore album.

Yet, even someone like Swift, for all her poise, good looks and gift of gab, says she sometimes felt like an outsider.

“ ‘The Outside,’ I wrote when I was 12, and not fitting in at school,” Swift recalls. “Being able to face the rejections of Nashville is nothing compared to facing the rejections at middle school. Songwriting is the best kind of therapy for me. I’m never tempted to drink to ease the pain of something.”

But mostly, Swift’s songs come about because of boys.

“When you go through a horrible breakup — from someone you should never have dated in the first place — it’s a waste of effort. But if you write a song about the experience, it’s not a wasted experience, it helped the career. ‘Tim McGraw,’ that was about a guy I was dating who was going off to college. I wrote that in my freshman year,” she says.

“Teardrops on My Guitar” is about a guy, Drew, that Swift had a crush on, except, somehow, he missed her signals. Maybe he was paying more attention in math class. Radio listeners, however, now know all about poor Drew, whose name is the first word she sings in the song.

“Drew showed up on my driveway the other day!” Swift says. “Kellie Pickler and I were going to a hockey game and this guy pulls up. I didn’t have my contacts on and didn’t see him right away. He’s a little older, a little taller, the guy I wrote that song about 2 1/2 years ago. I hadn’t talked to him. I didn’t know what to say and here he is walking toward me. Oh my God!”

She adds, “We had a civilized conversation.”

Drew’s gotten wise — lest he wind up on Taylor Swift II.

“I think the coolest thing about being a songwriter is you can call out anyone you want to,” Swift says. “Sometimes I feel bad for the guys I’ve written songs about. They are permanently branded.”

Call Swift “the anti-Britney.” She won’t mind.

“I want her to get well and come back and everyone wants her to win,” Swift says, serious for a moment. “I want to go to another Britney concert.

“But I don’t party. It’s just not my thing, never has been. When someone calls me a role model, that is the greatest compliment.”