Taylor Swift may be about the hottest thing going in country music -- and that's meant purely in terms of popularity -- but one gets the feeling she won't ever become a diva who gets caught up trying to bask in her own spotlight.

"I've wanted one thing since I was a little girl, and I'm not about to be the girl who wants one thing her whole life, then gets it and complains," Swift told a group of several reporters during an early May teleconference interview.

That sentiment took on extra credence as Swift -- who is appearing in concert Tuesday at Energy Solutions Arena -- discussed her recent rise to stardom and showed plenty of indications that despite her young age of just 19, she is mature beyond her years and has an uncommonly firm grasp on her career and how to maintain the monumental popularity she has begun to enjoy.

"I'm just absolutely humbled and blown away when I get awards," Swift said. SDLq'Album of the Year' this year [from the Academy of Country Music] was just completely unexpected. I honestly was expecting to hear somebody else's name get called. When things like that happen for me, it's just, I just feel excited. I'm never going to stop being excited about stuff like that. I'm a very excitable person. It's really easy to make me jump up and down and start screaming about something because I just never went into this whole thing expecting to succeed at it. So when I do, and when this thing keeps going on and the ball keeps rolling and it keeps on picking up momentum, it just blows me away every day.

"I think my main focus is continuing to stay relevant," she went on to say. "No amount of success is ever going to make me sit back and go, 'All right, well, I can take this year off,' or, 'All right, I can stop going on MySpace, I can stop picking up all of the new Internet trends and I can stop monitoring what my fans are thinking.' You've got to always stay on top of it, but always keep in mind that no matter who you are, if people see too much of you, they're going to get sick of you. So it's all a balance of staying present and letting the fans know that you're always thinking of them, but minimize over-saturation."

This clearly isn't your average 19-year-old music star when it comes to understanding the mechanics of building a career. But then, she isn't an average talent, nor has she brought an average work ethic to her music career.

Swift, in fact, began making waves in country music at an uncommonly young age. At age 11, she made her first trip from her hometown of Wyomissing, Penn., to Nashville to pitch demo tapes of her singing to karaoke songs. Before long, she was making regular visits to Nashville to write with songwriters. This led to her getting a development deal with RCA Records at age 13 and a record deal with Big Machine Records a couple of years later.

At age 16, she released her self-titled debut album. About 14 months later, in December 2007, she scored her first No. 1 country hit, "Our Song." It was her third top 10 hit (following "Tim McGraw" and "Teardrops on My Guitar") and came a month after she earned the Country Music Association Horizon Award as country's best new artist.

Impressive accomplishments, to be sure, but that was just a warm-up for what has happened in the year and a half since.

With the release last November of her second CD, "Fearless," she has rocketed into the upper tier of country performers. She was the best-selling artist of 2008, moving some 6 million copies of her two albums. She eventually had five hit singles from the first CD, including a second No. 1 with "Should've Said No." "Fearless," meanwhile debuted at No. 1 and held that spot for 11 weeks. Now she has started her first tour as an arena headliner and is planning to make a big impression with her show.

"My show is something I've put a lot of thought and time into," Swift said. "I hope people walk away knowing I'm putting every single emotion I have out there for them to see during that show. I really love going to shows where I feel like I've gotten to know that person better, a show where they tell me stories about what they wrote that song about and you're seeing cool video content and you're seeing costume changes and things like that. The Reba McEntire tours that she used to do were such an inspiration to me, Shania Twain when she would go on the road. I loved their shows. They were so entertaining, and I want to keep the crowd entertained for the entire time."

Her rise to stardom would seem, pardon the pun, extremely swift by any measure. Yet Swift herself doesn't seem to see it in such extraordinary terms.

"I love the speed that my career has gone, because I feel like in a way it's been fast, but in a way it's been a gradual climb," she said. "A lot of people rise to success within months and it's a really, really strange and rapid adjustment for them. For me, I put out my first album when I was 16 years old, and was playing free shows in bars and clubs and just trying to get anyone to listen up and discover my music. My albums actually didn't start out selling huge amounts of records, and gradually grew with the album sales of the first album. So I had two and a half years of kind of beginner success and then kind of intermediate success, mild success, and then when my second record came out, that's when everything changed. Everything in my life changed. All of a sudden, the crowds were frantic and every single show sold out and everything was just so much bigger than it had been before. So I'm really lucky I got those two and a half years of gradual climb before the craziness started."

Her success has clearly spread beyond country music now. Her recent single, "Love Story," became the first country song to hit No. 1 on the contemporary hit radio/top 40 chart. She was recently on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine -- a rarity for a country artist -- and she has tapped into the teen audience that has made the likes of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus mega-stars.

This makes sense considering that Swift's instantly catchy songs (most of which she has written or co-written herself) sit comfortably between easy-going rocking pop and breezy country and her lyrics believably capture the fevered rush of teenage love and the earth-shaking pain of breakups -- despite the fact that Swift claims to have never been in love herself.

The crossover appeal suits Swift just fine.

"What I love about the fact that I've been played on pop radio, what I love about it is that I'm still a country artist and everyone knows that," Swift said. "So it's really cool to be able to remain true to who you are, always remember who brought you to the party, but be able to hopefully bring new people to country music."

Taylor Swift

When: Tuesday at 7 p.m.

Where: Energy Solutions Arena, 301 W. South Temple, Salt Lake City

Tickets: $20-$49.50, available at the box office or through Ticketmaster outlets

Info: (801) 325-SEAT, www.energysolutionsarena.com, www.ticketmaster.com