'Fearless' Grammy prediction: Taylor Swift for best album

Taylor Swift's Fearless is the favorite to win the Grammy for album of the year.

And the Grammy goes to (wait for it) ... Taylor Swift. Her mantel already groaning under the weight of honorary hardware, the country ingénue is expected to collect the trophy for best album, a surprise to no one except perhaps shut-out Kanye West.

Her Fearless "will win easily," says veteran Grammy expert Paul Grein, who writes the Chart Watch blog for Yahoo.com. "She has strong appeal to both pop and country voters, and she has earned respect for the way her material is drawn from her own life. I can't see a scenario for anyone but Swift winning."

The others, ranked by Grein in order of their chances, are: Beyoncé's I Am ... Sasha Fierce, the Dave Matthews Band's Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King, Lady Gaga's The Fame and the Black Eyed Peas' The E.N.D.

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Is Fearless peerless? It was 2009's best seller, yet Swift and her platinum competitors didn't earn the year's top reviews. Those went to such less-familiar acts as Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors and Neko Case, who populated many critics' top 10 lists but sold only a combined 488,000 copies. Few expected nominations for those, but why not for lauded, respectable-selling discs by Phoenix, Bob Dylan, Wilco or Green Day, all slotted in lower categories?

Grein notes that marquee finalists are culled by blue-ribbon panelists "who do the best they can to not be swayed by charts and sales, but ... they have to know that a red-hot superstar like Beyoncéor Taylor is going to have more ratings appeal than a lesser-known specialty-genre artist. It's also possible that (they) saw fit to celebrate albums that have defied the commercial downturn."

The popularity tilt is no surprise "in a period of both national recession and a still-plummeting record industry that is desperately seeking to av