When Taylor Swift announced that she was planning to re-record each of her albums to effectively take control of her masters and keep it with the famous music manager Scooter Braun, the moving core was Taylor: strategic, skilled and easily connected to an empowerment narrative. It was not merely a cynical IP grip with purely financial implications; it was also a woman who literally found herself back. To listeners, however, the value proposition seemed less clear. So much of the relationship between pop star and fan revolves around the idea of ’blessings’, with the generous artist giving gifts to her listeners. With ‘new’ versions of old albums, Swift apparently asked her fans to accept the rebuilt albums as a new canon to replace the beloved decades old records.
Fearless (Taylor’s version) is the first of six of these planned ‘new’ versions. Getting started with her second album is a great choice; her writing is stronger than on her debut in 2006, and Fearless contains some of her more iconic and commercially successful tracks. Instead of playing a caricature of her 18-year-old self, we get the current Taylor into conversation with the Taylor of the past with a disturbing intimacy.
What can you earn by analyzing the gap between remix, recitation and reincarnation? The dissection of the Easter eggs wrapped in Swift’s songs has always been part of the Taylor listening experience – decoding which lyrics correspond to which break – up, and tracing the aftermath of each biting remark. Fearless (Taylor’s version) offers a different puzzle: see the difference between the original and this almost identical copy. These versions are slightly more polished, like photos touched with a push of a button on Instagram: the sound is clearer, the mix is clearer, each guitar scale is sharper. Most changes to original songs are barely noticeable, except for a refreshing blast of violin on ‘Love Story’; the duration of each song remains exactly the same or within one second.
The most obvious change is her voice, which has strengthened and deepened over the years. Her refrains are a little less breathable, and she slips in belt without sounding tense. There are micro-changes in the inflection: ‘You ask me for me love and then you push me around, ‘she called on’ Tell Me Why ‘, the note a little more strangled and growling. The second-long “Hallelujah” in the bridge of “Change” sounded sublime on the previous version; here it sounds more like a sigh, somewhere between relief and remorse.
The songs on Fearless surge between hope and pain, bitterness and awe. The tension in Taylor’s early albums arose from the dichotomy: reaching for fairy tales while calling their errors, cheating white horses and still believing that there is redemption in the perfect dress. ‘Today Was a Fairytale’, a song she wrote to accompany her como in the 2010 rom-com Valentine’s Day, fits right into this context with live guitar and Swift’s ode to ‘magic in the air’. The other “new” songs on Taylor’s version, released from her famous vault, mingling in that faint, double-edged sweetness – with the exception of “Mr. Perfectly Fine, ”a delightful, strumming removal. “I do not know how it goes better than that,” she sang on the title track, and the glow remained, as she described a dissolution that left her breathless.
“Forever and Forever” is Fearless ‘ best song, but the shock of the original album makes way for something cooler – more disgusting than horrible. In the 2009 version, Swift sounds wounded as she sings, “You looked me in the eye and told me you liked me / did you just make a joke?” In the newer versions (she also contains a delayed piano iteration under the bonus material), her voice is muffled, but more full as she sings the lines, no longer arguing the cruelty of an ex, but allowing the sadness that accompanied by the acceptance of your own anger.
This sadness depends on this new recording session. It’s hard to tell if there are sonic differences in the way she performs a song again, or that the knowledge that a 31-year-old contains songs she wrote as a teenager permeates every track. On the new recording of ‘Fifteen’, she holds the last note of ‘Count to ten’ for a moment longer than the original before crying: ‘This is life before you know who you’re going to be.’ Part of listening to Fearless (Taylor’s version) involves linking it back to our own past, when we would pretend to be worth more than knowing it want can be anything. The meta-layers of control and contrast wrap around in these surveys; Swift herself was 15 when she signed the deal with Scooter Braun. She’s making some of the best music of her career right now, and presumably putting it in the wheels to frustrate control of her old records. The past always becomes a difficult place to visit again.
Buy: rough trade
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