Taylor Swift has officially announced the details of the first of her upcoming albums of renowned vintage classics. After declaring in 2019 that she would take on the masters for all her pre-Lover music, Swift revealed on February 11 that she will be dropping the recorded “Love Story” at midnight, with the full, recorded album Fearless (Taylor’s version) to follow on April 9th.
The reissued “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” begins with the line “We were both young when I saw you”, and the new lyric video plays off photos of Swift with her fans around 2008, giving the song a kind of love letter make. to the Swifties. The arrival begins the application of the plans Swift announced in the summer of 2019, after news broke that her old record company – Big Machine Records, which she left in 2018 – had been sold to megamanager Scooter Braun. The sale gave Braun the right to all the master recordings for Swift’s old music, which means that anyone who wants to license one of Swift’s old songs to play in a TV show or movie or an advertisement, for Braun’s permission must ask and pay him an amount. license fee. And since Braun had previously worked with sworn Taylor Swift enemy Kanye West, Swift was crushed. In an emotional Tumblr message, she calls the news ‘my worst case’.
Not long after, in an interview with CBS’s Tracy Smith, Swift said she plans to sidestep Braun by re-recording everything in the songbook he now owns, which means all the songs she has in front of her released album from August 2019. Lover.
When Swift switched to Republic Records in the fall of 2018, she negotiated to own the master rights to all the music she creates going forward. By recording her old songbook with Republic Records, she will own the copyright to all the new recordings. The move gives licensees the option to work directly with Swift and her team rather than go through Braun. And that, in turn, will allow Swift to reclaim an assignment about her music and how it’s used.
While Swift recorded her old masters, she kept the whole pandemic busy. In 2020, she surprised two new albums: Julie’s Folklore and December’s Always. And now she will have everything Fearless – which includes some of her biggest earlier hits, such as “You Belong With Me”, in April.
Correction: An earlier version of this article quoted the first line of “Love Story” as “When I first saw you.” It has been updated with the correct quotation.