When Taylor Swift announced, in August 2019, her “absolute” intention to record her first six albums immediately raised questions.
Would she decide to adapt the songs meaningfully – their instrumentation or even their lyrics – or would each recording be merely a carbon copy of the original? Which album would she decide to record first? Would she go in chronological order of their releases? Or maybe she’s releasing even her biggest single again as a collection of the biggest hits? Would there be acoustic versions? Piano versions? Remixes? Could we finally hear the fabulous 10 minute version of “All To Well”?
Some – though not all – questions were finally answered Thursday, when Taylor announced in a post on her social media accounts that her 2008 version had been re-recorded. Fearless – appropriately subtitled Taylor’s version – will be coming soon. To prepare for its release, the main song from the album, “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”, will drop at midnight.
It was perhaps surprising, for those familiar with Taylor and her penchant for routine, that she did not choose to begin the journey of re-recording and re-release her back catalog with her self-titled debut album. This is probably what the majority of fans expected, but if the past year has taught us anything, it is that some of Taylor’s best careers are also some of her least predictable things. The Old Taylor may have been killed in 2017, after the most turbulent year of her career – but with ‘Love Story (Taylor’s Version)’, the pop superstar provides a symbolic basis for the upcoming resurrection of her previous iterations.
The new version of “Love Story”, as it turns out, is almost indistinguishable from the original. There is a very slight variation in Taylor’s tone of voice, at 31 surprisingly more mature than at 18. There are some instances of changing intonation, and some syllables are emphasized where it was not before, and the instrumental is more sharp . However, the difference is probably only noticeable to those who have studied Taylor’s music in exciting detail for the past 13 years, and that’s the point, of course: in recording her first six albums, Taylor wants the value of their original master recordings.
The story of her struggle with Big Machine Records over the rights to her masters is well documented. Taylor originally signed with the label when she was just 15 – but when it came time to renew her contract, she refused and announced that she had signed a brand new deal with Universal Music Group. Six months later, in an explosive post on her Tumblr account, she revealed why she left.
In the report, Taylor claims that Scott Borchetta – the founder and CEO of Big Machine – refused when she asked to buy the rights to her master recordings. Instead, he offered Taylor the opportunity to ‘earn them back’ on the condition that she sign a new ten-year contract and produce six more albums under the label. She turned down the offer, aware that Borchetta was planning to sell the label, and she chose to prioritize the safety of her future job over her past. And then, in one step, Taylor called her ‘worst nightmare’, and Borchetta sold Big Machine for $ 300 million to Scooter Braun, Ithaca Holdings.
“Every time Scott Borchetta heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape from my lips, it was when I cried or did not try,” Taylor wrote on Tumblr, referring to the years of ‘incessant, manipulative bullying’ she had. “He knew what he was doing; they both did it. Control of a woman who did not want to be associated with them,” Braun and his well-known clients said, including Kanye West and Justin Bieber.
Braun’s acquisition of the company not only meant that he and Big Machine had the ability to not have Taylor’s music licensed. In an interview with Billboard in December 2019, Taylor announced that she would categorically refuse all requests to license her old music until she could record and release it again, to prevent Big Machine or Scooter Braun from benefiting from her work.
“Every week we receive a dozen submission requests to use ‘Shake It Off’ in an ad or ‘Blank Space’ in a movie, and we say no to each one of them,” she said at the time. ‘The reason I’ll be recording my music again next year is because I want my music to live on. I want it to be in movies, but in commercials. But I only want it if I own it. “
So it makes sense from a business perspective that Taylor started recording one of her most famous and beloved songs. Although her debut album may have been the beginning, ‘Love Story’ is probably the birth of Taylor Swift, the superstar; after its release in 2008, the song became one of the greatest digital singles in American history. With its most recent RIAA certification in 2015, it was awarded 8 times platinum.
“Love Story” paved the way for Taylor’s journey from smaller country singer to the living pop legend she is today – the one whose music is so valuable, one might think to pay $ 300 million to own it. It’s one of those songs that everyone know, and consequently it will undoubtedly be streamed endlessly and played on the radio and licensed for use in movie trailers and TV shows and ad infinitum. But if Taylor was just profitable with this re-recording process, she could have started with it. 1989, the album featuring “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space”, are probably her most commercially successful hits.
Instead, Taylor decided to take us back to the song that began this journey for many of her longest-running fans. She wrote ‘Love Story’ on her own on the floor of her nursery in about 20 minutes, filled with 18-year-old anxiety about her parents’ disapproval of a boy she wanted to date (but ultimately never did). It was written late Fearless‘s album-making process and a last-minute addition to the playlist, but the song continued to sound like the trials of countless fans’ teens.
‘When I think back to the Fearless album and everything in which you changed it, a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face, ‘Taylor wrote in her statement, announcing that the recorded album was complete. “It was the musical era in which so many inner jokes were created between us, so many hugs exchanged and hands touched, so many unbreakable bonds formed.”
For fans who have stuck with Taylor through all the years since, the announcement felt like a familiar hug from an old friend. It evoked a previously held Taylor Swift tradition, a message hidden in seemingly random letters spelled ‘ninth April’ – the date of issue of Fearless (Taylor’s version). She revealed that the recorded version of the album contains six songs that have never been heard before during the production of the original version, which ensures the same excitement as the brand new Taylor Swift music, even though we heard most of the songs male without number before. Even the two-month wait between the single and the album is reminiscent of a familiar pattern of anticipation we could never experience with 2020s Folklore and Always.
In short, with Fearless (Taylor’s version), it feels as if Taylor is recreating the journey to the release of the original not only for herself but also for fans – and during a moment when everything feels uncertain, the nostalgia that accompanies it may not be a welcome comfort.
It did not escape fans that “Love Story” both begins and ends with the words “we were both young when I first saw you.” It’s a gripping sentiment for the countless fans Taylor discovered through the song in 2008 and has stuck with her ever since. The lyric video for the recorded version pays homage to the cherished relationship between the fan and the artist – a slideshow of photos of Fearless-era Taylor signs autographs and poses for photos with fans captured during a comically dated time. (Borchetta’s face is blurred one of the photos.) After it was released, Taylor kept a bunch of photos side by side of fans in tweets showing how much they grew next to her. The video ends with a simple message: “With love to all my fans.”
“I think it’s important for the people who keep you going and supporting you and having your back out in the world, to know that you’re thinking about them all the time,” an 18-year-old Taylor told the Los Angeles Times said. in 2008.
With ‘Love Story (Taylor’s Version)’ she proves that she still is.