“Could Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless’ remake be nominated for a Grammy?” It is an issue that has arisen several times since Swift released “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” and promised that his complete re-creation of the successful 2008 album “Fearless” would arrive in April.
It’s an interesting question … in a totally theoretical way, “Who would win a fight, Santa Claus or Jesus?” in a way, since it will never have any serious application in the real world.
If the question is merely it could, there is an easy answer to that: Yes, unquestionably – it is clearly technically eligible. If the query is changed to he would be, this is also simple: it will never happen in a million years, but especially it will never happen in the next.
This is due to the gatekeepers involved. There are the blue ribbon committees that keep the Grammy nominations and try – with an emphasis on “trying” – to ensure that the nominees reflect what the music climate has been like over the past year and not what was happening three presidents ago. (It is true that there were periods in Grammy history when you could have drawn the exact opposite conclusion.)
But, above all, there is Swift as his own doorman – one who has the option of whether or not to send a Grammy work for possible nominations. And while her team doesn’t comment on the matter, Swift’s chances of putting “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” in the running for the 2022 Grammy Awards are almost shy of the chances of her signing all royalties for her new version of the album for Scooter Braun as a gesture of goodwill “without resentment”.
This does not mean that Swift is not proud of the (re) work she is doing, but even if she was inclined to think that a version of “Fearless” should win the Grammy Album of the Year award twice, there’d be a self-destructive factor at play: Swift would send the “Taylor Version” recordings to compete with his completely new work. The December “Evermore” album and his songs will be up for grabs next time, and the darkest pop star on the planet wouldn’t be trying to think of a way to divert votes by offering the Academy an alternative to what is currently pioneering 2022 trophies .
Perhaps this seems self-evident. It was not, however, for some credulous news sources that suggested that Swift is trying to stack the cards for next year’s Grammy by launching a flurry of products. Fox News published a story, republished by TMZ, with the headline: “Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums will be eligible for the Grammys, generating mixed reviews: ‘Greed’”.
Leaving aside the question of what mixed criticism means, the allegation of “greed” related to Swift’s supposed Grammy accumulation was linked to two separate tweets, from a single Twitter user, with a total of 10 and three likes, respectively, so far … but still enough to be the subject of headlines about how Swift is trying to disrupt the Grammy with multiple nominations – an unlikely scenario for anyone following the award process.
At the very least, Swift and his team have been careful in recent years not to give voters or Grammy committees too many things to vote. When the songs on the album “Lover” were up for grabs, it was reported that their people split the difference between two of their biggest singles from that period and sent “Lover” for song of the year and “You Need to Calm Down” for record of the year and solo pop performance. (“Lover” was in fact nominated for music, and “Calm Down” was chosen for solo performance, but missed the edition for the album of the year.)
When it comes to the end of Grammy stuff, some fans and journalists seem surprised that “Taylor’s Versions” of older material is eligible for the Grammy. (A spokesperson for the Recording Academy issued a statement to Billboard: “The current eligibility rules would allow new performances and albums to be eligible if they had been recorded in the past five years. However, none of the older songs would be eligible for composition. awards. ”) The point was clear: outside the writing categories, a cover is a cover, and always eligible, if reasonably new; the rules make no separate exclusion for soundalikes, versus freer interpretations.
Swift is no less eligible for an almost note-for-note remake than director Gus Van Sant would have been for an Oscar for his remake of “Psycho”, plan by plan. Of course, unlike Van Sant, whose effort to xerox a Hitchcock classic deeply intrigued almost everyone in the film business except his sponsors, Swift received a lot of positive attention for remaking his own work – and, yes, pockets of “mixed criticism, “Also – gaining credit for the boldness and skill inherent in remaking six entire studio albums. Some even claim to find new or mature vocal inflections amid the” Love Story “facsimile. Award bait, however, is not.
If there was a prize for self-simulation, Swift would be the only nominee – not just for this year, but perhaps historically, as no one has really tried what she is doing now in the same volume or with the same attention to exact details, without cutting corners.
Pop stars like Frank Sinatra and country stars like Merle Haggard used to routinely re-record their classics when they changed labels, but not with the intention of pointing out that they were totally new interpretations or with the likely intention of inviting comparisons, let alone trying to make each sound fragment sounds as close as possible.
In 2012, Def Leppard became the rare artist to brag about doing something as close as possible to the original, boldly using the term “fakes” when the band released a handful of re-recordings of their old work, including “Pour Some Sugar on Eu . ” It was part of a dispute with the record company that made the band keep all of its pre-existing music out of digital services and launching replacements as a taste of what it could be. When the group finally reached an agreement with their record label and put the entire catalog online in early 2018, the few touch versions that they placed as a promise or threat disappeared silently.
Other artists, like Prince, also made a fuss about remaking their catalogs, but never did much more than just one or three sample songs. Perhaps the most notable example of achieving something even at the Swift stadium was when Jeff Lynne released an album of great hits from the Electric Light Orchestra made entirely of remakes. Instead of framing him as part of a contract dispute, he told fans that he never felt he had gotten people like “Mr. Blue Sky ”totally right the first time. Virtually no one believed that: some ELO freaks said that their one-man-band recreations did not have the same spirit as the more populous originals, however similar they seemed. And few noticed that he worked for other reasons besides being paid for mastering rights, as well as for publishing, when the songs were synchronized for ads and film / TV. (“Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra” reached number 118 in the United States, although it debuted in the top 10 in the United Kingdom.)
Grammy veterans will note that an album composed largely of re-recordings, Frank Sinatra’s “A Man and His Music” won a Grammy of the Year in 1967, although it is debated whether Sinatra had an exact duplication as a primary objective or agenda hidden when he wanted to publish a summary of his career that included songs from his previous record labels.
It is fair to say that this would not happen today – and probably not even examples of live projects or duet albums winning, like Eric Clapton’s “MTV Unplugged” in 1993, Tony Bennett’s “MTV Unplugged” in 1995 or Ray Charles and several artists “ Genius Loves Company ”in 2005. It is not that these projects lack merit, but the Grammys are under continuous pressure to appear relevant to the moment that prevents anything seen as a nostalgic flashback from appearing. (Certainly there will be no repetition of something that “Layla” won the best song in the early 90s; the rules have since been changed to keep the old ones out of the categories that reward the composer, although new recordings never cease to be eligible._
In the end, when the “Taylor Version” is inevitably not submitted, everyone will win: the Recording Academy for avoiding a hashtag # GrammysSo2008 and Swift for not pitting “Love Story” against “Willow” or anything else “The Evermore candidate” you can see that when the first round of the 2022 vote arrives this fall.
She will receive an unofficial tribute that is better than stacking Grammy nominees: the most capable mimeograph award for memes, with a possible plaque for courage in battle and a side tray of applause for “I said it was serious.”