When Taylor Swift announced, in August 2019, his “absolute” intention to re-record his first six albums, fans immediately raised questions.
Would she choose to make any significant changes to the songs – her instrumentation, or even her lyrics – or would each re-recording simply be a carbon copy of your original? Which album will she decide to record first? Would it go in chronological order of its releases? Or could she even relaunch her biggest singles as a sort of collection of the biggest hits? Would there be acoustic versions? Piano versions? Remixes? Could we finally hear the legendary 10-minute version of “All Too Well”?
Some – though not all – of these questions were finally answered on Thursday, when Taylor announced in a post on his social media accounts that his rewritten version of 2008 Fearless – appropriately subtitled Taylor version – would come soon. For the prelude to its release, the album’s first single, “Love Story (Taylor’s Version),” would be released at midnight.
It may have been slightly 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-launching her previous catalog with her self-titled debut album. It was probably what most fans expected, but if last year taught us anything, it is that some of the best moves in Taylor’s career are also some of the least predictable. The Old Taylor may have died in 2017, after the most tumultuous year of her career – but with “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”, the pop superstar provides a symbolic basis for the imminent resurrection of her previous iterations.
The new version of “Love Story”, it seems, is almost indistinguishable from the original. There is a very slight variation in the tone of Taylor’s voice, unsurprisingly, more mature at 31 than at 18. There are some cases of intonation change, and some syllables are emphasized where they were not before, and the instrumentals are clearer. The difference, however, is probably noticeable only to those who have spent the past 13 years studying Taylor’s music in excruciating detail, and that is, of course, the point: by re-recording her first six albums, Taylor intends to lower the value of her recordings original originals.
The history of their battle with Big Machine Records for the rights of their 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 declined, announcing that she had signed an entirely new contract with Universal Music Group. Six months later, in an explosive post on her Tumblr account, she revealed why she had left.
In the post, Taylor stated that when she asked to buy the rights to her master recordings, Scott Borchetta – founder and CEO of Big Machine – declined. Instead, he counter-offered Taylor the opportunity to “win” them back, on the condition that she sign a new 10-year contract and produce six more albums under the label. She declined the offer, aware that Borchetta intended to sell the brand, and chose to prioritize the safety of her future work over her past. And then, in a move Taylor called “the worst nightmare”, Borchetta sold Big Machine for $ 300 million to Scooter Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings.
“Whenever Scott Borchetta heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ slip from my lips, that’s when I was crying or trying not to cry,” wrote Taylor on Tumblr, referring to the years of “incessant and manipulative intimidation” that she said she experienced Braun and his famous clients, including Kanye West and Justin Bieber. “He knew what he was doing; they both did it. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to associate with them.”
Braun’s acquisition of the company not only meant that he and Big Machine had the ability to prevent Taylor’s music from being licensed – it also meant that they profited whenever a song in their catalog was bought, used or broadcast. In an interview with Billboard in December 2019, Taylor announced that he would categorically deny any licensing request for his old music until he could re-record and re-release it, in order to prevent Big Machine or Scooter Braun from profiting from his work.
“Every week, we get a dozen sync requests to use ‘Shake It Off’ in some ad or ‘Blank Space’ in some movie trailer, and we say no to each one,” she said at the time. “The reason I’m re-recording my music next year is because I want my music to stay alive. I want it to appear in films, I want it to be in commercials. But I only want it if I have it. “
It makes sense, then, from a business point of view, that Taylor has started to re-record one of his most well-known and loved songs. Although her debut album may have been the beginning, “Love Story” undoubtedly marks the birth of Taylor Swift, the superstar; after its release in 2008, the song became one of the best-selling digital singles in the history of the United States. After his most recent RIAA certification in 2015, he was awarded 8x platinum.
“Love Story” paved the way for Taylor’s journey from small country singer to the living pop legend she is today – one whose music is so valuable that one can think of paying $ 300 million to acquire it. It’s one of those songs that Worldwide you know, and as a result, it will undoubtedly be broadcast endlessly and played on the radio and licensed for use in movie trailers and TV shows and ad infinitum ads. But if all Taylor was pursuing with this rewrite process was profit, it could have started with 1989, the album containing “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space”, arguably his most commercially successful hits.
Instead, Taylor decided to take us back to the music with which, for many of his older fans, this whole journey began. She became famous for writing “Love Story” alone on the floor of her childhood room in “about 20 minutes”, full of anguish at the age of 18 because of her parents’ disapproval of a boy she wanted to date (but never did). It was written at the end of FearlessThe album creation process and a last-minute addition to the tracklist, but the song continued as the soundtrack to the trials and tribulations of countless teenage fans.
“When I think of Fearless album and everything you’ve transformed, a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face, ”Taylor wrote in his statement announcing the completion of the re-recorded album. “This was the musical era in which so many internal jokes were created between us, so many hugs exchanged and hands touched, so many unbreakable bonds formed.”
For fans who have stayed with Taylor all these years, the announcement was like a family hug from an old friend. He resurrected a previously defunct Taylor Swift tradition, a message hidden in seemingly random capital letters spelling “April 9” – the release date for Fearless (Taylor version). She revealed that the re-recorded version of the album will include six songs never heard before written during the production of the original, ensuring the same level of excitement that precedes Taylor Swift’s new song, even though we’ve listened to most of the tracks countless times before. Even the two-month wait between the single and the album recalls a familiar pattern of anticipation that we never had with 2020’s Folklore and Ever.
In short, with Fearless (Taylor version), it seems that Taylor is recreating the journey of releasing the original not just for her, but for fans as well – and, during a time when everything seems uncertain, the nostalgia that comes with it couldn’t be a more welcome comfort.
This didn’t escape fans that “love story” begins and ends with the words “we were both young when I first saw you”. It is a moving feeling for the countless fans who discovered Taylor through music in 2008 and have stayed by his side ever since. The video with the lyrics of the re-recorded version is a tribute to this beloved relationship between the fan and the artist – a slide show of photos of Fearless-It was Taylor signing autographs and posing for photos with fans captured during a comical moment in time. (Borchetta’s face is blurred one of the photos.) After it was released, Taylor liked a lot of photos side by side of fans in tweets showing how much they grew up next to her. The video ends with a simple message: “With love to all my fans”.
“I think it is important for the people who keep and support you and have their backs to the world to know that you are thinking about them all the time,” Taylor, 18, told the Los Angeles Times in 2008.
With “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)”, she proves that she still is.