By the age of eighteen, a breakout nation star named Taylor Swift felt like she’d accrued sufficient hindsight to mirror on her youthful self with authority: “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team / I didn’t know it at fifteen,” she sang on “Fifteen,” a ballad about her freshman yr in highschool. It was one of many standout tracks from Swift’s sophomore album, “Fearless,” which got here out in 2008. The album, which adopted the self-titled début that made her an trade darling, was the primary in lots of incremental evolutions that Swift has produced from a Nashville-based nation singer-songwriter to a globally certain pop famous person. “Fearless” was additionally the place she started to develop the emotional and attitudinal signatures that she has carried by way of nearly each period of her profession, and which have outlined her as a songwriter. On “Fearless,” Swift sharpened her lyrical specificity, utilizing correct nouns and detailed renderings of conversations and experiences to create an indelible picture of Taylor Swift, the savvy naïf. She was a hopeless romantic making an attempt to jot down her personal fairy story, however she was additionally growing a critical starvation for vengeance towards anybody who dared to disappoint her.
Over the years, this style for vengeance has migrated from the realm of the private and romantic to the skilled. Last week, Swift launched “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a newly recorded model of her 2008 album, the primary of six re-recorded albums that she’s planning for within the coming years. It was not a transfer born out of an inventive impulse, however a need to regain management over her catalogue. At the start of her profession, Swift signed with a small indie label in Nashville referred to as Big Machine Records, which was run by a document government named Scott Borchetta. As her catalogue grew extra invaluable over time, the ever-shrewd Swift tried to purchase the masters for her first six albums from Big Machine. Borchetta refused, until Swift rejoined Big Machine (she’d left and signed with Republic Records) and “earned” her previous masters, “one album back at a time, one for every new album I turned in,” Swift wrote in a heated Tumblr put up in 2019. The public spat escalated when Borchetta offered Big Machine, together with Swift’s masters, to Scooter Braun—the notorious music supervisor related with Justin Bieber and Kanye West. When the deal went by way of, Swift wrote to her followers on-line, scorned as soon as once more: “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Braun’s] hands for years . . . Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
But even informal followers of Swift’s profession perceive how unlikely she is to permit anybody—not to mention a sworn enemy—to take management of her musical legacy. These re-recorded albums are her try and deflate the business and cultural worth of the unique recordings, whereas maintaining their creative sanctity intact—a Machiavellian act of technique overlaid with flavors of empowerment and devotion to her followers. “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” is a deft and exacting recreation of the unique album, every association and lyric preserved in its unique spirit. For these recordings, she invited Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, two of her most popular collaborators in recent times, to assist produce, however their trademark sounds and kinds are barely current right here. The solely marked distinction between “Taylor’s Version” and the unique lies in Swift’s vocals, which have grown smoother, richer, and deeper within the final decade. The maturity of Swift’s voice on “Taylor’s Version” makes her assertions of knowledge extra convincing, even when she returns to the nation twang of her earliest days. Still, “Taylor’s Version” makes clear that these dutiful renderings had been designed to make the uncooked supply materials out of date, to not complement or reimagine it.
To incentivize listeners to stream the brand new album—and to recreation the charts, the place longer albums have a greater chance of performing effectively, owing to stream counts—Swift re-recorded all tracks from the deluxe version of “Fearless,” and in addition six extra tracks from that period that had by no means been launched, making for a twenty-seven-track-long album. The spotlight of those from-the-vault tracks is “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a sweetly defiant pop-country breakup anthem that seems like a forgotten Swift traditional: “Mr. ‘Never told me why,’ Mr. ‘Never had to see me cry,’ ” she sings, “Mr. ‘Insincere apology so he doesn’t look like the bad guy’/ He goes about his day, forgets he ever even heard my name.” In 2021, these lyrics tackle new significance to a feverish fan base desperate to dissect every line and draw speculative which means from each story. Now, towards the backdrop of her battle with Borchetta and Braun, the unique male objects of those scorned narratives may be swapped out and changed by her trade foes. “Taylor’s Version” is a stroke of strategic genius that gives new gasoline for her fanbase to reëngage with the decade-old psychodrama of her lyrics.
To delineate from the unique album, Swift reshot the duvet picture from “Fearless.” The angle of the digital camera is decrease within the new model; her windblown locks darker and wilder. The picture is sepia-toned, and it captures Swift in a second of seemingly unvarnished freedom. It’s simply distinct sufficient that when listeners seek for her music on streaming companies, “Taylor’s Version” seems aesthetically linked to the extra naturalistic visible ethos of her newest albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” each from 2020. And then, after all, there’s that parenthetical: “Taylor’s Version,” a designation that appears easy and apparent sufficient however carries a number of pointed implications concerning the two recordings. Rather than “2020 version” or “new version,” or an altogether new identify, this album, not like the “Fearless” of 2008, has an express proprietor. It just isn’t the business asset of some nameless male trade entity, however Swift’s. This parenthetical attracts an moral line within the sand that makes the selection apparent for any listener perusing her music on streaming companies and making an attempt to resolve which model to click on on. Swift can also be astute sufficient to know that the quick reminiscence of the Internet’s algorithms and serps will shortly favor “Taylor’s Version”—inside twenty-four hours, the document had been streamed and bought sufficient that it’s on observe to prime the album charts subsequent week. In 2021, with Swift nonetheless on the peak of her profession and frequently masterminding her personal narrative, that is what counts as a Swiftian fairy-tale ending.
