By the age of eighteen, a breakout country star named Taylor Swift felt like she’d accrued enough hindsight to reflect on her younger 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 year in high school. It was one of the standout tracks from Swift’s sophomore album, “Fearless,” which came out in 2008. The album, which followed the self-titled début that made her an industry darling, was the first in many incremental evolutions that Swift has made from a Nashville-based country singer-songwriter to a globally bound pop superstar. “Fearless” was also where she began to develop the emotional and attitudinal signatures that she has carried through almost every era of her career, and which have defined her as a songwriter. On “Fearless,” Swift sharpened her lyrical specificity, using proper nouns and detailed renderings of conversations and experiences to create an indelible image of Taylor Swift, the savvy naïf. She was a hopeless romantic trying to write her own fairy tale, but she was also developing a serious hunger for vengeance against anyone who dared to disappoint her.
Over the years, this taste for vengeance has migrated from the realm of the personal and romantic to the professional. Last week, Swift released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a newly recorded version of her 2008 album, the first of six re-recorded albums that she’s planning for in the coming years. It was not a move born out of an artistic impulse, but a desire to regain control over her catalogue. At the beginning of her career, Swift signed with a small indie label in Nashville called Big Machine Records, which was run by a record executive named Scott Borchetta. As her catalogue grew more valuable over time, the ever-shrewd Swift tried to buy the masters for her first six albums from Big Machine. Borchetta refused, unless Swift rejoined Big Machine (she’d left and signed with Republic Records) and “earned” her old masters, “one album back at a time, one for every new album I turned in,” Swift wrote in a heated Tumblr post in 2019. The public spat escalated when Borchetta sold Big Machine, including Swift’s masters, to Scooter Braun—the infamous music manager associated with Justin Bieber and Kanye West. When the deal went through, Swift wrote to her fans online, scorned once again: “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 casual followers of Swift’s career understand how unlikely she is to allow anyone—let alone a sworn enemy—to take control of her musical legacy. These re-recorded albums are her attempt to deflate the commercial and cultural value of the original recordings, while keeping their artistic sanctity intact—a Machiavellian act of strategy overlaid with flavors of empowerment and devotion to her fans. “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” is a deft and exacting recreation of the original album, each arrangement and lyric preserved in its original spirit. For these recordings, she invited Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, two of her preferred collaborators in recent years, to help produce, but their trademark sounds and styles are barely present here. The only marked difference between “Taylor’s Version” and the original lies in Swift’s vocals, which have grown smoother, richer, and deeper in the last decade. The maturity of Swift’s voice on “Taylor’s Version” makes her assertions of wisdom more convincing, even when she returns to the country twang of her earliest days. Still, “Taylor’s Version” makes clear that these dutiful renderings were designed to make the raw source material obsolete, not to complement or reimagine it.
To incentivize listeners to stream the new album—and to game the charts, where longer albums have a better likelihood of performing well, owing to stream counts—Swift re-recorded all tracks from the deluxe edition of “Fearless,” and also six additional tracks from that era that had never been released, making for a twenty-seven-track-long album. The highlight of these from-the-vault tracks is “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a sweetly defiant pop-country breakup anthem that feels like a forgotten Swift classic: “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 take on new significance to a feverish fan base eager to dissect each line and draw speculative meaning from every story. Now, against the backdrop of her battle with Borchetta and Braun, the original male objects of these scorned narratives can be swapped out and replaced by her industry foes. “Taylor’s Version” is a stroke of strategic genius that provides new fuel for her fanbase to reëngage with the decade-old psychodrama of her lyrics.
To delineate from the original album, Swift reshot the cover image from “Fearless.” The angle of the camera is lower in the new version; her windblown locks darker and wilder. The image is sepia-toned, and it captures Swift in a moment of seemingly unvarnished freedom. It’s just distinct enough that when listeners search for her music on streaming services, “Taylor’s Version” appears aesthetically linked to the more naturalistic visual ethos of her latest albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” both from 2020. And then, of course, there is that parenthetical: “Taylor’s Version,” a designation that seems straightforward and obvious enough but carries a host of pointed implications about the two recordings. Rather than “2020 version” or “new version,” or an altogether new name, this album, unlike the “Fearless” of 2008, has an explicit owner. It is not the commercial asset of some anonymous male industry entity, but Swift’s. This parenthetical draws an ethical line in the sand that makes the choice obvious for any listener perusing her music on streaming services and trying to decide which version to click on. Swift is also astute enough to understand that the short memory of the Internet’s algorithms and search engines will quickly favor “Taylor’s Version”—within twenty-four hours, the record had been streamed and purchased enough that it is on track to top the album charts next week. In 2021, with Swift still at the peak of her career and continually masterminding her own narrative, this is what counts as a Swiftian fairy-tale ending.
