Taylor Swift’s Master Plan

In retrospect, that Tumblr post might be one of the most important things that Swift has ever written. It has all the qualities of a good Taylor Swift song, conjuring an image of an innocent teen-ager who got in over her head, and the men intent on exploiting her. Whereas her predecessors struggled to get their fans to care about the inner workings of the music industry, Swift created a real-life story that, in a cleverly meta way, was all about why she deserves to own the stories she’s told. And these aren’t just any stories: as Swift later told Rolling Stone, Braun and Borchetta are “two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work.” When she announced that she would rerecord her first six albums—giving her the copyright to the new tracks—the plan was greeted by many as an act of feminist reclamation.

For the past few years, Swift has been rolling out these rerecorded albums, one at a time, in nonchronological order. Each one, appended with the phrase “Taylor’s Version,” has been ridiculously successful, embraced by both fans and critics. Perhaps most important, these releases created a virtuous way to listen to Swift’s music. Fans refused to stream the old tracks; radio stations committed to playing only the new ones. “Whenever Taylor re-records a new track, we immediately replace the old versions,” Tom Poleman, the chief programming officer of iHeartMedia, said in 2021. “Listeners have made it known that they cannot wait to hear Taylor’s Version of each track.” Last year, a video came up on my Instagram feed. “ ‘Taylor’s Version’ means no one steals her albums,” a little girl tells her sister, as the two of them sit in their playroom. “And the meanie bug who stealed her albums name is Scooter Brahms.”

“Not Brahms,” the other girl says. “Braun.”

The irony is that, by this point, Braun no longer owned Swift’s masters. In 2020, he sold them to Shamrock Capital, a private-equity firm spun off from the family investment office of a member of the Disney family. Still, Swifties continued to refer to the original albums as “Scooter’s Versions.” And the enemy was no longer just Braun but anyone who chose the old songs over the new. Several months ago, I saw a viral TikTok of a girl in a sequinned dress vibing out at an event to Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—until she realizes that something is awry. The chorus hits; her eyes bulge. “It’s not Taylor’s Version!” she screams. The video has 3.4 million likes, and the comment section is split between sympathetic Swifties and confused casual listeners. “I will refuse to dance/sing or even bop my head if it’s not taylors version,” one user wrote. Another asks, “Is it not the same . . . ?” To the most devoted Swift fans, this was like asking if Columbus Day is the same as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

In March, 2023, Swift took her feminist crusade on the road with the Eras Tour: the highest-grossing tour of all time, which made Swift the first musician to become a billionaire primarily on music earnings. The tour, inspired by Swift’s rerecording project, was a mix of live performance and live promotion; at certain shows, she teased the release of the next Taylor’s Version, sending fans into a frenzy over the possibility of hearing new old music. Late last year, the six-hundred-and-thirty-two-day tour finally came to an end. Curiously, two album rerecordings—the artist’s eponymous début and “Reputation”—had yet to be released.

It is possible that neither album will ever be released. The week before last, Swift announced that she had struck a deal with Shamrock Capital to buy back her masters. “All of the music I’ve ever made . . . now belongs . . . to me,” she wrote, in a letter on her website. While that first letter, about the Braun purchase, concluded with the valediction “Sad and grossed out,” this one ended with “Elated and amazed.” The rerecordings era was officially over. Swifties, meanwhile, have celebrated by reintroducing the Scooter’s Versions, which are now also Taylor’s Versions, back into their lives. And, more quietly, they’ve started to admit that maybe the rerecordings were never that great to begin with.

It was all so promising at the start. In April, 2021, Swift released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version).” The original “Fearless,” from 2008, launched her to international fame and gave us both “Love Story” and “You Belong with Me,” which are still among her most popular songs. It won Swift her first Grammy, and a 2009 MTV Video Music Award. (This marked the start of her feud with West, who interrupted her acceptance speech to declare that Beyoncé was the rightful winner.) For fans of the original, “Fearless (T.V.)” was underwhelming, but in a good way. The rerecorded tracks are loyal to the originals; some sound almost as if they’ve simply been remastered. The mix is clearer, and the instruments are sharper. As Michael A. Lee, a music professor at Azusa Pacific University, told Entertainment Weekly, the piano in “Forever & Always (Piano Version)” has gone from sounding like an “upright, almost honky-tonk,” to sounding like a grand. In “Change,” the guitar solo is less distorted. Over all, Lee said, the album is an almost identical remake of the original—a technically difficult task to pull off.

The main difference is the quality of Swift’s vocals, which had improved dramatically in the thirteen years between the initial release and the rerecording. On the original, Swift sounds shaky and nervous—understandable, as she was only eighteen. But on the rerecording her voice is deeper and fuller. I was never a huge fan of the original “You Belong with Me,” because it felt as if Swift was mostly speak-singing. The pre-chorus featured a silly line—“She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”—made sillier by its delivery. But on the Taylor’s Version the line is more melodic, and she enunciates more clearly. (Similarly, on the rerecorded “1989” album, it is finally possible to tell that Swift is singing about a “long list of ex-lovers” rather than “all the lonely Starbucks lovers.”)

Some of the lyrics on “Fearless” are almost stunningly earnest. Others seem mature beyond their years, a feeling that is acute when listening to the Taylor’s Version. In general, there is something touching about hearing an older Swift return to some of her earliest songs. After she rerecorded “Never Grow Up,” a song on “Speak Now” that she wrote in her late teens, fans uploaded videos splicing the two versions of the track together. One listener wrote, “This totally has the feel of a younger and older sister sitting next to each other on wooden bar stools up on a small stage with their guitars and just strumming and vibing into their microphones.”

Revisiting “Fearless,” Swift has written, was “more fulfilling and emotional than i could have imagined.” And it was an important proof of concept. The album went to No. 1—the first time that a rerecorded album has topped the charts—and had the biggest sales week for any country album since 2015. Many newer fans were also exposed to her early tracks for the first time. I discovered what is now one of my favorites, a deep cut called “The Other Side of the Door.” When Swift played the song as a surprise on the Eras Tour, she grinned when fans seemed to know every word.

After “Fearless (T.V.),” there was a lot of excitement about the rerecordings to come. But the next two, “Red (T.V.)” and “Speak Now (T.V.),” were significantly worse in quality. Part of the issue lay with the spirit of the original albums: though both were made after “Fearless,” they’re more melodramatic, in the way that a moody teen-ager can appear more immature than her precocious younger sibling. Some of the songs seem designed to be screamed by heartbroken girls in their bedrooms, and it was difficult for Swift, now in her thirties, to re-create the necessary angst. “Last Kiss,” on “Speak Now,” is thought to be about the demise of Swift’s relationship with Joe Jonas, who reportedly dumped Swift over the phone. The track’s intro is twenty-seven seconds long—the supposed length of that breakup call—and, by the time that Swift starts singing in the original version of the track, one gets the sense that she spent the song’s intro reliving that phone call. In the final verse, she gets audibly choked up. Before the release of “Speak Now (T.V.),” I was worried that, if she faked this, it would sound overwrought. Instead, she didn’t even try, and that was somehow worse. On the Eras Tour, we’ve seen Swift recapture old emotions: a video of her voice cracking and her eyes welling up during a performance of “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” went viral. But, without the caught breath in “Last Kiss,” the song feels oddly distant.