After signing to Big Machine Records in 2004, Taylor Swift released six studio albums that all went number one on the Billboards 200s. Following her massive successes with Big Machine Records, Swift decided to leave the record label in 2018, which sparked a chain of feuds between her and Scooter Braun, the man who purchased her masters to the six albums and sold them for 300 million dollars.
Without the masters and rights to her first six studio albums, Swift announced in 2019 that she would be rerecording these albums—an attempt at reclaiming power and ownership to her songs. The first re-recorded album is “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” which was released on April 9, 2021.
From the viewpoint of a dedicated Swiftie who has been an avid fan of her music since the original Fearless era, I was ecstatic to hear that Taylor had chosen to release “Fearless” first. I was even more excited when I found out that the re-recording would also include six unreleased songs that didn’t make the original cut.
What makes “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” so special is the quality of each song. Listening to the reimagined production on each track of this album was an otherworldly experience for me. For starters, songs like “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” have louder guitar riffs and much more prominent sounding drums than the original. Not to mention how Swift’s mature voice also shines through on this record as she’s now able to hold higher notes and emphasize different words throughout the song.
In tracks like “Forever & Always,” we can hear the maturity of Swift’s vocals stand out toward the end of the track. She’s able to further inflect her vocals when she sings the final “always,” and this is complemented by an epic-sounding guitar riff in the instrumentals.
Similarly, in songs like “The Way I Loved You,” Swift traded the beginning guitar strum instrumentals to a set of bold drum beats that progressively get louder as she sings, “He is sensible and so incredible / And all my single friends are jealous.”
It’s the little details like these that make it close to the original—if not, even better.
The second reason why I love the re-recording is because of the unreleased songs, or as Swift likes to call them, “songs from the vault.” One of my personal favorites from the vault is “You All Over Me,” featuring Maren Morris, a song that describes the feeling of being unable to move on from a lover. In this track, Swift woefully sings, “Lost tears, swore that I’d get out of here / But no amount of freedom gets you clean / I’ve still got you all over me” as Maren Morris harmonizes with her in the background vocals. This slow track brings Swift back to her country roots while fusing in pop elements with its production.
The third reason why I’m obsessed with the rerecording is its nostalgia. Given the fact the original version of “Fearless” released almost 13 years ago, I’ve had an abundant amount of time to grow up with these songs and insert a handful of them into my everyday playlists. One song in particular that made me feel the most nostalgic is “The Best Day,” a love song Taylor wrote about her mother. Growing up with a single mom, I learned to dedicate this song to my mother and related to lyrics like “I don’t know who I’m going to talk to now at school / But I know I’m laughing in the car ride home with you.” Though more than a decade has passed since I first listened to this track, it still hits harder than ever now that I’m 17 coming up on 18.
