![]() ![]() She wrestles with change on “Nothing New,” an alt-rock duet with Phoebe Bridgers contemplates fate on a wistful pop song produced by Max Martin and Shellback (“Message in a Bottle”) and gets the final, piercing word on “I Bet You Think About Me” featuring Chris Stapleton, penned after a high-profile breakup in 2011. ![]() The hot-blooded breakup anthems you know and love are still there (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” are two), but the new, full collection paints an even richer portrait of heartbreak. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.” Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. “Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote in a letter to fans. But just as she played with the traditions and conventions of country music on her early albums, Swift uses the nostalgia of 1989 not to look back, but to move ahead.Īfter rerecording her 2008 album Fearless as part of a sweeping effort to regain control of her master tapes-or at least create new ones-Taylor Swift presents Red (Taylor’s Version), an expanded take on her 2012 blockbuster that features nine never-before-released songs written in the same era as the original. Swift didn’t exactly grow up with the synthesized, ’80s-inspired sounds that producers like Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder, and future bestie Jack Antonoff help her create here as the album’s title reminds you, she wasn’t even born until the decade was ending. Like Shania Twain’s Come On Over or even Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, 1989 is an instance in which an artist deliberately defies expectations and still manages to succeed. “Blank Space” even manages to make light of her gravest and most well-protected subject: Taylor Swift. And where she may have taken things personally in the past, now she’s just trying to have fun (“Shake It Off”). So while “Welcome to New York” is her way of letting everyone know that she’s at least momentarily done with country music and Nashville and the constrictions they put on her image and sound, it’s also a song about turning your eye outward and surrendering to the possibilities only a city like New York can offer. Where 2008’s Fearless and Speak Now take their dramas to Shakespearean heights, 1989 celebrates a newly liberated life of flings (“Style”), weekend getaways (“Wildest Dreams”), and the kind of confidence a younger Taylor Swift was too passionately involved to grasp. Musically, it wasn’t just her embrace of big beats and shiny surfaces, but a sense of lightness and play as well. On 1989, Swift did away with the idea of ratios entirely-just launched them into the ocean, and went all the way. She’d already started adjusting the ratio of country to pop on 2010’s Speak Now and 2012’s Red, working with Swedish superproducers Max Martin and Shellback on the latter. Nearly a decade later-and at the tail end of a 2023 in which her every move seems to have determined pop-cultural weather-it’s weirdly easy to forget that in 2014, she was still approaching (nah, engineering) an inflection point in her life and career, reintroducing herself (at just 24) as the all-conquering, planet-like presence we know today. It’s not just that any one of the newly uncovered songs here is more than strong enough to have been included (or strong enough to have launched the career of a less prolific artist) it’s that, even on material previously deemed inessential, Swift sounds comfortable bordering on imperious-like she’d been making lush, montage-ready pop music all along. I can’t believe they were ever left behind.”įrom “Now That We Don’t Talk” (on which, wowee zowee, she sings, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht/With important men who think important thoughts”) to “Say Don’t Go” to “Is It Over Now?”, one gets a real feel for the ferocity and focus with which she was writing at the time, a new audience in sight. ![]() “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. ![]() “The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways,” she wrote on Instagram. When Taylor Swift announced that 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was finally seeing release, she mentioned that, of all the albums she’s faithfully rerecorded in her quest to retake her master tapes, this one was special. ![]()
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