November 2021 - Music

Album of the Month (In My Opinion - Year!) RED (Taylor's Version) By Taylor Swift

"Red (Taylor's Version)" is the next album in Swift's mission to re-record her first six records, a plan that she announced in 2019 after Scooter Braun's Ithaca Holdings LLC acquired Big Machine Label LLC, which owned Swift's catalog. Braun eventually sold those maters for over $300 million, Variety reported in November 2019.

The upcoming album comes on the heels of the album "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," which Swift released in April, and "Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version)," which the singer released as a single in September. 

Swift announced that "Red (Taylor's Version)" would be her next re-recorded album in June, later announcing the album's tracklist in August. It includes 30 songs, 20 of which are re-recordings of songs from "Red (Deluxe Edition)." There's also a smattering of new "from the vault" tracks that feature artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Stapleton, and Ed Sheeran, as well as a 10-minute version of Swift's iconic ballad "All Too Well."

The 10-minute “All Too Well” also contains a line we hadn’t heard before: “You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath.” That is a bar. If a lesser writer wrote those words, you would probably never hear the end of it. If I wrote that, I would tell everyone I knew. Swift wrote that and left it on the cutting-room floor.

Songwriter Liz Rose, who collaborated with Swift on “All Too Well” and some of the brightest spots of her early work, said in a 2014 interview that she acted more like an editor. The OG “All Too Well” is better for the editing: focused, sturdy, sublime.

I was anxious that the 10-minute “All Too Well” would be bloated. Self-editing is generally a good idea. It always pays off. The risk of Red (Taylor’s Version) was playing with the legacy of an album and a song that became larger than life. Here are some drafts is a move few writers can get away with. But now we are hearing these drafts, it’s still on Swift’s terms, in accordance with the careful ways she has turned her life into text. The fictional version of Swift in the short film is an author. At the end, we see her at her own book launch, and no other framing could be so apt or telling. With the rerelease of this pivotal record, Swift has once again made a complicated story her own.