FEATURE:
Begin Again: A Modern-Day Pop Genius
Looking Back at Red (Taylor's Version)
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I can’t really do full justice…
to the brilliance of last year’s Red (Taylor's Version), but I wanted to write about it. Swift was in the news last month after Damon Albarn accused of her of not writing her own songs – that she was a collaborator rather than the main source of its creation. She has had a busy month so far. Apart from appearing on a remix of the Ed Sheeran track, The Joker and the Queen, she is appearing on a new charity album:
“Seems Taylor Swift knows all too well how to give fans what they want for Record Store Day. On Wednesday (Feb. 9), Vans announced that the superstar will be included on Portraits of Her, a special charity benefit album for the annual event.
Set to be released in independent record stores on April 23, the 16-track album will raise money for We Are Moving the Needle, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering and supporting female professionals in the recording industry. While it’s unclear whether Swift will be contributing a new song or a re-recorded track to the compilation, she’ll be joined by the likes of Julien Baker, Banks, Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, Girl in Red, K.Flay, Mariah the Scientist, Julia Michaels and Princess Nokia on the tracklist.
“This album celebrates generations of women who have overcome barriers to representation, recognition, and opportunity in the music industry,” said Tierney Stout, Vans’ director of global music marketing, in a statement. “Brands, record labels, musicians and other organizations, including Record Store Day and We Are Moving the Needle, are working together to give today and tomorrow’s female talent more visibility, support and opportunities.”
Emily Lazar, a mastering engineer and founder of We Are Moving the Needle, added, “Women are an incredible asset to the music industry, yet they are underrepresented across the board, but particularly in recording studios. To close the vast gender gap in this industry, we must all work together to empower women on and off stage, behind the music, in the studio, and everywhere else in this business”.
Swift was named Record Store Day global ambassador back in January, and the unnamed song for the charity album isn’t the only surprise she has up her sleeve. The icon also plans to drop an as-yet-unannounced title of her own to mark the 15th anniversary of the holiday for vinyl lovers the world over”.
In 2020, Swift released her ninth studio album, evermore. If that were not enough, she re-recorded and released two of her older albums. A new version of 2008’s Fearless was released earlier last year. 2012’s Red was recontextualised with new addition and wonderful expansion in November. I wonder whether Swift is approaching other studio albums this year. I always feel, like Lady Gaga, she could appear in films. She seems to have this natural ability and gravitas where she could own the big or small screen. Perhaps too busy with music, she is inspiring other artists and stepping out by taking ownership of her studio albums. As this Wikipedia article shows, new producers and personnel came in to give a brilliant Taylor Swift album new dimensions and dynamics:
“Red (Taylor's Version) is the second re-recorded album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on November 12, 2021, through Republic Records. It is a re-recording of Swift's fourth studio album, Red (2012), following her first re-recorded album, Fearless (Taylor's Version), which was released in April 2021. The re-recording venture is Swift's countermeasure against the changed ownership of the masters to her first six studio albums.
The album encompasses re-recorded versions of 20 songs from the Red deluxe edition and Swift's 2012 charity single "Ronan"; the 10-minute-long, unabridged version of "All Too Well"; Swift's own recordings of "Better Man" (2016) and "Babe" (2018), both of which she wrote but gave away to other country artists; and six new "from the Vault" tracks that were intended for the 2012 album. Swift and Christopher Rowe produced most of Red (Taylor's Version), while Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Paul Mirkovich, Espionage, Tim Blacksmith, Danny D, and Elvira Anderfjärd handled the rest. Shellback, Dan Wilson, Jeff Bhasker, Jacknife Lee, and Butch Walker also returned to produce the re-recordings of tracks they had worked on in 2012. Phoebe Bridgers and Chris Stapleton joined the album as guest vocalists alongside original features from Gary Lightbody and Ed Sheeran”.
I would urge people to buy Red (Taylor's Version) on vinyl. Although the album is Swift starting to reclaim her work and take back creative and artistic control, I also think that it gives new life and opportunities to the songs. Although the original Red is a great album, I feel Taylor Swift’s version shows her growth and brings new weight and brilliance to the songs. With stronger instrumentation and production, one has to recommend and respect such a phenomenal achievement! Tracks twenty-two to thirty are denoted as the ‘From the Vault’ tracks, the newly added songs to the re-recording. I have been thinking of a way to commend and write about Swift following the tension and support that followed Albarn’s ill-advised comments about her songwriting. Showing she is among the greatest Pop artists and composers of her generation, Red (Taylor's Version) is spectacular! I wonder whether 2014’s 1989 will be the next album that she re-records. Bringing in collaborators and recording new music videos, it must have been a long and very tiring process. Not showing any fatigue or lack of inspiration, Red (Taylor's Version) is a modern-day Pop pioneer at her peak. The critical reception to the album was hugely positive. Pitchfork discussed the second re-recorded album from Swift:
“This is the Swiftiverse. Is Red (Taylor’s Version) really trying to exist anywhere else? The second of six albums that Swift is remaking from scratch to regain financial and legal control of her catalog, it’s built on the well-founded belief that her fandom will consume anything spun by her hands—even lightly retouched versions of songs that came out less than a decade ago, plus a fistful of contemporaneous unreleased tracks for good measure. Leave it to Taylor to turn a business maneuver into a sweeping mid-career retrospective; leave it to Swifties to receive the songs, the merch, and the short film as gifts, glimpses into their idol’s secret history handed down as rewards for their devotion.
Originally released in 2012, Red was the clear nexus between where Swift’s career started and where it was heading. After a three-album progression away from country, she revealed the extent of her pop ambition, calling in producers Max Martin and Shellback—Swedish heavy-hitters who had sent Britney Spears and P!nk up the charts—to cue the synths and drop the bass. (“Message in a Bottle,” the first song Swift wrote with the pair, is among Red (Taylor’s Version)’s new offerings; its abundant polish nearly makes up for its dearth of personality.) Red was also where she began to seek source material beyond her own biography; the character studies (of Ethel Kennedy on the lightly ditzy “Starlight”; of a Joni Mitchell-esque elder on “The Lucky One”; of a mother who loses her young son to cancer on vault track “Ronan”) point in the direction of folklore, where, years later, the gulf between Swift and her narrators would widen.
Like Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first of Swift’s re-recordings to be released, Red (Taylor’s Version) stays true to the original. Hunting for subtle differences between the old and the new feels like a game of Where’s Waldo?, and sometimes just a test of headphone fidelity. Various instruments are slightly louder or quieter in the mix; a note or two might have been tweaked in the melody of “Sad Beautiful Tragic”; the “wee-ee”s on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” are even more cloying than before. A notable exception to this trend of sameness is the bonus track “Girl at Home,” formerly a prim, strummy ode to girl code, freshly remade with producer Elvira Anderfjärd (a Max Martin signee) as a burbling, bottom-heavy synth-pop joint.
If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. But the real draw for her main audience, who already know Red like the back of their hands, is the new material. Some of it is new only in the sense of being newly attached to this album or newly reclaimed by Taylor: “Ronan” was a one-off charity single in 2012; Little Big Town recorded “Better Man,” a stolen rearview glance on the drive away from toxic love, in 2016; and the venom-laced air kiss “Babe” was released by the country duo Sugarland in 2018. Most anticipated is an extended cut of a classic: “All Too Well,” a Red track with an outsize presence in Swift lore.
A slow-burn account of sunsetting love, long since codified as an exemplar of Swiftian storytelling, the original version of “All Too Well” was the product of Swift and co-writer Liz Rose’s extensive edits to a 10-minute demo. Now, Swift has dug up the lost verses. Not all of them are additive; Swift’s beyond-her-years analysis in the final verse feels disconnected from the in-process pain of the version that we know, and when she opens up the song for its subject’s input (“Did the love affair maim you too?”), she undermines the definitiveness of her own account. The extra bulk dilutes the original’s walloping crescendo, making it harder to locate the emotional climax. Still, it’s surreal to see the stuff of lesser writers’ dreams—“You kept me like a secret/But I kept you like an oath”—abandoned, until now, on the cutting room floor.
Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff; see the garish cheer of “The Very First Night,” the too-obvious hook of “Run” (“like you’d run from the law”). Much more compelling is “Nothing New,” a somber acoustic ballad squarely in the wheelhouse of guest star Phoebe Bridgers, which grapples with the music business’ famously fickle relationship to young women. These same anxieties—about being chewed up, spit out, and replaced—surfaced on “The Lucky One,” but here, instead of projecting them onto another character, Swift inhabits them in her own voice. “Nothing New” was written by Swift in her early 20s, a time when she was deeply scared of alienating her audience. I wonder if she withheld it out of fear that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy—that by exposing her disillusionment, she’d dull her own shine.
Swift has an unfortunate habit of relegating female guests on her songs to the background; just ask Haim, Imogen Heap, the Chicks, or Colbie Caillat. Bridgers, meanwhile, makes off with a full verse and chorus to herself. In light of the song’s subject, this feels significant: By inviting a popular younger artist who has studied her textbook to share her stage, Swift suggests that there’s ample room for them both. But things get eerie on the bridge, when she begins waxing prophetic about the young woman who will eventually take her crown. Trading lines with Bridgers, she sings:
I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream
The kind of radiance you only have at 17
She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me
I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.
Just this year, a 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released her breakout smash, then borrowed liberally enough from Swift to grant her two writing credits—one of them retroactive—on her debut. Swift is too smart not to know that some of her listeners will make this connection. Whatever; she owns it. Ownership is, after all, this project’s raison d’être—ownership of master recordings, but also of personal and artistic history. You have to admire Swift’s pluck in standing so resolutely behind hers. Red, often lauded as Swift’s best album, is not perfect; it contains some of her great masterpieces (“Holy Ground,” “22,” “All Too Well”), but also some duds (while reviewing this record, I got through “Starlight” for maybe the first time since 2012). Red (Taylor’s Version) may be a commercial endeavor first, but that doesn’t mean it lacks an underlying artistic statement: that sometimes we must revisit our past, both the flattering and the less flattering bits, in order to get to our future. Swift won’t have any trouble finding companions for the road”.
I guess Taylor Swift is keen to record new material and another studio album that moves her story and sound forward. As she has this run of six albums that she is taking back into the studio, this is her main focus. This is what CLASH had to opinion when they tackled one of last year’s best albums:
“Listening to Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ is, Clash imagines, the same feeling that parents get when reading books they first read as children to their own offspring. Familiar, comforting but at the same time, tinged with a little sadness now that you're grown up and life isn't as simple as it once seemed.
Swift wrote in journals accompanying 2019’s album ‘Lover’ that vault song ‘Nothing New’ (featuring Phoebe Bridgers) encapsulates the feeling of being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have. No wonder Bridgers was close to tears recording her part; getting older is scary. At the lower end of her vocal range, Swift croons: “How can a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22?”, mirroring the sentiment of another vault song, ‘Winter Sun’ where emotions feel all consuming but you’re, “Too young to know it gets better”.
As adult listeners, we all know that love isn't as dramatic as that 'Red' passion, that Swift describes as "driving a new Maserati down a dead end street". Instead, it's doing the dishes before you're asked to, and cosying up on the settee in comfortable silence at the end of a long hard week.
Now, rather than dressing up like hipsters with your girlfriends to make fun of your exes a la ‘22’, you like each others' Instagram photos and try and fail to find a date in your diary that works for you all to have brunch, ad nauseum. Taylor Swift has bottled the better times and then pressed them onto four vinyl LPs that will get adults everywhere thinking about how Everything Has Changed.
While ‘Red’ was originally a high-energy release about the emotional extremes of young adulthood, the additional ‘vault’ tracks are more understated and reflective in nature. One such song, ‘Run’, was written prior to ‘Everything Has Changed’ with Ed Sheeran - a long-time friend of the American starlet - on the very first day they met. It’s a slow, gentle track about the youthful tendency to make your person your world.
With the new additions, the album is a medley of genres. With an electronic soundscape and pulsing beat evocative of Swift’s 2014 album ‘1989’, the Carly Rae-Jepsen-esque offering, ‘Message In A Bottle’ is about standing on the precipice of a new romance, aware of a mutual attraction. Equally poppy is ‘The Very First Night’. In contrast, ‘I Bet You Think About Me’ featuring Chris Stapleton is a ballad about insecurity, with the instrumental harking back to the singer’s country roots with the harmonica.
Following two years of tremendous global loss - and the gain of two new albums by Swift alongside another re-record, of ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’ - it’s hard not to need a box of tissues at the ready for ‘Ronan’. First of the songs ‘from the vault’, ‘Ronan’ is a response to Finding New Meaning In The Loss Of A Son, a blog set up by Maya Thompson chronicling her son Ronan’s battle with cancer, in the run up to his tragic death.
Tackling another kind of loss, vault track ‘Better Man’ is for anyone who has ever endured abuse or escaped from a toxic relationship; it explores the complex feeling of missing someone who treated you poorly. It’s thematically similar to ‘Babe’, which fans believe is about Swift’s relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, a largely unremarkable song about betrayal.
All the vault songs, however, pale in comparison to the epic ten-minute version of fan-favourite ‘All Too Well’ which concludes our emotional marathon. This character assasination of the 40-year-old actor will go down in history as one of the best breakup songs ever written.
You're in line at the supermarket when you see them, three aisles down. Your breath catches in your throat, it’s like you’ve been punched in the gut. They look the same, a little softer around the edges, perhaps, but time does that; they're not 22 anymore, and neither are you. You walk to your car, autumn leaves crunching underfoot as you comb back through all the memories. As you breathe in the cold winter air you remember it, all too well.
While some see Taylor Swift’s re-recording efforts as a statement of female empowerment, triumphing over those who have wronged her, really it’s much simpler than that. As ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ shows, this is an exercise in catharsis. Leafing back through the storybook of our own formative years, we feel it all”.
I want to end with a review from The Line of Best Fit. Before coming to that, it is worth mentioning the fact Red (Taylor's Version) broke several streaming records. It became the most-streamed album in a day from a female artist on Spotify, with more than 90.8 million global opening-day streams. Swift also became the most streamed woman in a single day—with more than 122.9 million global streams on the platform across her entire discography—and the first woman in Spotify history to amass 100 million streams in a day:
“Red was in parts the sound of Swift kicking at the coat-tails of pop respectability, hyper-aware of the space she inhabited as well as the scenes that would (eventually) embrace her. The last substantial work she would undertake with longtime production collaborator Nathan Chapman, it also marked the beginnings of a two-album relationship with Max Martin and Shellback, which would see Swift through her imperial phase.
The record’s always been a watershed moment in her story - a perfect distillation of Swift's self-aware, lyrically biographical gee-shucks persona set against career-defining songs that ultimately changed the way she’d be perceived. It was obviously going to be the most anticipated part of Swift's quest to re-record the first six of her albums. Thankfully, Red (Taylor's Version) sees Swift delivered a package that balances fan service alongside an insightful documentation of one of modern pop’s best songwriters at a key juncture in her career. In anyone else’s hands, 30 tracks might feel bloated and indulgent, but Swift tempers length with careful curation, sequencing and a respect for what made the original Red such a superb pop record.
As on Fearless (Taylor’s Version), her vocal is subtly bolder and more assertive but otherwise the same songs sound much the same - perhaps a little more organic and autumnal in places, a nod to her lockdown albums (Aaron Desssner and Jack Antonoff are credited as producers across the record). But it’s the tracks from the “vaults” that really surprise: “Nothing New”, a sad lullaby of a duet with Phoebe Bridgers, is among the best things she’s ever made, with a tender back-and-forth bridge between the two women. Along with the Chris Stapleton-featuring “I Bet You Think About Me” - the record’s most country-leading moment - she turns in two songs that equal the original’s collabs with Ed Sheeran and Gary Lightbody. Elsewhere “Better Man” and “Babe” - both Swift-penned and performed originally by Little Big Man and Sugarland respectively - sound energised and full with their creator’s voice leading them. “Message in Bottle” and “The First Night” are A-grade Swift and would fit easily on Red’s follow-up 1989, while a second Sheeran-featuring song “Run” is all the better for its light use of the red-headed Brit’s vocal.
Her ten-minute version of “All Too Well” at the conclusion of the record is as disarming as it is fascinating. An artefact of her songwriting and recording process, it sits neatly alongside to the glimpses of Swift at work we get in Miss Americana, last year's Netflix documentary. While it adds little to the album musically, it plays into the mythology that surrounded Red’s original release, doubling down to an extreme on the drama and emotion. There are more clues than ever about the song's antagonist who shouts “fuck the patriarchy” as he throws his keys to Taylor and charms her father "with self effacing jokes”, “sipping coffee like you were on a late night show." Its inclusion highlights the strengths of the song’s truncated version; the result of some very well-informed artistic choices. The vitriol is dialled back there; Swift understands the intricacies of pop music, retaining choice lines from the seven verses that play out the song’s sadness, shame and regret with perfect pitch”.
The remaining four reissues and re-releases will break streaming records and earn Swift more kudos. Her reputation was one of the world’s most influential and inspiring artists has already been confirmed. Red (Taylor's Version) is an important, extensive and terrific album boasting some of Swift’s best vocals! It is an album I respect greatly – from an artist who does not need to prove herself to Damon Albarn or anyone else. The release of Red (Taylor's Version) marked, perhaps…
TAYLOR Swift’s greatest moment.