Taylor Swift making country music again… kind of.
In a rather ironic turn of events, she has re-released her breakthrough 2008 country album Fearless and it’s awesome.
The record originally spent 35 weeks on the top country albums charts and produced two number one singles, “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me”.
The new version she just released, officially titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version), comes by way of a huge disagreement with her former label. According to Variety, in June of 2019 Scooter Braun (you may know him as Justin Bieber’s manager) bought Big Machine Label Group and acquired all of the assets. This included every part of every song from Taylor’s time signed to the label, which he then sold to an investor.
So, long story short, she couldn’t get any of her music back and she was pissed about it. And how could you blame her? The music she wrote and created that launched her into superstardom in the country world and beyond was gone and there was no way for her to get the rights back.
That’s when she decided to re-record every song from her second studio album, the aforementioned Fearless, with plans to potentially do the same for the rest of the music she lost, as well.
I think it’s pretty cool to see her give a middle finger to Scooter Braun and completely redo most of her entire catalog… pretty country move if you ask me.
She told People she tried to stay as true to the original versions as she possibly could:
“In terms of production, I really wanted to stay very loyal to the initial melodies that I had thought of for these songs. And so we really did go in and try to create a ‘the same but better’ version.
We kept all the same parts that I initially dreamed up for these songs. But if there was any way that we could improve upon the sonic quality, we did. I really did want this to be very true to what I initially thought of and what I had initially written. But better. Obviously.”
She even recorded some songs “from the vault” that were never recorded on the original album, either.
And I’m here to tell you that it’s GOOD. I couldn’t tell you the last time I sat down and listened to a Taylor Swift record, but I thoroughly enjoyed this new project. I think a big part of it is the nostalgia from hearing songs I listened to in High School as an adult now and remembering what life was like back then.
When Taylor first came on to the scene with her self-titled album in 2006, she was almost an overnight sensation. “Teardrops on My Guitar” still hits me where it hurts.
Recently, she even tied a huge record with Dolly Parton as the only artist to top the charts twice with different versions of the same song since she released “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” in February and it went number one on the Billboard Hot Country songs chart.
She was just 18 years old when the album first came out, and now at 31, a lot of life has gone by in between. There’s some great stuff on the internet that gets to that very point, and I have to laugh, because I think a lot of people are going to enjoy this new project solely because of the nostalgia factor:
It’s like a walk down memory lane.
I mean, you haven’t really lived if you didn’t put “White Horse” on the CD player alone in your room and belt it mainly out of spite for what Joe Jonas did to her.
And “Fifteen” for when you realized life happens, it goes on, and it’s okay to not have it all figured out:
And of course, the absolutely iconic “You Belong With Me”.
Tell me you don’t remember every word:
Check this album out even if it’s just for old times’ sake. It will make you feel 16 again, even if just for a few minutes. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad, but it was a blast to listen to and somehow, I remembered the words to almost every song.
Maybe I needed to hear it more as an adult than I did back then…
