Musicas original recordings of Taylor Swift would always be better

In movies, one of the main rules on time travel is: do nothing that can break the continuous spacetime. Plots that move between past, present, and future emphasize the fragility of choices. In 2021, Taylor Swift He began to build an alternative reality by disassembling his first six studio albums and reusing them in an extensive rewriting process to recover possession of his music. The question came to be, “What if we could redo it all over again – but even bigger?”

With the support of a fan base willing to go to Earth’s ends with her, Swift faced a universe of boundless possibilities. She was not the first artist to try to recover the possession of her songs by rewriting everything from scratch – but was the first to do it on a monumental scale. It was more than just having a catalog full of records that defined times. Those songs have become weapons in what she considers to be the struggle of her life.

In 2019, his former label, Big Machine, sold the original recordings of his first six albums to Scooter Braunwhich later resold them to the Investment Fund Shamrock Holdings. At that moment, Swift could not predict that the cycle would close with Shamrock selling the albums back to her. She only saw red

“My musical legacy is about to fall into the hands of someone who tried to destroy him”Said Swift when the news of the initial sale came to light in 2019.

The rewrites began as a mission designed to devalue the original catalog and show that the true value of those songs resided on it. She added the songs from Vault. Then came “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)”. Then the ERAS TOUR It took everything to a new explosive level.

In the end, Swift was happy, and now he owns all the songs he has already released. But the revelation of the third act is that the original recordings would always be better than their counterparts in Taylor’s Version. Every detail of those releases tells the story of the legacy she feared losing when her catalog ended up in the wrong hands. And every small change made in the rewrites rewrite its narrative.

Some changes were structural, but mainly strategic. When Fearless (Taylor’s Version) was released as the first album of the re -recording project, was accompanied by the song “If this was a movie (Taylor’s Version)”which appears as the fifth song in EP The More Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The original version of the song had been released two years after Fearless. With this project, Swift reordered time simply by reorganizing the tracklist.

As far as we know, the change did not cause any multidimensional collapse – but yet it was something different, and not insignificant to an artist who dedicates himself to the order of songs on his albums. That was Taylor’s Version. It established the pattern of what these rewritten albums could be. Swift was able to restructure, reorganize and revise the past as he wanted, with a perspective that only won years after the original release of these albums.

“If this was a movie” It is the only song of the Deluxe edition of Speak Now that credits a co -author: Martin Johnsonfrom the band Boys like girls. When Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) It was released, this bonus track was omitted and Swift stated:

“I wrote Speak Now completely alone, between 18 and 20 years old. ”

In 2010, she composed the album on her own to prove that no external force was responsible for her success.

“The songs that came up during this period of my life were marked by brutal honesty, diarTeistic confessions without filters and wild nostalgia”she said.

“It’s a tale about maturing, stumbling, flying, falling … and surviving to tell you”.

And even if that unique co-authorship credit never diminished her, it was a loose tip-and she made a point of tieing her.

Despite all his discourse on brutal honesty and confessions without filter, Swift could not resist the temptation to “clean” some things on the way. The most notable change happened in “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)”. The new version rewrite the sentence:

“She’s Better Known for the Things That She Does On The Mattress.” (“She is better known for the things she does on the mattress.”)

Although relatively harmless for the time, the phrase was destroying the image of the “sweet country girl”. But its removal also erased an important context to understand Swift’s legacy with regard to feminism and misogyny – an aspect of its narrative that has inspired gender courses at universities. Maybe today this doesn’t seem so relevant, but at one point that was her truth.

In Red (Taylor’s Version)Swift did the opposite. The 10 -minute version of “All Too Well” I had much more to say – no less. It is still discussed if she really wrote the verse “Fuck the Patriarchy” at that time or if that was like mentally redoing a fight with better answers, long later. Bringing the future to the past would be cheating? Perhaps. Swift was inventing the rules as he advanced.

When Max Martin and some of the original producers of Red and 1989 They did not return, she herself re -recorded their contributions with Christopher Rowe and Jack Antonoff. But, just like in Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)the sometimes confusing production choices have buried much of the intense emotion of the original versions.

It can be argued that this is not so important. The original versions still exist after all. Now fans can create playlists by combining their favorite tracks. However, until Swift was able to repurchase his songs, the idea was that there would be no need to return to the originals.

However, from FearlessAs her sound became more complex, it became visibly more difficult to recreate the moment with each new relaunch. Her voice changed as much as she herself. The forced country accent is gone. There is an emotional distance evident throughout the revised catalog – a distance between the melodrama of memories and the contained filter with which it sees them today.

As someone who communicates with his fans through hidden clues and enigmatic messages, Swift knows how much the apparently insignificant small details matter. She admitted this by revealing that, at the moment, has less than 25% Reputation (Taylor’s Version) recorded. “THE Reputation It was a very specific album of that moment of my life, and I always crashed when I tried to redo it ”she said. “It’s the only album among the first six I thought could not be improved when redone. The excerpt from “Look What you made me (Taylor’s Version)” that appeared in an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale Prove your point. It’s just a glimpse, but enough to justify the need for an orijai board to contact the ancient Taylor. Only she could do it right.

There is undeniable specificity in the way Swift conveys emotion on all your albums. It is evident when she is striving too hard – and also when she is not striving enough. You can hear this in the deepest grooves of the original discs. You can feel the absence of this in rewrites.

Swift’s greatest strength as an interpreter is that when she sings something, you tend to believe her. That’s what made Reputation so personal. The fact that in that phase of her career, she was having a hard time making people believe her, was a key part of the album. How can she access the feeling of being the most hated person in the world again – when is now undoubtedly one of the most beloved? And why would she do that?

THE ERAS TOUR It was the only place where the line between the original recordings and Taylor’s Versions simply did not exist. The audience shouted back the songs that most meant to them – and everything was the same. Some only got to know Swift’s music a long time after being considered “betrayal” to hear the “stolen versions”, as fans call the originals. Emotions that are already worn out can be completely new to them. This is their version. Others have lived with these lyrics for years – and know exactly what is missing when they hear the new versions in the car or headphones.

In the movies, this would be the moment when the credits would start to rise, and Swift Storage: “Nothing’s Gonna Change, Not for Me And You”. What version do you hear?

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