Taylor Swift’s Quest for Justice

In the early years of her career, Taylor Swift stepped lightly, transforming from a precocious country musician into a global pop star. She shifted her sound and her image gradually, a strategy that seemed less about allegiance to a particular genre than about personal traditionalism. (She did not start cursing in her music until she was in her late twenties.) Swift has always been a rule-follower—a diligent songwriter with a wholesome image—which made her a kind of renegade in a brash, hypersexualized pop landscape. On “Red,” her fourth album, from 2012, she began dipping a toe into modernity. In the song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” she nodded to the aggressive and trendy sounds of E.D.M., adding a light dubstep drop before the chorus. By most pop standards, it was a subtle flourish, but for Swift it was like an earthquake. In “Treacherous,” she incorporated sexuality into her lyrics for the first time: “I’ll do anything you say / If you say it with your hands.”

On “Red,” Swift also experimented with grander sounds that translated better in arenas, which she had begun to sell out. The album’s opening track, “State of Grace,” is more U2 than Emmylou Harris—a dramatic number with huge drums and echoey electric guitars. Her voice, too, soars above her preferred conversational register. At the end of the song, she offers a bit of doctrine: “Love is a ruthless game / Unless you play it good and right.” As with much of Swift’s music, it seemed like an innocent declaration, but it also carried a threat: play by the rules, she implied, or else. Swift was a moralist in matters of the heart, and once someone broke her trust all bets were off. Anyone who dared to injure her—as many of her romantic interests seemed to do—would be subjected to retaliation in the form of withering lyrics.

Swift’s thirst for justice, in recent years, has carried into business affairs. As a teen-ager, she signed to a small independent label in Nashville called Big Machine, run by an executive named Scott Borchetta. After six albums, she moved to Republic Records, a major label. But as she grew more popular her back catalogue, which Borchetta owned, became more valuable. Swift—a stockbroker’s daughter, who once told her childhood classmates that she would be a financial adviser when she grew up—attempted to buy back the master recordings. In 2019, in a Tumblr post, she described a galling proposal from Borchetta: she could earn back her masters if she returned to Big Machine; for each new album, she would regain control of an old one. (In a statement, Borchetta described the proposal differently: “We were working together on a new type of deal for our streaming world that was not necessarily tied to ‘albums’ but more a length of time.”)

Swift declined the offer, and Borchetta soon sold Big Machine—and the six Swift albums—to one of her enemies, Scooter Braun, a music manager who had handled the career of her longtime adversary Kanye West during the peak of the artists’ feud, in 2016. Even a deft storyteller like Swift couldn’t have dreamed up a betrayal like this. “All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years,” she wrote of Braun. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.” (Braun told Variety, “All of what happened has been very confusing and not based on anything factual,” and he denied bullying Swift, saying, “I’m firmly against anyone ever being bullied. I always try to lead with appreciation and understanding.” He has since sold the catalogue to the Disney family’s private-equity firm, Shamrock Holdings.)

A dauntless strategist, Swift found a satisfying recourse. Last year, she began rerecording the six albums. This past April, she released a new recording of “Fearless,” her sophomore album, and this month she released “Red (Taylor’s Version).” The new recordings are not designed to recast the music. Instead, the records have been dutifully rerecorded note for note, with the intention of supplanting the originals and thereby collapsing their value. It’s an ambitious project that could be pulled off only by someone with Swift’s extensive resources and passionate fan base. And it’s the kind of emotional gesture that Swift lives for: a counterpunch designed to punish her transgressors while fortifying her legacy.

“Red (Taylor’s Version)” has new cover art, featuring an older Swift wearing a page-boy cap that is a demure dusty red. Musically, the album is nearly indistinguishable from the original. Some of the instrumentation is a bit more forceful, like on a recording of a live performance. For the first iteration of “Red,” Swift collaborated with bold-faced pop songwriters such as Max Martin and Shellback. This yielded some of her most beloved songs, including her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Some of the songs, like “Stay Stay Stay,” had the feel of cheesy jingles, and Swift has used this opportunity to make them slightly more sophisticated. Still, the new recording is more a facsimile than an addendum. The album feels a bit like a cherished garment after it’s been through the wash.

If there are revelations to be found on “Red (Taylor’s Version),” they are in its previously unheard bonus tracks, which Swift excavated from her vault. For “Nothing New,” Swift invited the indie-rock darling Phoebe Bridgers to record with her. The song, a downcast acoustic track, sounds more of a piece with the folksy poeticism of Swift’s latest albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” than with “Red.” Swift and Bridgers sing about the passage of time and the inevitability of their irrelevance. “Lord, what will become of me / Once I’ve lost my novelty?” Swift asks. “How can a person know everything at eighteen / But nothing at twenty-two?” Some of the new songs have exhilarating flashes of Swift’s quintessential vitriol, which has faded over time. On “I Bet You Think About Me,” she returns to a favorite subject: the disdain she holds for the pretentious, coddled men she’s dated. “I bet you think about me when you’re out / At your cool indie-music concerts every week,” she sings. “In your house / With your organic shoes and your million-dollar couch.” The album also contains an epic, ten-minute version of “All Too Well”—an addition so momentous that Swift created a high-drama short film to go along with it. On the extended track, she lets her scorn off its leash: “I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age.” Lines that might have sounded gratuitous back then become delicious a decade later.

There is perhaps no performer of the modern era with a more intuitive understanding of pop stardom and its demands. Swift has mastered all of the elements, including songwriting, music licensing, and social media. This year, as part of her catalogue-reissue project, she joined TikTok—an obligatory step for an artist whose fan base straddles the millennial-Gen Z divide. TikTok is known for springboarding new talents and unknown tracks to fame overnight, but it also often resurfaces old songs in strange new ways. “No Children,” a 2002 song by the indie band the Mountain Goats, recently went viral after drawing the attention of young TikTokers dealing with parental divorce. As a marketing strategy, joining TikTok was a shrewd move. Yet the platform runs on chaos and serendipity, and it wasn’t as gameable as Swift might have hoped. In September, as Swift was preparing to reissue “Red,” TikTokers seized on “Wildest Dreams,” a track from her 2014 record, “1989,” and began using it as a backdrop for silly videos in which they slowly zoomed in on their own faces. Sensing the buzz, Swift released her newly recorded version of the song. If it wasn’t her original plan, it must have satisfied at least some of Swift’s intent: using the platform of the future to revisit her past. ♦