THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 29, 2021 91
lead with appreciation and understand-
ing.” 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 rere-
corded note for note, with the inten-
tion 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 exten-
sive resources and passionate fan base.
And it’s the kind of emotional gesture
that Swift lives for: a counterpunch de-
signed to punish her transgressors while
fortifying her legacy.
“
R
ed (Taylor’s Version)” has new
cover art, featuring an older Swift
wearing a page-boy cap that is a de-
mure dusty red. Musically, the album is
nearly indistinguishable from the orig-
inal. Some of the instrumentation is a
bit more forceful, like on a recording of
a live performance. For the first itera-
tion 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 To-
gether.” Some of the songs, like “Stay
Stay Stay,” had the feel of cheesy jin-
gles, and Swift has used this opportu-
nity to make them slightly more so-
phisticated. 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 lat-
est 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 eigh-
teen / 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 ver-
sion 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 proj-
ect, she joined TikTok—an obligatory
step for an artist whose fan base strad-
dles the millennial-Gen Z divide. Tik-
Tok 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 pa-
rental 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 Septem-
ber, 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 back-
drop 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 re-
visit her past.
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
[email protected]
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