Featured Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant
Drop everything now! Taylor Swift has unleashed her new album rerecording, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). In her recent Instagram post, Swift celebrated reclaiming her third studio album with the caption, ‘‘It’s here. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours. It’s an album I wrote alone about the whims, fantasies, heartaches, dramas, and tragedies I lived out as a young woman between 18 and 20.’’
Now, at 33 years old, Speak Now has officially become hers, once again. With the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), and now Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift is officially halfway through all of her re-recordings.
The 22-track project includes reinventions of the 16 songs Swifties have come to know and love, plus 6 new songs from The Vault, including “Castles Crumbling,” which features Paramore’s Hayley Williams, who will be accompanying Taylor on the UK leg of the Era’s tour.
When this album was initially released in 2010, Taylor, who was somewhere between 18 and 20 years old at the time, was experiencing “the most emotionally turbulent [ages] of a person’s life,” she wrote in a prologue included in the physical vinyl copies of the re-release.
The prologue continues on to reflect on those “turbulent” times, including the infamous Kanye mic-grab and invasions of privacy, while also expressing appreciation for the album that “catapulted my career to new realms of success.”
Completely self-written, these songs originally gave Taylor an opportunity to express everything she wanted to say but felt she couldn’t in just words. Most notably, her infamous track 5, “Dear John,” the supposed response to John Mayer, which she refers to as “my most scathing.”
The album also features “Better Than Revenge.” Upon its initial release, some fans expressed disappointment with Taylor’s disempowering choice of words in the song’s original lyrics, ‘‘She’s better known for the things that she does / On the mattress, whoa.” Addressing the problematic lyrics with The Guardian, she said “I was 18 when I wrote that. That’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realize no one can take someone from you if they don’t want to leave.”
Although other fans hoped and rooted for the original lyrics to return in ‘‘Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version),’’ having 13 years to reflect, Swift has updated the lyrics in the rerelease to, “He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches, whoa.”
Older and now more self-assured, Taylor has opened The Vault to resurrect six songs that she is now ready to share, and fans are more than excited to listen to these songs that once upon a time didn’t make the album.
Usually, in her songs, Swift is the one finding love, and her fans listen in awe, wishing they had a love like hers. With ‘‘When Emma Falls in Love’’, a vault track with a heartfelt rom-com feel to it, Swift puts a new twist to her classic ‘‘falling in love’’ trope.
Different from ‘‘Enchanted’’ and ‘‘Sparks Fly’’, songs in which Swift is the one enchanted to meet someone and wants to meet them in the pouring rain, in this new track, she isn’t the one falling in love, but the wishful observer in someone else’s love story instead.
In the song, Taylor tells the story of Emma falling in love with a boy, having doubts about love, and changing the world of whoever falls in love with her. Swift is a master when it comes to crafting fairytale-esque love songs with lyrics like, ‘‘When Emma falls in love, it’s all on her face / Hangs in the air like stars in outer space / When Emma falls in love, she disappears’’
Taylor ends her prologue with “I consider this music to be, along with your faith in me, the best thing that’s ever been mine.” Now the album is truly hers and ours.