It’s over for the doubters: you just can’t argue with Taylor Swift any more. You can’t argue with her fanbase, immaculately devout and mind-bogglingly populous. You can’t argue with her songcraft: masterfully generic in a sonic sense; startlingly distinctive in a lyrical one. You can’t argue with her positive impact on the lives of her devotees. Or on everyone else: it’s estimated that her current Eras tour could contribute around $5bn to the US economy. You can’t argue with the statistics in any arena, in fact. Released only a fortnight ago, the movie version of Eras is already the highest grossing concert film of all time, by a significant margin.
If all this lucrative excellence feels stifling then you could in theory argue with the near-billionaire Swift’s fixation on flogging stuff, including reams of special edition vinyls and endless merch. Yet you can’t really argue with her current bout of newly re-recorded old albums created in response to her ex-label Big Machine selling her masters to music manager Scooter Braun, a man she has accused of “incessant, manipulative bullying”. It’s commercially milkable, of course, but at its core this is a morally upstanding business exercise if ever there was one.
1989 (Taylor’s Version) is the fourth re-recording in her non-chronological release schedule. It was preceded by Speak Now (originally 2010, re-recorded in 2023), Red (2012; 2021) and Fearless (2008; 2021), and Swiftie sleuths muse on the order’s meaning. The jumbled timeline could well have been due to the plagiarism lawsuits that long swirled around 1989’s lead single Shake It Off, but those have now been dropped and Swift is ready to revisit what she called her “very first, documented, official pop album”. That last part is arguable, as Red provided a string of Max Martin-abetted uber-anthems, but it’s true that 1989 was a watershed moment: you could feasibly not know who Taylor Swift was before it. You couldn’t afterwards.
The nuts and bolts of this re-recording will be of interest only to the hardcore contingent – a game of spot the difference that even Swift, who loves to set puzzles for her fans, hasn’t been promoting particularly hard. Like her version of Red, it does not see the return of Swedish superproducer Martin, who helmed the album’s central run of big hitters: Blank Space, Style, Shake It Off, Bad Blood, Wildest Dreams. Instead, Christopher Rowe takes the reins alongside Swift, and the result is a very close match: sometimes bassier, with Swift’s voice richer and more mature yet hardly distractingly so.
For the less obsessed, the release provides a perfect excuse to revisit those monstrously accomplished tracks. Looking back at the zeitgeist-dominating 1989 also helps make sense of that decade in pop. The album was widely read as heavy with 80s references at the time – something confirmed by Swift – but now it actually sounds overwhelmingly representative of the 2010s, a time of harsh, often unbeautiful synthpop that was almost pugilistic in its efficiency.
At least where pop is concerned, we currently live in more thoughtful times – and Swift has managed to retroactively keep up with this shift. Her album re-recordings have all been accompanied by bonus “From the Vaults” tracks – previously unreleased songs from the time of each album’s creation. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) has five: Say Don’t Go is a decent if unremarkable collaboration with the veteran songwriter Dianne Warren, but the other four, co-written with Jack Antonoff (who contributed two songs to the original), turn out to be some of Swift’s best work. After 1989, Antonoff would go on to produce a slew of creative and classy pop by Lana Del Rey, Lorde and St Vincent, and these songs are in that mould: compelling, clever, a lot catchier than standard Antonoff fare but not exactly stone-cold megahits, which was presumably why they were passed over at the time.
The provocatively-titled “Slut!” is a shimmering tale of inappropriate sexual adventure, as Swift channels Lana Del Rey cosplaying a moonlit ingenue. The remaining three are Swift’s speciality: postmortems of relationships that were patently unhealthy but whose legacy still pulses with dashed promise. Now That We Don’t Talk does it with an uncharacteristically cool falsetto chorus and thrumming synths, and features a nice hook about phoning her mum. Suburban Legends is a doomed schooldays romance full of perfect lines (“I broke my own heart ’cause you were too polite to do it”). Is It Over Now? is a barbed and bitter rinsing of an unfaithful ex over sparse electropop, full of echoing drums and an era-specific alien-like vocal sample.
These subtle, interesting songs lost out to brasher, more basic tracks – Welcome to New York, Style – on the original 1989 tracklist, but who’s to say whether their inclusion would have affected Swift’s trajectory? Clearly she made a pretty good call on that front. This carbon copy of her blockbuster album doesn’t rewrite history but adds some instantly treasurable footnotes.
