Taylor Swift has thanked her fans for inspiring her to remake and reclaim her art.
The ‘You Need to Calm Down’ hitmaker on Friday (12.11.21 released the re-recorded version of her acclaimed 2012 album ‘Red’, and admitted it wouldn’t have been possible if her Swifties hadn’t “emboldened” her.
She wrote on social media: “Just a friendly reminder that I would never have thought it was possible to go back and remake my previous work, uncovering lost art and forgotten gems along the way, if you hadn’t emboldened me.
“Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Tonight we begin again. Red (my version) is out now. (sic)”
The Grammy-winner is re-recording her early albums after Scooter Braun purchased her former record label, Big Machine Label Group, for $300 million, and with it acquired the rights to her back catalogue.
Scooter’s Ithaca Holdings then sold the catalogue to Shamrock Holdings, without offering Taylor the chance to buy her masters.
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The original album boasted 16 tracks, but ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ is an epic 30-tracks long. It includes an extended 10-minute version of ‘All Too Well’.
A short film of the same name written and directed by Taylor will also follow at midnight.
Elsewhere, Phoebe Bridgers features on ‘Nothing New’, Ed Sheeran is on a new duet called ‘Run’, as well as featuring on the new cut of ‘Everything Has Changed’.
Plus, Chris Stapleton is on ‘I Bet You Think About Me’ and Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody is back on ‘The Last Time’.
In a voice note added to the end of the record on Apple Music, the 31-year-old superstar details the theme of heartbreak running throughout ‘Red’, and she felt “healed” after revisiting her past work.
She elaborated: “Musically and lyrically, ‘Red’ resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past.
“Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators.
“And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”
‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ follows April’s ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’, the new recording of her 2008 album.
