In re-recording her back catalogue, Taylor Swift is feeling the fear – and doing it anyway

In 2021 she has gone even further. She is re-recording her first six albums to regain control of her music and her musical legacy. The new recordings will, she hopes, make the original albums almost obsolete.

What brought this on was fury that her former label Big Machine sold, without her consent, the master rights of her catalogue to entrepreneur Scooter Braun, who then sold them to a private investment fund for an estimated $300m.

Her action is on a par with George Michael taking his record company Sony Music Entertainment to the High Court in London in October 1992 over alleged inequality of earnings. He lost the case. Taylor appears to be winning in the court of public opinion.

The first of the new recordings is Fearless (Taylor’s Version). This expanded, 1hr 45min version of her 2008 sophomore album that sold 12 million copies has 26 songs, among them six unreleased tracks. The listener could be forgiven for thinking that one of the new songs ‘Mr Perfectly Fine’, written, rumour has it, about her ex Joe Jonas, is now about Braun, a man she alleges bullied her for years. “Hello Mr Casually Cruel, Mr Everything Revolves Around You… he goes about his day, forgets he even heard my name,” she sings.

Fearless (Taylor’s Version) brings a new context to the songs she wrote as a teenager – though its theme of a young woman on the cusp of maturity dealing with the trials of heartbreak and betrayal can sometimes make for a surreal listen. On ‘Fifteen’, the 31-year-old is singing about life having greater things “than dating the boy on the football team/but I didn’t know it at 15”.

While ‘Hey Stephen’, written in 2007 about her crush on Stephen Barker Liles – from the American country duo Love and Theft who she toured with – will certainly be a surreal listen for Stephen because he is now married with two kids.

On ‘White Horse’, the now-grown-up Taylor sings about hoping to find “someone someday, who might actually treat me well”. ‘You Belong with Me’ seems a little out of sync for the more enlightened times we live in. The track has Swift slightly dissing her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend: the music she listens to, her clothes (“she wears short skirts/I wear T-shirts”).

Lest we forget, when singer Joe Jonas broke it off by phone with Taylor in 2008, and began dating actress Camilla Belle, she wrote ‘Better Than Revenge’. It included the lines that would get her almost cancelled if she sang them now, as feminists could argue the lyrics come under the category ‘slut-shaming’: “She’s an actress/She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

I imagine she will change the lyrics to this when she re-records the 2010 album Speak Now.

There are some great moments on the album. The Best Day, a song she wrote to celebrate her mother Andrea on her birthday here has a new, more powerful meaning, as three years ago Andrea was diagnosed with cancer.

Closing the album, the previously unreleased ‘Bye Bye Baby’ has the star in reflective mood: “It wasn’t just like a movie.”

Born December 13, 1989, in a little town called Wyomissing, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Swift felt isolated and unpopular at high school. She was considered weird and awkward, an ugly duckling even.

One day she asked some of her peers at school if they would like to go shopping. One by one, they told her they had something to do. When she got home, her mother took her to the local mall anyway. It was there, so the story goes, that she saw all the girls who had rejected her offer. Taylor’s heart sank. Her mother scooped her up and drove her to a bigger mall, 45 minutes away.

The positive to her childhood exclusion was that it pushed her towards writing about inner pain with country-pop songs.

“When you’re dealing with something like loneliness or confusion or rejection or frustration, those emotions are so jumbled up in your head,” she has said. “For me, the only way to condense them down into one thing is to write a three-and-a-half-minute song about it.

“I first started writing songs because I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to. Songwriting for me just started out as therapy.”

She performed at the local theatre when she was nine. At 12, her mother, who was a schoolteacher, took her to Nashville with her demo tape of Dolly Parton and Faith Hill covers, looking for a record deal. Two years later, her father, who worked for Merrill Lynch, relocated to its Nashville branch so she could have the best chance of becoming a country singer. She was offered a development deal by a record label.

In 2006 her self-titled album was released, having only been discovered the previous year. She now has sales of over 200 million records internationally.

The one-time twee country singer with ringlets in her hair singing about teen angst has transformed herself many times, most significantly in the last year.

Released in July 2020 (less than a year after her seventh studio album, Lover), Folklore was a total surprise. Not just because it came out of the blue, but more that the songs – produced by The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner – were like nothing she had done before.

It was sparse and sombre, moody, raw; and beautiful. ‘Epiphany’, a war song about her grandfather Dean landing on Guadalcanal beach in 1942, could have been written by PJ Harvey. It sounded like a lo-fi indie album.

Superstars who have sold over 200 million records are not supposed to make albums like that. It was called her quarantine album, meaning something she made in the time of a pandemic. But there was something more going on than viruses. This shift was even more obvious with the next album, Evermore, released just three months later.

Produced again by Dessner (with contributions from Haim, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn), she was creatively unbridled, and unburdened. Here were 15 songs that you could never imagine her writing or recording. “I haven’t met the new me yet,” she sang on Happiness. On the title track she sang with Bon Iver; on ‘No Body, No Crime’ with Haim.

You don’t have to have a degree in psychology to see what inspired this marked departure from her musical past. The transformation began in earnest when she stood up for her rights as an artist against her first record company in 2019 — although many feel it started well before that. The public and toxic row with Kim and Kanye West in 2016 also played its part in empowering her. It brought about 2017’s dark album Reputation and world tour, featuring 80-foot serpents crawling along the stage – Kanye had dubbed her a snake.

The most fascinating part in all this is what Taylor Swift’s next album will be like...