Taylor Swift's 1989: What's new on Taylor's Version and why has she re-recorded it? (2024)

Taylor Swift has delighted fans with a re-recorded version of 1989, the best-selling album of her career, along with five unheard songs from those sessions.

The demand to hear "Taylor's version" of the 2014 album caused technical problems on some streaming services, Swifties reported on social media.

It's the latest in a string of re-recordings by Swift, who wants to take back ownership of her old material.

Of the extra songs, one called "slu*t!" tackles her reputation at the time.

Another, titled Is It Over Now?, includes lyrics about calling an ex-boyfriend a "lying traitor", and has led to fevered speculation about who she's referring to.

The original album turned Swift into a bona fide superstar, winning the Grammy Award for album of the year and spawning hits like Shake It Off, Blank Space and Bad Blood.

Her ongoing project to revisit and reclaim her work started after music mogul Scooter Braun bought the rights to her past recordings in 2019.

The latest reconstruction dropped at 05:00 BST on Friday, and eager fans claimed, external at one stage it "broke and crashed Apple Music and Spotify".

In 2014, Taylor said she had recorded more than 100 songs for 1989 - so the relative scarcity of vault tracks is intriguing.

Whereas previous re-recordings have featured full discs of bonus material, this album gets just five new additions: "slu*t!", Say Don't Go, Now That We Don't Talk, Suburban Legends and Is It Over Now?

As a whole, they feel like dry runs for the songs that made the cut. The melodies aren't as crisp, the lyrics aren't as sharp. Suburban Legends has a particularly clunky line about letting a partner's indiscretions slide "like a hose on a slippery plastic summer".

"slu*t!" has piqued fans' interest for its title alone - who might she be talking about? No-one, it turns out.

The song is thematically similar to Blank Space, commenting on the media's portrayal of Taylor's relationships: "But if I'm all dressed up / They might as well be lookin' at us / And if they call me a slu*t / You know it might be worth it for once."

The best of the new tracks is Is It Over Now. An angrier take on 1989's philosophical break-up songs, it calls back to the Harry Styles snowmobile incident (see also, Out Of The Woods) then, deliciously, references the "Sad Taylor Boat" meme, external - a photo of Taylor fleeing a vacation alone after the couple split up.

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She goes on to refer to an ex as a "lying traitor", accuses them of parading their new relationships in public, and notes that every new girlfriend looks like her. "If she's got blue eyes, I will surmise that you'll probably date her."

Many fans have surmised that Styles is the ex in the song.

In an accompanying letter to fans, Swift said that while making the original album at the age of 24, she wanted to "completely reinvent myself", which included silencing "the voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman".

She wrote: "You see - in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slu*t shaming - the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today.

"The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt."

So she "swore off" hanging out with male friends, dating, flirting, "or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era".

That just led to speculation about her sexuality, though, she wrote. "If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn't sensationalize or sexualize that - right? I would learn later on that people could and people would."

The Telegraph called it an "impeccable remake of her best album - with five clever new songs".

In a five-star review, Neil McCormick wrote, external: "Without its five new tracks, this album would be almost indistinguishable from the 2014 version, which marked the then 24-year-old's shift from country sweetheart to mainstream pop idol, and is her best album to date."

She "has gone out of her way to match the tones and inflections of her younger self, and on the new tracks, "the timbre of Swift's voice has become noticeably deeper and richer, and her singing glides a little more smoothly than it did before", he added.

The Guardian's critic Rachel Aroesti agreed, external: "The result is a very close match: sometimes bassier, with Swift's voice richer and more mature yet hardly distractingly so."

Her five-star review said the release proved "it's over for the doubters: you just can't argue with Taylor Swift any more".

The Times' Will Hodgkinson also offered five-stars, external for the new, extended recording of "her first pure pop album", calling it "a triumph".

"Now 1989 comes with a faithful new rendering and a handful of unheard tracks from the vaults, which is where the interest is here. slu*t! is a classic Swiftian love song, winsome but troubled and not entirely serious."

The new version of 1989 made Financial Times critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney change his mind, external about the importance of Swift's "magnum opus".

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This is the latest part of an ongoing campaign to regain control of her work after Braun bought her former label Big Machine.

At the time, she accused him of "bullying" and attempting to "dismantle" her "musical legacy", adding: "This is my worst case scenario."

He then sold her master tapes on to an investment fund.

She has been re-recording and re-releasing her first six albums one by one as "Taylor's Versions".

Re-recording them means that under the term of her new record deal, Swift owns the rights to these recordings.

The first three, Fearless, Red and Speak Now, all went to the top of the UK album chart, with the latter arriving in July. Now, only two others are still to be re-released - Taylor Swift and Reputation.

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