The Archive (Taylor’s Version)

Illustration by Liz Bolduc.

What do Mary Shelley, George Lucas, and Taylor Swift  have in common? I wish I had a better punchline for this setup, but the answer is that all three artists created rivaling versions of their work: Shelley’s moralizing 1831 revision of Frankenstein, Lucas’s frequent additions and revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy, and now Taylor Swift’s release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version).¹

In Swift’s case, the decision seems more financial than artistic, a result of her public feud with her old label Big Machine. In 2019, the label (whom she signed with at the age of 14) sold the masters of her back catalogue to music manager Scooter Braun rather than to Swift herself; Braun later sold the masters to an investment fund. The dispute over Swift’s masters played out before the eyes of fellow musicians and an adoring fanbase, earning her public support from artists and industry insiders such as Todrick Hall, director Joseph Kahn, and, bizarrely enough, Kanye West, whose own feuds with Swift are complex enough to warrant several articles in their own right. Eventually, Swift announced that she would re-record the material previously held by Big Machine in an effort to assert her own legal and artistic rights over the work. On April 9, 2021, Swift released the first of these albums, an update of her 2008 album Fearless.²

Critically and commercially, Swift’s move to re-record seems like a solid one. The decision places her in a long tradition of musical acts reasserting rights over disputed albums, from Def Leppard to ELO.³ Her vocal defense of her own artistic expression calls to mind strange cases like that of John Fogerty, who was once forced to defend his output as a solo artist against accusations by former label Fantasy Records that his new material sounded too similar to songs he had recorded while fronting Creedence Clearwater Revival.⁴ In any case, fans have been wildly supportive of Swift’s re-recordings, pushing Fearless (Taylor’s Version) to the top of the Apple music charts in both the US and the UK and finding increasingly creative ways to avoid streaming the old Fearless album on platforms like Spotify, where autoplay algorithms will occasionally assert old material alongside the new.

The reasons behind Swift’s success in this particular endeavor are manifold. Most importantly, the album is good. Critics have praised the album’s production and artistic qualities, not just as an update on material that performed well in its original context in 2008, but as a well-conceived album in the current pop-country landscape. There’s also Swift’s large and enthusiastic fanbase to consider. “Swifties,” as Taylor’s fans are called (and which your humble author considers herself a part of), were likely to support any endeavor undertaken by the artist, so great is her star power; and the addition of new “from the vault” tracks ensures fans have fresh material to stream and restream and, occasionally, recommend to hapless social-media users.

Still, we can’t discount Swift’s own prowess as a PR machine. Since 2019’s Lover, her first album since leaving Big Machine, Swift has increasingly connected her artistic output to a series of progressive causes, including LGBT right and Democratic voter turnout in Tennessee.⁵ Chief among these causes has been a certain pop-feminism, most overtly present in songs like “The Man” but also threading through a great deal of her work in a way that cleverly (and indeed, accurately) connects Taylor’s struggles against a large, male-dominated music industry to a broader conversation about gendered oppression and misogyny. To support Taylor, Swift all but tells us, is to stand up for women artists everywhere.

All of this leaves us with a lingering question, however. What are we to do with an artist whose work exists in multiple editions? This is hardly a new question in scholarly circles, where we must often decide which Frankenstein or Great Expectations or even which translation of the Bible to teach or cite. In Swift’s case, this decision may be less tricky than it initially seems. This is hardly a “Han shot first” situation, like George Lucas’s infamous revisions to Star Wars that can entirely alter the flow and interpretation of key scenes—nor is there any indication that the original Fearless will be made unavailable to consumers, as the original Star Wars releases have been. At first blush, Taylor’s Version isn’t so different from the original Fearless. Indeed, Swift seems to have taken great pains to reproduce the country twang which defined the original Fearless, and which Swift had largely buried as she moved towards pop. The largest change, beyond the addition of a few new songs at the end of the album, is in production quality. Removed from the “loudness war” that 2008 still very much belonged to, Taylor’s Version displays a more nuanced, normalized level of sound that allows the listener to pick out more discrete instrumentation and the particulars of Taylor’s voice and lyricism.⁶ It’s a familiar album made better, and for that, fans are grateful.

Still, as much as Swift tried to sound like her 18-year-old self, she simply isn’t 18 anymore. At 31, Swift has a fine control over her voice that didn’t exist in her early work. This is a more experienced singer imitating a less experienced one, and you can hear it. More importantly, this is a more experienced Taylor imitating a younger, more naive self; Taylor’s richer timber is accompanied by a deeper layer of life experience, imbuing the once wide-eyed confessions of a teenager with a touch of irony and sentimentality. “Fifteen” was once a sisterly letter of advice to high schoolers only slightly younger than herself; now, it conveys a post-folklore sense of heartbreak, growth, and reconciliation.

More than a mere re-recording, Taylor’s Version is like commentary on an old personal diary. There’s a palimpsestic quality to some of these songs—the aforementioned “Fifteen,” for example, or “You Belong with Me,” which affects a girl-next-door quality that now long-time megastar Taylor Swift simply can’t embody to the same degree—which inevitably complicates any attempt to critique and interpret. Who do we position as the speaker of “White Horse?” Is it a teenage Swift freshly disillusioned with a would-be Prince Charming? Or is it an adult Swift who, as she professes in 2020’s “Invisible String,” has long given up grinding axes with old heartbreaks? The “Taylor” of Taylor’s Version is in fact two people, the lyrics and musical sensibility of a younger Swift fused with the performance and intonation of an older. There’s a bittersweetness to this album that could not exist before, inflected by the entirety of Swift’s life and colored by the very legal dispute that led to the re-recording. For long-time Swifties this is a delicious quality, but where does it leave the critics?

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to leave readers with advice on which version of Fearless is the “correct” one to listen to, to interpret, to enjoy. As a Swiftie myself and someone with some awareness of the ethical dimensions that underwrote Taylor’s Version, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend the re-recording first and foremost. The artist Taylor Swift is very much present in a way that Mary Shelley isn’t, and I believe her wishes matter. Still, Swift will be fine whether or not you choose to stream the old Fearless, and there’s no denying the charm of the old Fearless’s production values and teenage sincerity, even if you were never part of the high-school girl demographic it was marketed to. Maybe it’s best to just embrace the increasing weirdness of Swift’s career, the inevitable bifurcation of herself as an artist that will result from these re-recordings. The archive deepens; the world listens; the Taylors multiply, and perhaps we multiply in turn.

1. James O’Rourke, “The 1831 Introduction and Revisions to Frankenstein: Mary Shelley Dictates Her Legacy,” Studies in Romanticism 38 (Fall 1999): 365–85; Brendan Nystedt, “From a Certain Point of View,” Contingent, Dec. 10, 2019.
2. Kirsten Spruch, “A Timeline Of What Happened After Scooter Braun Acquired Taylor Swift’s Big Machine Catalog,” Billboard, Nov. 17, 2020.
3. “Taylor Swift wants to re-record her old hits after ownership row,” BBC, Aug. 22, 2019.
4. Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. (92-1750), 510 U.S. 517 (1994).
5. Abby Aguirreby, “Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself,” Vogue, Aug. 8, 2019.
6. “The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse,” NPR, Dec. 31, 2009.