Review Summary: An admirable and very intimate effort that will be extremely rewarding to her most devoted fans.
The story of
Taylor's Version and how it began treks back to 2019 when Scooter Braun, a big-time music manager and apparent enemy of Swift, purchased the Big Machine label for three hundred million dollars – along with it acquiring the rights to her first six albums. According to Swift, Braun timed leaks of sensitive information, bullied her through social media, and used Kanye West and Justin Beiber as pawns against her. Taylor, who attempted to buy her music back, has stated that she never felt like she was given a real chance to do so. All of this led to feelings far beyond that of losing a bidding war; to Taylor, it was personal not only because the rights to
Taylor Swift (2006),
Fearless (2008),
Speak Now (2010),
Red (2012),
1989 (2014), and
Reputation (2017) belonged to someone else, but because that person just happened to be a man who bullied and intimidated her for years. Swift summed it up as her "worst case scenario" and "worst nightmare".
Who exactly will get the last laugh remains to be seen. Since 2021, Taylor has been hard at work re-recording her intellectual property, and has already released her own versions of
Fearless,
Red and as of today
Speak Now – all of which she owns (insert "Mine" joke here). Not unlike her current "Eras" tour, it feels like something of a victory lap for an artist who at thirty four years old is already in the top twenty five selling artists
of all-time. The actual re-recorded songs sound, for the most part, the same as their predecessors. That's largely the point, as her aim is to essentially reclaim those songs as they were. Subtle differences can be found by the hardcore Swiftie or discerning ear; minor changes in inflection or emphasis, along with slight variations in production, do (obviously) exist – no matter how closely the originals were retraced. These sporadic occurrences are unlikely to influence your opinion of the tracks one way or another, though; for all intents-and-purposes, it's another day at the office for Ms. Swift just as it was when she released her versions of
Fearless and
Red.
What gives these albums most of their value, at least for the majority of consumers, is the "From The Vault" tracks – songs that existed from each LP's recording session, but missed the cut for the final tracklist. That's why
Red (Taylor's Version) was a far more worthwhile endeavor for fans than
Fearless (Taylor's Version), because
Red's "From The Vault" tracks felt like crucial puzzle pieces missing from the original album, whereas their counterparts on
Fearless sounded like the b-sides that they were. That isn't to say that Swift made any poor decisions with her re-recording of
Fearless; if anything, it's proof that she got
Fearless' tracklist right the first time and
Red – which was notoriously eclectic and perhaps even a little bloated – wrong. However, there are numerous considerations to make that influence how the "From The Vault" songs factor in. Take for instance that 2012's
Red was indeed (and maybe still is) Swift's most sonically diverse record; what that does is create a much wider range of potential sounds for her
vault tracks to fit into. Anything with vague country, pop, synth, R&B, or rock influence – hell, even dubstep – would sound at-home on that stylistically mixed bag album. The scope was much narrower for
Fearless, and that's again the case with
Speak Now, which draws the majority of its influence from the country-pop sphere. Also factor in just how much Swift's approach to writing music has shifted since the
Fearless/
Speak Now era: she's gone full-on pop, created a somewhat facetious pop-rock album, plunged into indie/folk, and dabbled in electronics. To go from such a broad artistic palette back to "country-pop" (to
Speak Now's credit, its songwriting is actually very diverse) creates a whole batch of challenges in itself, because of all the things Taylor Swift is
right now, a country artist isn't one of them.
With all that said,
Speak Now's vault tracks land somewhere in between that of
Red's and
Fearless' in terms of the value that they bring to the experience. Generally, the songs do a surprisingly good job of fitting the magical, lovestruck atmosphere of
Speak Now – but they're not quite
essential the way that 'Nothing New', 'Forever Winter', 'Run', or the ten minute version of 'All Too Well' were for
Red. An argument could be made (and it's one I'd willingly hear and likely at least partially agree with) that
Red had more holes in the quality of its original tracklist – thus opening the door for the
From The Vault tracks to feel more essential in the first place – whereas
Speak Now is widely considered by fans to be her best work, or at least one of them. It's a fair point, and that's why I don't fault Taylor Swift for not finding a way to make what are ultimately b-sides that she willingly discarded thirteen-plus years ago somehow, magically, as good or better than the A-list tracks. It's a bit of a double edged sword, re-recording an album like
Speak Now – the closer a musical piece is to perfection, the less room there is for improvements. What that will lead to, unfortunately, is fans feeling let down by tracks that, while good, aren't
amazing like the ones they have formed countless memories to and thus elevated them to an unattainable standard. Regardless, 'Electric Touch' is a huge pop-rock banger that really didn't need Fall Out Boy's presence and would have arguably been better off without; 'When Emma Falls in Love'
nails the sound of the
Speak Now era with its plucky banjo, warm acoustics, and lyrical storytelling; 'I Can See You' has the most addicting guitar line and rhythm of any Swift track since 'Style'; 'Castles Crumbling' is a sad, smooth ballad about growing older and losing the interest of your fandom and, like 'Electric Touch', it doesn't really need the guest vocal help (although, Hayley Williams' voice is a much more natural fit with Taylor's than Patrick Stump); while 'Foolish One' feels a little more like a
Fearless era track and 'Timeless' pays tribute to her grandmother Marjorie (although not quite as movingly as she did on 2020's
evermore). All-in-all,
Speak Now's vault tracks really are quite great; just don't listen to them right after the original fourteen track masterpiece.
Again, it's an interesting dynamic to judge a re-recorded piece – with new tracks appended – against the original. What should carry the most weight? The fact that a borderline-classic album is still very much the same at its core? The expectations of the listener pitted against Swift's unenviable task of making six b-sides live up to them? I'll say this –
Speak Now loses nothing on Taylor's Version, but in judging its viability as a worthwhile separate piece from the original LP, it's not
as essential as
Speak Now was in its time. For that, it perhaps has the sense of losing just a tiny bit of ground – which may simply be par for the course on
any re-recording of music that has already existed and garnered high praise. Redoing your own best work and attempting to match it is a tough business to be in. It may not contain anything that the casual Swift listener or average radio-goer will be breaking down doors to hear, but with
Speak Now (Taylor's Version), she delivers an admirable and very intimate effort that will be extremely rewarding to her most devoted fans.
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