Friday, Nov. 12, is a day to remember if you’re a Swiftie — or just a person who uses the internet — because today, Taylor Swift released an expanded, re-recorded version of her seminal album Red.
Red (Taylor’s Version) is part of her ongoing pursuit to regain ownership of her earlier work after Scooter Braun acquired Big Machine Records and seized control over the master recordings of her first six albums. Despite selling the master rights to Swift’s catalog to a private equity firm in late 2020, the war between the singer-songwriter and the men who profit off her music still wages on, publicly.
To devalue the worth of her original masters, Swift announced she would simply re-record all of them to regain ownership. Red (Taylor’s Version) is the second of her album re-recordings, following the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version) earlier this year.
“It never would have been possible to go back & remake my previous work, uncovering lost art & forgotten gems along the way if you hadn’t emboldened me,” Swift tweeted. “Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Now we begin again.”
The 30-track, 2-hour-long album received five stars from Rolling Stone, which called her long-lost 10-minute version of “All Is Well” a “new heartbreak epic.” Known as a breakup album, the music pinpoints a time in Swift’s life when she was going through a highly publicized breakup with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who undoubtedly is not having a great day today.
The internet is, in turn, rejoicing.
