Taylor Swift is ready to revisit her hit album Red. Swift took to Instagram on Friday to announce that she’ll be re-recording the 2012 album with “Taylor’s Version” dropping November 19.
“I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red,” Swift shared in a lengthy post.
Thanks to time, Swift explained that she feels healed enough to return to Red.
“Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators,” she shared. “And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”
The album will include all 30 songs that were originally meant to go on the album, including a track that is 10-minutes long — which many fans are speculating is the extended version of “All Too Well.”
“Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long. Red (Taylor’s Version) will be out November 19. ?: @bethgarrabrant,” Swift said, concluding the announcement.
Following Fearless, Red will be the second album Swift re-records. The new edition, called Fearless (Taylor’s Version), came out in April and featured six new songs.
“I’ve decided to add songs from the vault, which are songs that almost made the original Fearless album,” she said in a February announcement. “I’ve now gone back and recorded those, so that everybody will be able to hear, not only the songs that made the album, but the songs that almost made it. The full picture.”
She also shared what the Fearless era means to her, writing that “a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face” when she thinks about it.
“This was the musical era in which so many inside jokes were created between us, so many hugs exchanged and hands touched, so many unbreakable bonds formed,” she wrote. “So before I say anything else, let me just say that it was a real honor to get to be a teenager alongside you, and for those of you I’ve come to know more recently than 2008, I am ecstatic that I’ll get to experience a bit of that feeling with you in the very near future. Now that I can fully appreciate it in its whimsical, effervescent, chaotic entirety.”
In July 2019, Scooter Braun bought the rights to Swift’s early records, which were recorded with Big Machine. Swift, who was disappointed with the sale, then penned a passionate open letter condemning Braun and Big Machine and kicking off a highly public feud.
According to Swift, however, even though she couldn’t own her original masters, her contract allowed her to re-record her music at a point in the future. Swift then announced that she planned on re-recording her first five albums.
