9.0

GENRE: Pop/Country
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2021

The words in Taylor Swift songs usually mean something else. Her songwriting is suitable for magnifying glasses, lengthy online forum discussions, and Twitter threads with numerical theories. In her lyrics, plaid shirts take on different connotations, refrigerator lights flash through the mind with psychological importance, Gucci scarves become a symbol of saudade. All this gives fans a sense of secrecy that many artists aim at but fail to provide. That’s partly because while we rush to get rid of memorabilia remnants from love fiascos, Swift inserts them in pop hits that will live forever in the annals of breakup songs, turning them into fanbase vernacular. Most of us, mere mortals, have difficulty formatting happy birthday posts to Facebook friends, but Swift’s mind seems inundated with obvious but neglected figures of speech and heart-wrenching rhymes. That’s what’s made Swift a popstar with so many hidden gems and deep cuts amidst her chart-topping saccharine hits: for every track with a “haters gonna hate, hate, hate” line, there is a song like “Clean,” with more meaningful and well-written lyrics.

On 2012’s Red, Swift mastered giving people the words they wanted to say but didn’t know how. Right there, in between the “how come no one thought of writing this before?” and the “that’s so clever” inner statements, there’s enough space to feel sorry for her on “The Moment I Knew.” To get teary about her things being mailed back on “All Too Well.” To go back in time with “22,” and call your ex-boyfriend names with “I Knew You Were Trouble.” At times deluged with melodrama, Red was the narration of a relationship gone wrong, written by a famous young woman falling victim to tabloids and misogynist jokes. On it, Swift shielded herself with red lipstick and Max Martin-produced pop songs that could make her critics bang their heads and swallow their mean words for three minutes.

The record marked the singer’s partial departure from country music, with dismal guitar-layered ballads sitting among subdued EDM and dubstep beats. Much like a relationship, Red was musically jumbled, thematically messy, and all-around intense. There were breakup songs, excruciating gloominess, flecks of happiness, partying, jealousy, confidence, insecurity. It was an album full of imagery, each song with scenes surrounding you like fog, its lyrics highly personal but equally immersive. On Red (Taylor’s Version), the second re-recorded album in a list of six she’s redoing from scratch, Swift owns up to the mess, knitting together tracks from the standard and deluxe editions of Red, adding tracks she wrote for other artists (“Better Man” and “Babe), a stand-alone charity single (“Ronan”), and seven unreleased tracks from the Vault, which include a 10-minute version of “All To Well.” Yep, Swift’s been busy.

Red (Taylor’s Version) attempts to fix some mistakes: “Girl At Home,” noticeably the weakest song on the original album, gets new electronic arrangements produced by Swedish producer Elvira Anderfjärd, though not much strength is obtained. Just like it happened on Fearless (Taylor’s Version), it seems like the most well-known tracks are doomed to lack vibrancy. The absence of original producer Max Martin is felt on “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” both with cleaner productions that erase the rage of their former versions. But the rest of Red (Taylor’s Version) hits how it’s supposed to, prodding the sword even deeper than expected at some points. Intro track “State of Grace” is still a charmer, a festival anthem to Glastonbury proportions. Its loud electric guitars and muffled vocals prove that Red is cooler than any indie record sitting at her ex-boyfriend’s collection. The Taylor’s version of “Holy Ground” is graced with new synthesizers that hit from all sides and provide an energy boost to the already lively track.

With Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Swift proved that it was possible to revisit the past, distancing herself from the acclaimed position of third-person narrator shown on folklore and evermore while still cohesive with her current artistic identity. With Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift decreases the distance between the two spots: most songs are autobiographical, but then there’s “Ronan,” a devastating song inspired by a mother’s blog about her 5-year-old son who died from cancer; and “The Lucky One,” which is rumored to be about Joni Mitchell and Kim Wilde. The rework on the unreleased tracks approximate Red to Swift’s newer musical inclinations, with recent collaborators Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff to take care of the songs from the vaults, enhancing the record with newly-acquired shades in her sound palette. “Nothing New,” the collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers, serves as a connection between the album and the new musical style we hear on folklore. The track is a jab at a society that raises girls to have boyfriends and get married and then criticizes them for doing so, a prelude to the more direct innuendos Swift provided on “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off” from 2014’s 1989.

Red (Taylor’s Version) attests to Swift’s premature ability to channel lonely housewives sipping wine in their kitchens. On Swift’s rendition of “Better Man,” a song she wrote at 21 and gave to Little Road Town to record, the lyrics have the sour maturity of a divorcée who regrets giving away her best days to an undeserving husband. “Her lips on your neck, I can’t unsee it,” she sings on “Babe,” which she originally penned and passed on to country duo Sugarland. These songs fit the narrative and principle of Red (Taylor’s Version) because Swift is now 32 and has gotten a panoramic vision of what went wrong in that relationship. But they would’ve sounded out of place on original Red, an album meant to be a gale of young immaturity and non-resolution, on which she questions herself multiple times, like in the “Maybe I asked for too much” line she bemoans on “All Too Well.”

The re-recording of Red rekindles a time Swift has sought to move on from, a period when her every word was microscopically analyzed by fans and journalists. Fans intended to find the culprit who broke her heart and scrutinize them, and the media intended to shame her for dating. Many of the songs on the album were allegedly about Jake Gyllenhaal, who Swift dated for three months in 2011. Among these is the heartbreaking “The Moment I Knew,” a 2012 bonus track now included in the standard tracklist of Red (Taylor’s Version), in which the singer describes how devastated she felt when her then-boyfriend failed to show up at her 21st birthday party. The song tracks all the way to “22,” an upbeat twist about forgetting about exes and having a blast with friends a year later. On “I Bet You Think About Me,” one of the new tracks from The Vault, Swift then twists the knife. “Oh my god, she's insane, she wrote a song about me," she scoffs, poking fun at critics at the same time.

But what really has Ghyllenhall (supposedly) anxious on his million-dollar couch is “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” an extended version of Swift’s most quintessential song, the epitome of her work as a lyricist. The new verses—which are old, we just never got to hear them before—add a new item to the list of keepsakes mentioned in the original song. “And you were tossing me the car keys, ‘Fuck the patriarchy’ key chain on the ground,” she jokes about an ex with feminist pretenses. “You who charmed my dad with self-effacing jokes/Sipping coffee like you're on a late-night show,” she goes on, hinting at a self-centered and deceiving famous ex-boyfriend. How do you enhance something already considered the pinnacle of your career? Swift would say to add some more quick-witted lines about mundane background details, zoom in on your shitty ex’s wrongdoings, and then bring in Jack Antonoff to reimagine the arrangements. Done.

After years under biased scrutiny from the media, Swift learned to twist the narrative in her favor, leaving the world in awe every time she did it. She’s turned “snake” insults into stage props and Instagram blackouts into a thing. But even though the premise of Red (Taylor’s Version) is to stop those who deceived her from profiting off of her songs, the rerecording represents something more complex than marketing strategies. Red was the firsthand account of a 21-year-old going through a rough breakup amidst press conferences and sold-out concerts, spiraling into headlines on how many guys she’s dated and how she shouldn’t have. As such, Red (Taylor’s Version) is a retrieved tossed-out diary, its pages stained with red lipstick and its words blurred by tears. To have some dudes in suits behind tables receiving royalties for “songs she wrote alone on her bedroom floor,” it’s something the singer is too wise to see happening with her hands behind her back. After all, Swift is no crumpled piece of paper.

Listen to Red (Taylor’s Version):