In October 2014, pop star Taylor Swift released her 5th studio album, 1989. It debuted with 13 songs and ran 48 minutes long until she released the deluxe album debuting at 1 hour 8 minutes with 19 songs. Recently, Swift announced that she would release Taylor’s Version of this album on October 27, 2023, exactly nine years after the original release date.
This album includes popular hits like “Style”, “Blank Space”, “Shake It Off”, and “Bad Blood”. The cover art for the album is a Polaroid picture of Taylor Swift herself wearing a sweatshirt with seagulls spread across it with the caption, “T.S. 1989”.
Taylor Swift lost the rights to her music because of a contract she signed with her former music manager, Scooter Braun. She came up with the idea of re-recording all the albums she does not have ownership of, to attempt to regain ownership of her music as a way to get back at Scooter. Swift wants her songs to have the ability to be in movies and television shows, but only if she has complete ownership of them. Her team has consistently rejected requests to have her songs in films and commercials, but if she had ownership, they would not be able to do this.
So far, Swift has re-released her albums Fearless (April 2021), Red (November 2021), and Speak Now(July 2023). Along with her newly found ownership of these albums, the fans have received new bonus tracks on some of these albums. Since Swift’s goal is to regain possession of her songs, she tries to make each song sound similar to the original, if not the same, although there have been some subtle differences. Her voice has matured drastically in the past decade, so there are some instances where the use of more autotune can be heard in the re-recordings for the songs to remain similar. With a change in her voice, Swift also changed some lyrics of her past songs. Some of these songs include new lyrics or some lyrics completely changed. An example of this is in her song, “Better Than Revenge”, where she changes an entire line of the song. Swift changed the lyric “She’s better known for the things that she does / on the mattress” to “He was a moth to a flame / she was holding the matches”, This change sparked debates within the fanbase when some fans preferred the original to the re-release.
Previously, Swift had released a music video for her song “I Can See You”, where fans noticed a sign that read “1-9”. This easter egg stirred up the fanbase to dissect the entire music video, looking for clues on what this could mean. Taylor Swift often hides easter eggs and clues pointing to future and past works via music videos, outfits, etc. These hidden clues have made her fanbase very skilled at figuring them out, hence this whole “dissecting” of the music video. Fans settled on the theory that Swift would announce Taylor’s Version of this album on the 9th day of the 8th month of the year, August 8th, finishing the sequence “1-9-8-9”, since this was her last show of the U.S. leg of the Era’s Tour. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was announced on August 9, 2023, during one of Swift’s concerts at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The theorizing fans were correct, and now Swift will be re-releasing her 5th album on October 27th, 2023.
