Since 2019, Taylor Swift has promised that she would re-record her first six albums in an attempt to regain ownership of her music after Scooter Braun bought her masters. Today, she’s officially launched the campaign on Good Morning America: Her 2008 album Fearless will be the first to be released in re-recorded form, now expanded to 26 songs and titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The album will be released on April 9—a capitalization-based Easter egg in Swift’s statement, which is confirmed on her website. “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” is out at midnight tonight.
Swift writes in the note that the 26 tracks will include six that have never been released—“the ones it killed me to leave behind”—written between the ages of 16 and 18. “artists should own their own work for so many reasons,” she writes, “but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really *knows* that body of work. for example, only i know which songs i wrote that almost made the fearless album. songs i absolutely adored, but were held back for different reasons (don’t want too many breakup songs, don’t want too many down tempo songs, can’t fit that many songs on a physical cd).” The new version, she adds, is “the whole story, the entire vivid picture…. the entire dreamscape that is my fearless album.” Check out the note, along with the album art, below, and scroll down for the tracklist.
In 2019, Scooter Braun and his media holding company Ithaca Holdings LLC acquired Big Machine Records—Swift’s former label home—and the masters of Swift’s first albums (also including Taylor Swift, Speak Now, Red, 1989, and Reputation). Shortly after the news broke, Swift released a statement on Tumblr expressing her anger over the deal. In addition to accusing Braun of “incessant, manipulative bullying,” Swift claimed that she was never offered the opportunity to buy her own masters before Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine. Big Machine Label Group’s Scott Borchetta disputed Swift’s account of events in an interview.
Days before her scheduled performance at the 2019 American Music Awards, Swift released a statement on social media claiming that Braun and Borchetta were trying to prevent her from performing Big Machine-era songs at the AMAs. She claimed they also attempted to block live performances of those songs from the Netflix documentary Miss Americana. She said the two men argued that performing her older songs on the AMAs broadcast constituted “re-recording”—she legally wasn’t permitted to begin that process until 2020. On the day of the show, however, she performed a career-spanning medley of songs while wearing a white button-down emblazoned with the names of her first six albums.