Taylor Swift’s Original Recordings Were Always Going to Be Better

In the movies, one of the primary rules of time travel is that you don’t do anything that could cause a tear in the space-time continuum. Plot lines that move between the past, present, and future emphasize the fragility of choice. Back in 2021, Taylor Swift started building an alternate reality by dismantling her first six studio albums and repurposing them as part of an extensive re-recording process to regain ownership of her music. The question became, “What if we could do it all over again, even bigger?”

With the support of a fandom ready to ride to the ends of the earth with her, Swift stared down the barrel of boundless opportunity. She wasn’t the first artist to reclaim ownership of her songs by making them all over again, but she was the first to do it on such a monumental scale. It went beyond having a catalog full of era-defining records. Those songs became weapons in what she considers to be the fight of her life. In 2019, her former label Big Machine sold the master recordings of her first six studio albums to Scooter Braun, who later sold them to the private equity firm Shamrock Holdings. At the time, Swift couldn’t see that the circle would close with Shamrock selling the albums back to her. She only saw red.

“My musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it,” Swift said when news of the initial sale broke in 2019. The re-recordings started as an elaborate mission to tank the stock of those songs and to show that their inherent value existed within her. She added the vault tracks. Then came “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version).” Then, the Eras Tour took it to explosive heights. In the end, Swift got her happy ending. She now owns every song she’s ever made. But the third act revelation is that her original recordings were always going to be better than their Taylor’s Version counterparts. Every detail of those releases tells the story of the legacy she feared losing when her catalog fell into the hands of the wrong people. And every slight change made to them re-wrote her narrative.

Some of the changes were structural, but primarily strategic. When Fearless (Taylor’s Version) arrived as the first release in the re-recording series, it came alongside “If This Was a Movie (Taylor’s Version), track five on The More Fearless (Taylor’s Version) EP. The original version was released two years after Fearless. With this project, Swift effectively reordered time by simply tinkering with the track list. As far as we know, the change didn’t cause any kind of multidimensional collapse. But still, this was different, and not insignificant for an artist who labors over the exact order in which songs appear on her albums. This was Taylor’s Version. It set the standard for what these albums could be. Swift could restructure, rearrange, and revise the past as she saw fit using perspective she didn’t gain until years after these original albums first arrived.

“If This Was a Movie” is the only song on Speak Now (Deluxe Edition) that credits a co-writer, Boys Like Girls’ Martin Johnson. When Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) arrived, with the bonus track omitted, Swift shared: “I first made Speak Now, completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20.” In 2010, she wrote the record on her own to prove that no outside forces were responsible for her success. “The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions, and wild wistfulness,” she said. “It tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying, and crashing … and living to speak about it.” And even though that singular credit never diminished her efforts, it was a loose end, so she tied it up.

For all her talk of brutal honesty and unfiltered confessions, Swift couldn’t help but clean things up as she went. The most notable change came on “Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version).” The new version rewrites the lyric “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress,” which was generally tame for its time but fairly out of character for the country-pop sweetheart. It removes essential context for how Swift’s legacy is understood in regard to feminism and misogyny, an element of her narrative that has inspired multiple college-level gender studies courses. It might not be now, but at one point in time that was her truth.

On Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift did the opposite. The 10-minute-version of “All Too Well” had so much more to say, not less. It remains disputed whether she actually wrote that “Fuck the patriarchy” line all those years ago, or whether it was the equivalent to replaying arguments with better comebacks long after they occurred. Was bringing the future to the past cheating? Maybe. Swift was making the rules up as she went. When Max Martin and some of the other Red and 1989 producers didn’t return, she re-produced their contributions herself with Christopher Rowe and Jack Antonoff. But like Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the perplexing production choices across the re-recordings largely buried the stormy emotion of the originals. 

It could be argued that it doesn’t matter all that much. The original versions still exist, after all. Now, fans can make mix-and-match playlists combining their favorites. But up until Swift bought back her music, the understanding was that there wouldn’t be a need to go back to the originals. However, post-Fearless, as her sound became more complex, it became noticeably harder to recapture the moment with each re-release. Her voice has changed just as much as she has. No more faux-country twang. There’s a clear emotional detachment across her whole revised catalog, an expanse between the melodrama in her memories and the muted filter she views them through now. 

As someone who routinely communicates with her fans through hidden clues and convoluted messages, Swift knows how much small, seemingly inconsequential details really do matter. She admitted as much when she revealed that, at the moment, she has less than 25 percent of Reputation (Taylor’s Version) recorded. “The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it,” she said. “It’s the one album in the first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it.” The snippet of “Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor’s Version)” that appeared in an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale proves her point. It’s only a glimpse, but enough to justify needing a ouija board to contact the old Taylor. She’s the only one who could get it right.

There’s an indisputable specificity to the way Swift performs emotion across all of her albums. It’s obvious when she’s trying very hard and when she isn’t trying hard enough. You can hear it in the deepest grooves of those original records. You can feel its absence in the depths of the re-recordings. Swift’s biggest strength as a performer is that when she sings something, you’re inclined to believe her. It’s what made Reputation so personal. The fact that, at that point in her career, she was having a really hard time getting people to believe her, was integral to the record. How does she access feeling like the most hated person on the planet again while being undoubtedly one of the most beloved? Why would she want to? 

The Eras tour was the only place where the lines between the original recordings and Taylor’s Versions didn’t exist. The audience screamed back the songs that meant the most to them and it was all the same. Some might not have found Swift’s music until long after it was considered the ultimate betrayal to stream the “stolen versions,” as fans refer to them. The emotions that are old and jaded for her might be completely new to them. That’s their version. Others have lived with those words for years and know exactly what’s been missing when they’ve played the new versions in their cars and headphones.

In the movies, this is when the credits would roll and Swift would sing, “Nothing’s gonna change, not for me and you.” Which version do you hear?