Taylor Swift releases ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’, a re-recording of his 2012 album

It’s official. Taylor Swift unlocked the chest.

On Friday, the Grammy-winning singer unveiled “Red (Taylor’s Version),” a remake of her acclaimed 2012 album “Red” as part of her ongoing mission to regain ownership of her early music.

While the original album had 16 tracks, “Red (Taylor’s Version)” is a 30-track epic, featuring musical collaborations with Phoebe Bridgers, Gary Lightbody, Ed Sheeran and Chris Stapleton. It also includes nine new songs that didn’t make the final product in 2012.

And guessing from the reactions on social media, revisiting the past isn’t always a bad idea.

Good morning my people, who’s already woken up giving a stream to the hymnal? #RedTaylorsVersion https://t.co/TpregD7h7a pic.twitter.com/EmOYr5WjYw

— Taylor Caótica 🧣 (@taylorcaotica) November 12, 2021

Among music critics, reception was also largely positive.

In awarding the album five stars, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield described the project as “a tribute to how far she’s gone, but it leaves you even more excited about where she’s going.”

Writing specifically about the lost 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” he said Swift “takes her own masterpiece, rips it all apart, breaks like a promise, rips its tapestry and rebuilds into a heartbreaking new epic, twice as long and twice as crazy.”

According to Chris Willman of Variety, Swift benefits from having nearly all of the album’s original producers back on board.

However, he writes: “A general initial impression is that more acoustically based things are easier to recreate exactly without producer Nathan Chapman than their early forays into electro-pop without Max Martin, although the differences can be difficult for who does not have an attentive ear. ”

However, he says, the collection of nine new songs “has no failures in the group”.

In a four-star review titled “The Retread for a Broken Heart,” NME’s Hannah Mylrea says that 31-year-old Swift’s mature vocals are the most significant change.

“You hear it most clearly in spoken times, like in ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,’ she writes, before adding that ‘it’s a typical moment of being a young adult, and although it delivers with a vengeance in its creation, in these moments the changes in Swift’s lyricism and voice in the 10 years since it was first released are obvious.”

“Red (Taylor’s Version)” is the second installment in the series for Swift’s re-recording project. In April of this year, she topped the Billboard chart of the 200 most listened albums at the moment with “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)”, which was the rework of her 2008 second album, “Fearless”.

Swift has already announced plans to revisit her first albums (from her self-titled debut in 2006 to “Reputation” in 2017) in an attempt to regain ownership of work she released under her former label Big Machine Records.

Celebrity manager Scooter Braun acquired the lead recordings for Swift’s first six albums in 2019, despite his objections. Swift confirmed in a Twitter post last November that the masters have already been sold to Shamrock Holdings.

After the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version),” Swift thanked fans for inspiring her to reclaim her art, telling her 89 million Twitter followers: “It would never have been possible to go back and remake my previous work, discovering lost art and jewels forgotten along the way, if you hadn’t encouraged me. ‘Red’ is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Now let’s start again.”

It never would have been possible to go back & remake my previous work, uncovering lost art & forgotten gems along the way if you hadn’t emboldened me. Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Now we begin again. Red (my version) is outhttps://t.co/ZUAWDuv4jL pic.twitter.com/Ji26KdOlWQ

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) November 12, 2021

Translated text. Read the original in English.