After months of anticipation, Taylor Swift has finally delivered an updated version of 2012’s Red.
The project marks the second drop in Swift’s ongoing reissue series, which kicked off in April with the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The Grammy winner’s decision to rerecord her first six albums came after music executive Scooter Braun purchased her former label Big Machine Records in 2019, and ultimately sold her masters to Shamrock Holdings.
“It’s something that I’m very excited about doing, because my contract says that starting November 2020—so, next year—I can record albums 1 through 5 all over again,” she told Good Morning America in August 2019. “I’m very excited about it. … I think artists deserve to own their work. I just feel very passionately about that.”
Red (Taylor’s Version) includes guest appearances by Chris Stapleton, Phoebe Bridgers, Mark Foster, and Ed Sheeran. It also spans 30 tracks, including a 10-minute demo version of “All Too Well,” which has also received the visual treatment. Swift wrote and directed the “All Too Well” short film, in which she stars alongside Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.
“Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end,” she wrote on Instagram. “Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”
You can check out the “All Too Well” video below and stream Red (Taylor’s Version) now on Apple Music and Spotify.
Swift will also serve as the musical guest on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Jonathan Majors.
