Fearless, the original version of which was released in 2008 on Big Machine Records, is the first album in the Taylor Swift catalog to receive the re-recording treatment.
Early Thursday, Swift announced the completion of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), telling fans they can expect the re-recorded version of her sophomore album—complete with six previously unreleased songs from the vault—to arrive soon.
“fearless was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth,” Swift said in a note to fans shared the same day as her appearance on Good Morning America. “it was the diaRy of the adventures and explorations of a teenage girl who was learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the facade of the faIrytale ending she’d been shown in the movies.”
Swift also reiterated her inspiration for re-recording her first six albums, noting that “artists should own their own work” for a multitude of reasons. Chief among those reasons, she said, is that only the artist is capable of truly knowing their own body of work.
As revealed in her statement by way of strategically placed capital letters, Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is out in full on April 9. “Love Story,” meanwhile, drops tonight.
Swift, whose most recent album evermore opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and landed among a wide variety of 2020 year-end lists, first spoke on her re-recording plans back in 2019 following the sale of her original master recordings to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings.
Swift has been publicly critical of that deal and has received support from other artists amid the initial speculation and eventual confirmation of her re-recording plans, including from Kelly Clarkson, who suggested to Swift via a tweet in July of that year that she should re-record any songs for which she didn’t own the masters.
“I’d buy all of the new versions just to prove a point,” Clarkson said at the time.
