Taylor Swift has re-recorded a new version of This Love from her 2014 album 1989. The four-minute track is the second re-recorded song from 1989 – the first was Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version) which was released last September.
“This Love (My version!) is out & I’m currently reliving the 1989 tour in my head and spiraling, it’s fine,” wrote the 32-year-old singer on Instagram.
To accompany the song, Swift also shared a lyric video, which has already garnered nearly a million views.
This Love (Taylor’s Version) also had a very quick preview in the teaser trailer for Amazon Prime’s new series The Summer I Turned Pretty, which dropped yesterday.
This is not Swift’s first re-recording by any means. She first released a re-recording of her 2008 album Fearless in April 2021, and then re-made her 2012 album Red, releasing Red (Taylor’s Version) in November the same year.
The re-recording is Swift’s way of reclaiming ownership over her own music, after American media proprietor, Scooter Braun, gained possession of the master recordings for Swift’s first six studio albums in 2019.
Both Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) had returned to their original albums’ number one spots on the Billboard 200 charts in 2021. Red (Taylor’s Version), also simultaneously went straight to the top of both the Billboard 200 and Hot 100, and as Swift also achieved this feat with 2020 albums Evermore and Folklore, she became the first-ever artist to have three albums reach the top of both charts at the same time.
In November Swift’s All Too Well (10 Minute Version) also smashed records becoming the longest song ever on the Hot 100.
Re-recording albums not only allows for a change in ownership, but the process also gives artists an opportunity to re-imagine their original sounds. Rolling Stone, for example, called Red (Taylor’s Version) “bigger, glossier, deeper, casually crueler” than the original.
Other musicians have taken note of Swift’s efforts. Speaking on an April episode of the podcast Full Send, rapper Snoop Dog said: “What did she do? She remastered her album. Why? Because she wasn’t making revenues off of that album.”
“She redid her album as a way of ‘I’ll make this for my fans, and they’ll support me because those are my vocals, this is my music, and I should be making money off of my project when you buy it’,” he said.
As always, Swift has meanwhile been extremely busy: in March she debuted a new song Carolina in the trailer for the upcoming film version of Delia Owens’ 2018 novel Where The Crawdads Sing. At April’s CinemaCon, attendees saw the first clips of Swift in the new David O. Russell film, Amsterdam, alongside a packed cast that includes Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek.
