Taylor Swift Announces Red (Taylor’s Version)

Taylor Swift has announced a re-recorded version of her incredible fourth studio album, Red, which originally released in 2012. The new record will include 30 songs, expanding on the previous 16 tracks. Red (Taylor’s Version) will drop on November 19th.

In a post on social media, Taylor expressed, “I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.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. 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.Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.Red (Taylor’s Version) will be out November 19.”

Red was a new avenue for Taylor. It explored the world of pop music more deeply with the likes of singles “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble”. It also ushered in the era of Taylor’s signature bold red lips.

In 2019, her former label, Big Machine Label Group sold the rights of her first six albums to music manager, Scooter Braun of Ithaca Holdings LLC. Soon after, Taylor devised a brilliant plan to re-record and release all of those back catalog albums to regain rights to the masters she had created.

This last April, the first of those re-releases (the album Fearless) was greeted warmly to exceptional praise and success.

The digital copies of Red are available for pre-order now, with physical copies and bundles sure to follow.

Article by Tiffany Cuthrell, featured photo by Beth Garrabrant