Taylor Swift’s Re-recorded ‘Fearless’ Album Coming This Spring
Taylor Swift has been at work re-recording her Big Machine Label Group-era albums, and a new Instagram note offers a hint as to when the first one may drop. The country-turned-pop superstar's website, though, confirms it.
A hidden message in a post from Swift on Thursday (Feb. 11) shares a date: "APRIL NINTH" is spelled out in capital letters in Swift's musings about re-recording Fearless, which led fans to suspect that date, a Friday, as the release date for the new version of the record. Swift's website officially announces April 9 as the release date of Fearless (Taylor's Version).
"When I think back on the Fearless album and all that you turned it into, a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face ... It was a real honor to get to be a teenager alongside you," Swift reflects. "Fearless was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth. 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."
Released in 2008 when she was 18 years old, Fearless was Swift's sophomore album. The best-selling album of 2009, it spent 11 weeks at the top of the all-genre Billboard 200, has been certified Diamond by the RIAA and is one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century. Fearless was a hit at awards shows, too. In 2009, it was named CMA and ACM Album of the Year, as well as Favorite Country Album at the American Music Awards. At the 2010 Grammy Awards, Swift won Best Country Album and the all-genre Album of the Year honor for the record.
Fearless contains five singles, including the smash hit "Love Story," which Swift is re-releasing in a new form on Friday (Feb. 12), though a snippet of the song appeared in a 2020 ad for the online dating platform Match. Her re-recorded version of the album, which is now available for pre-order, promises new renditions of its 20 songs, as well as six additional bonus tracks. Those songs are all from the same era: They were "written when I was between the ages of 16 and 18," Swift notes, but did not make the original album.
"[These are] songs I absolutely adored, but were held back for different reasons," Swift writes. "I've decided I want you to have the whole story, see the entire vivid picture, and let you into the entire dreamscape that is my Fearless album ... These were the ones it killed me to leave behind."
Swift is re-recording Fearless and her five other albums from her BMLG days following her split from the label — after the completion of her original record deal, she signed with Universal Music Group in 2018 — and a very public battle over her master recordings. BMLG is now owned by celebrity talent manager Scooter Braun, whom Swift says has been a bully to her over the years. She also says that she was not notified of the label's sale ahead of time, and was never given a fair chance to acquire her masters or purchase the label itself.
Swift has been busy during the COVID-19 pandemic: In addition to re-recording her old music, she released two brand-new albums, Folklore and Evermore, in 2020. One song from each album — "Betty" and "No Body, No Crime," which features Haim, respectively — was shipped to country radio.
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