It was a cold autumn day in 2012. I led in bed, my blanket wrapped snuggly around me. My ten-year-old self had the Red album playing in my CD player that I had bought that day. Little did I know the songs I’d be listening to would be recreated nine years later.
‘Red’ had always been one of my favourite Taylor Swift albums, so the fact that it would be one of the first ones to be rerecorded excited me greatly.
Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’ album, released back in 2012, took the charts by storm and became her first number one album on the Official UK Albums Chart. It topped the charts in a 41 other countries as well, spending a total of 84 weeks in the Top 100. the album had four tracks in the top ten hits: ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ (4), ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ (2), ‘Everything Has Changed’ (7) and ’22’ (9).
Swift doesn’t own the original recordings of her first six albums which is why, at least as rumour has it, she’s rerecording them. It’s a massive effort from Swift to have full control over her music, and I mean really, who’s complaining? We get to hear the original album but she gives it a completely new perspective with her added maturity.
The tracks stay in the same, original order with eight added songs from ‘the vault’. These songs are songs that didn’t make the original album, but have since been rerecorded alongside the originals. Swift said “Essentially, there are songs on this album that I’ve called ‘from the vault’ tracks, because in my mind, there’s a symbolic vault of songs that I love that I’ve written. I write a lot of songs for an album, and then I pare it down.”
Each song on the album invokes a different emotion, and they all express the different feelings Swift was feeling at the time. Similar songs like ‘The Last Time’ and ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ still give off post-break up feels just with a mature attitude to Swift’s voice. At the other end of the spectrum, songs like ‘The Lucky One’, ‘Holy Ground’ and ‘Nothing New’ (from The Vault), are songs more about learning to grow from something that has happened in the past or just growing up in general from being in the spotlight. These are sung with a faster beat and with a positive energy which Swift can show off now nine years later from when she originally wrote them.
My favourite songs from ‘Red’ (Taylor’s version), are the originals ‘The Lucky One’, ‘All Too Well’, and ‘Come Back…Be Here’ because of how they all give off different moods, which means that you can listen to them at any given time. The songs recently released from the ‘Vault’ that I have a soft spot for are ‘Better Man’, ‘Babe’ and ‘I Bet You Think About Me’.
The song everybody wants to talk about is ‘All Too Well”, or should I say Jake Gyllenhaal’s song. The rerecorded five-minute version sits at number five in the tracking list but as a big surprise, when you get to the end of listening to the album, the ten-minute version starts playing. Specifically ten minutes and 13 seconds which, if you didn’t know, is her lucky number. If you haven’t heard it before, I definitely recommend giving it a listen. Swift released the ten-minute version as the promotional single from ‘Red’ (Taylor’s version) which was met with positive reviews from fans and critics alike.
A short film was also released alongside the ten-minute version which expressed to the viewer the start to end of Swift and Gyllenhaal’s relationship. This was expressed in pictures recreated by actors Dylan O’Brien and Sadie Sink.
As a whole, the album itself is a recreational beauty, giving the songs that haven’t had light in so long a new spark. It makes me so excited for the next albums to be rerecorded!
*cue me and my friend, Chloe, embarrassingly singing to All Too Well when it was released…*
