A Rebirth – “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” Review

(The Swiftening Series: 1. folklore | 2. Lover | 3. reputation | 4. 1989 | 5. Red | 6. Speak Now | 7. Fearless | 8. Taylor Swift

Bonus: evermore | Red TV | Midnights | Speak Now TV | 1989 TV)

The original project of Taylor Swift’s rerecords was simple enough. After negotiations to buy the rights to her first six albums from her original record company, Big Machine Records, fell through, Taylor set out to use her rights to the songs themselves to rerecord each of them. This could, in theory, muscle out the original versions for streaming and sales dollars and effectively make her back catalogue worthless to the people who saw it as merely an investment and not a result of her at the time 12-year career.

In order for this project to work, the rerecords needed to be faithful enough recreations to disincentivize fans and casual listeners alike from going back to the original versions. But they also needed to have something extra – something new, something exciting to entice people who already bought the original version to go out and buy the new one, too.

Fearless was the first of Taylor’s album to receive a rerecord, and though it was done so lovingly, it’s obvious that it was also done conservatively. After all, though small rerecording projects have happened here and there, Taylor’s mission to rerecord so many beloved and successful albums in one go was basically unprecedented. So, her second studio album got all of its hits recreated essentially as faithfully as possible, with the addition of a few bonus tracks from the time period to sweeten the deal. Upload a few new official lyric videos to YouTube to make sure nobody’s clicking on original version lyric videos and bingo – you’ve got a rerecord.

But Fearless was a success, and the outpouring of support for Taylor and her project to reclaim her work made it clear that the project may not just be viable – it could even be profitable for Taylor and her team. So along came Red, and with it a seeming novelty in the form of its ten-minute version of fan-favorite track “All Too Well.”

This time, though, there was more to the process. Red got an entire short film to accompany the extended “All Too Well,” and the hype surrounding the release made it into the mainstream. People not even all that into Taylor joked about Jake Gyllenhaal and the scarf he still had stashed somewhere, supposedly.

And so, Speak Now came next, with its own original music video for one of the vault tracks, plus a surreal appearance from former beau Taylor Lautner in the video and on stage of her Eras Tour. Oh right, and the Eras Tour.

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taylor already had three untoured albums when she began her rerecording process, 2019’s Lover and 2020’s folklore and evermore. So, when Taylor started teasing a tour after the release of her 2022 album Midnights, many people scratched their heads and wondered how much of a role the untoured albums would play in the tour. Most I saw at the time agreed that there was no possible scenario where anything more than the biggest hits from these albums would make the setlist, much less anything more than a song or two referencing the rerecords.

Instead, what we got was a 3-hour tour de force featuring a dedicated segment to 9 of Taylor’s 10 albums (only her poor forgotten 2006 debut album left on the cutting room floor). And that tour has made mega popstar Taylor Swift into something even bigger somehow.

And so, we come to 1989.

Originally released in 2014, 1989 was a major reinvention for Taylor, something that the album’s title cheekily referenced. 1989 was the year Taylor was born, and as she has stated on numerous occasions, this album would come to mark her rebirth.

It was a rebirth in a lot of ways. Not only was Taylor shedding her country past entirely for the very first time, she was also attempting very intentionally to leave behind her public image of a lovestruck serial dater obsessed with her exes. She intentionally tried to surround herself with a group of untouchable model best friends, people no one would speculate she was secretly trying to date. (Hah.)

But that was just it. It was a very intentional rebirth.

When I first listened to 1989, I was struck by its extremely polished sound. So many of the songs on this album are pop juggernauts that the album is often referred to both by fans and the broader music community as the pop bible. It didn’t invent pop music referencing vintage, particularly 80’s, sounds, but it certainly skyrocketed that sound into the stratosphere, and defined an entire decade of sound. It kickstarted the producing career of Jack Antonoff, whose style would come to make up the sounds of so many other major artists.

That is an achievement. But it’s an achievement that, in hindsight, with a modern ear, felt a little stale to me.

What I love about Taylor’s music is, for lack of a better word, the mess. The way she loves to play in metaphor and double meaning. The way she loves to admit embarrassing truths about herself. Basically every other album in her catalogue has this quality, to me. But 1989 didn’t, because it was all so intentional.

Taylor had a story she wanted to tell about herself. She wanted to be reborn, and she drove intentionally toward that mission in a way that I’ve always felt left some truth behind. Any mess she came upon in 1989 felt personally crafted that way. It wasn’t a rebirth because that was what it came to be, it was a rebirth because that was what Taylor seemingly wanted for herself at the time.

Regardless of my feelings, though, 1989 is extremely beloved, and not for no reason. As much as I sort of slid off of it, I cannot deny that there are some fantastic and iconic songs on this album, and I also cannot deny how important it was as a career step for Taylor. So, when she announced that 1989 would be her fourth rerecord, I was eager to hear a modernized version of the Taylor album I’ve felt the most distant from.

Ironically, in the talk of rebirth, it’s interesting to note how 1989 (Taylor’s Version) stays extremely faithful to the original. I get the sense that this might be one reason she waited so far in the process to tackle it – to me, it feels like she wanted to get the hang of the rerecording process before she really felt comfortable with such a beloved and continually relevant album. Despite what diehard fans might be saying on the internet, this is an album that almost exactly captures the feeling of the original, more than any of her other rerecordings.

Sure, there are tiny little tweaks here and there, but in my opinion, they’re for the best. Take “Shake it Off”, for example. I haven’t been secret about the fact that this is not a song I love dearly. At the same time, though, I think a lot of my issues with it have been polished in the new version. Her strained, squeaky delivery has been loosened and made more comfortable. Sure, the obnoxious horns are still honking, but the spoken bridge seems much more tongue in cheek and a little less grating. It’s still not my favorite song, but I think this version captures the ease and joy of the version I saw performed on the Eras Tour stage a lot better than the recorded version.

Some songs I didn’t pay much mind to in my first listens have been extremely aided by the new production. “Welcome to New York” is a total showstopper with the widened production and more confident vocal delivery from Taylor.

I feel totally cheated and frustrated that I didn’t notice how brilliant “I Know Places” was until this listen, either. I’m not even sure I can chalk it up to the rerecord, either, I think this is just the first time I’ve given the song a proper listen. (In my defense, it’s pretty far down in an album I just admitted isn’t my favorite of Taylor’s, so I haven’t revisited it as often as others, but still). The sound of a tape recorder beginning and ending the song is a fantastically clever way to capture the feeling of being monitored and underscores the futile attempts by Taylor to hide her relationships from the prying media.

And, crucially, songs I’ve loved on this album have retained their magic. The self-conscious majesty of “Out of the Woods”, complete with its melodramatic bridge, has been recaptured. “Style” is just as fun to listen to with the windows rolled down, though I will say that I think some of the low end in the original is lost, though not to any great detriment. And my favorite song from the album, “You Are in Love”, is still so intimate and self-reflective, a moment of messiness from this album that always felt a bit too pristine to me.

Did the rerecord of 1989 change my feelings on it? Not really. I still do find the album itself to be an extremely well-crafted and very clean narrative about Taylor Swift.

The vault, though…

Something that has begun to take shape over the course of the rerecordings is a seemingly intentional move by Taylor to choose previously unreleased songs from the era that recontextualize the themes of the original. To me, the greatest example was the self-awareness and self-consciousness rife in the vault of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), but moments of clarify have come from every vault so far.

So what does 1989’s vault say about the era it came from? Well, honestly, it captures the mess I’ve been wanting so much from this album.

The original narrative of 1989 is one about a young woman in a doomed and dramatic relationship escaping and redefining herself. It seemingly started from the end, with not one song lacking the awareness of how it all ends. It liberally references Taylor’s on-again off-again relationship with fellow musician Harry Styles.

I think this is where I found a disconnect – those beautiful moments where I could look at two songs in the same album and realize they were talking about the same situation with two wildly different perspectives, one during and one in hindsight, like the difference between “Dear John” and “Ours” or “Treacherous” and “All Too Well”.

But with the opening vault track, “’Slut!’”, I finally get that moment.

This track attracted attention from the moment its name was revealed – and I think it’s obvious why. Theories flew around swiftie communities trying to guess what the song would be about, and almost everyone assumed it would be a scathing condemnation of the way popular media derided her for being in relationships at the age of 25.

I don’t think anyone expected it to be a dreamy love song.

It’s not as if the themes of defiance against media misogyny are absent from this track – but instead, it seems to set up a theme that the rest of the vault will continue to explore. This is the thoughts of a woman being so in love that she doesn’t care at all about what others think of her. As she croons in the chorus – “If they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once.”

I think this is a theme totally new to this album. We’ve certainly seen a self-awareness toward the mistreatment of the media in “Blank Space”, for example, but there aren’t any songs that say “maybe you’re worth the mistreatment.” And it’s… well, it’s messy.

The messiness grows even more when we get to my favorite vault song, the devastatingly short “Now That We Don’t Talk”. Now separated, Taylor displays a flippant disregard for her love, including a slew of devastating insults. But at the core, there’s a love and concern for this person that lingers, particularly in lines where she implies she knows her charismatic celebrity ex might be anxious on the drive home from a big party. The very concept of the song, a frustration at not being able to express her feelings about this person when he isn’t around anymore.

But perhaps the standout track on this vault, at least as far as fan discussion is concerned, is the spiraling breakup song “Is It Over Now?” The song takes terrible offense at her ex moving on, at the same time the singer admits she too is moving on while harboring the same intense passion. The return of the slut-shaming theme, when she points out that her ex’s new relationships get to be far more comfortably in the open than hers.

In a deeply 1989 move, the song is punctuated by a shrill autotuned scream, betraying the frustration that the song’s polished pop feel hides.

In all, the vault punctuates so many of the themes of the original 1989 with a taste of the tumultuous feelings that were broiling beneath the surface. 1989 isn’t changed. Not really. It’s the same pop bible it always was. It sounds just as good at a party, or driving fast down a highway. But now, it’s broader. It feels more complete.

That’s one of the beautiful things about how the rerecording process has evolved. At the beginning, it was a project of total recreation, of perfect replacement of the original. But now, it feels like it’s evolved into something more – an interest in giving insight to the original albums with the benefit of hindsight and the confidence of maturity.

In some ways… it’s a rebirth.