Today is the day that Swifties have been waiting for. After a much-publicized battle with Big Machine Label Group over her master recordings, Taylor Swift has released ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’ on Friday. The whopping 27-track album features updated versions of the 20 songs on the deluxe version of ‘Fearless’ originally released in 2008, plus six brand-new songs “from the vault.”
Fans of Swift will already know every word to the 20 songs that they’ve been listening to for the last 13 years. In listening to those “new” versions, there are subtle differences that dedicated listeners and trained ears will notice, but nothing that’s drastic enough to where it can be said that these songs are significantly better or worse than the original versions. Personally, the song that has improved the most is ‘You Belong With Me’. The original had a little too much auto-tune and over-production to the point where it came off whiny. Now, with much more maturity under her belt, Swift was able to channel her emotions differently so that you could feel the song in a different way.
As far as the new songs are concerned, one clearly stood out among the rest. The final track ‘Bye Bye Baby’ truly feels like it belongs with this album. It has sophisticated lyrics and it feels like classic Taylor. Both ‘We Were Happy’ and ‘That’s When’, the latter of which is a duet with Keith Urban, do what many Swift songs in the past have not done, which is place the blame on her for the end of a relationship. Unlike ‘You All Over Me’, ‘That’s When’ actually gave Urban a chance to shine and the production was even tailored to him.
Unfortunately, not every song was a slam dunk for this particular record. ‘Mr. Perfectly Fine’ and ‘Don’t You’ are not bad songs. The problem is they don’t fit on this album. If we’re pretending it’s 2008 and Swift was releasing ‘Fearless’ for the first time, these two tracks would feel out of place. If you were to tell me that Swift included these songs on this re-release because that’s when they were written, that’s a valid explanation. For the sake of cohesion though, both songs belong on either ‘Red’ or ‘1989’ sonically.
Nobody needs to tell you to go listen to this album. If you’ve been a die-hard fan of Taylor Swift this long, you’re already listening to it on repeat. Just in case you need it, you can listen to ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’ here.
