Taylor Swift - Fearless (Taylor’s Version)

Pitchfork 75

Read Dani Blum’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

After her masters were sold to an old foe, Swift’s re-recording project starts with her 2008 opus on the teen-girl experience – an apposite contrast to venal male industry executives

In 2012, Def Leppard announced in robust style that they would be rerecording their biggest hits. It was provoked by a dispute with their former record label, designed to “punch them in the bollocks”, said frontman Joe Elliott. “We fucking built that company. We built their penthouse sushi bar, wherever it may be, and they just treated us like shit.”

This is a sentiment with which Taylor Swift may empathise. She hasn’t actually threatened harm to the testicles of her former label boss Scott Borchetta – and Scooter Braun, the manager who bought the master rights to her first six albums, then sold them to an investment fund for an estimated $300m – but if an album ever seemed like a musical equivalent of a painful knee to the groin then Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is it.

Related: Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

The Guardian 0

(Republic)
Painstakingly re-recording her breakthrough 2008 album to hit back at her music business enemies proves a fruitful endeavour for the songwriter

Since about 2018, Taylor Swift has been at the centre of arguably the most riveting contract dispute in music business history since Prince wrote “slave” on his cheek. It has been a conflict fought in public, in detail. No precis does the nuances justice, but the crux of Swift’s unhappiness is that the rights to her first six albums were sold out from under her nose when her former label, Big Machine, was acquired by a man she regards as an enemy: Scooter Braun.

Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager; more pertinently, he also managed the rapper Kanye West at a time when West was tormenting Swift – another vexed tale wrapped around this one in a double helix. The antagonism between Swift and West began when he interrupted her acceptance speech for best female video at the VMAs in 2009. The video in question was You Belong With Me – a hit from Swift’s hugely successful 2008 album Fearless. That album has now been totally re-recorded by Swift and was released on Friday.

If you were trying to sell this as an art forgery, someone would eventually twig