Taylor Swift dropped her highly anticipated re-recording of her 2010 album Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) on Friday (July 7) and it’s not just Swifties who are amped up about it. The singer celebrated the release with a note to fans in which she reminisced about the songs she began writing at 18 and then revisited as a 32-year-old, and all the attendant memories and emotions that journey unleashed.
“It’s here. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours. It’s an album I wrote alone about the whims, fantasies, heartaches, dramas and tragedies I lived out as a young woman between 18 and 20,” she wrote. “I remember making tracklist after tracklist, obsessing over the right way to tell the story. I had to be ruthless with my choices, and I left behind some songs I am still unfailingly proud of now.”
The revised version of the album includes all 16 songs from the original and deluxe versions of the project, plus six never-before-heard “From the Vault” tracks with two collaborations with Hayley Williams and Fall Out Boy; Williams guests on a vault track called “Castles Crumbling,” while Fall Out Boy appears on the vault track “Electric Touch.” The other solo Vault songs on Speak Now are: “When Emma Falls in Love,” “I Can See You,” “Foolish One” and “Timeless.”
Swift previously released Red (Taylor’s Version) and Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which similarly featured re-recordings of those album’s tracks, as well as previously unreleased songs that were cut from those original albums.
In her note to fans, Taylor addressed the new songs, writing, “therefore, you have 6 From The Vault tracks! I recorded this album when I was 32 (and still growing up, now) and the memories it brought back filled me with nostalgia and appreciation. For life, for you, for the fact that I get to reclaim my work. Thank you a million times, for the memories that break our fall.”
In addition to re-recording the songs, Swift tweaked a lyric from the song “Better Than Revenge,” which was rumored at the time to be inspired by ex-boyfriend Joe Jonas and his post-Tay girlfriend, Camilla Belle. On the original, Swift sang: “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think, she’s an actress, whoa/ She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress, whoa.”
In the re-recorded version, Swift kept the first line the same, but changed the latter line to: “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches, whoa.”
See Swift’s note below.
