By Nimisha Mikkineni

A highly accomplished singer and songwriter, Taylor Swift, announced news of the re-recording of her older album, Fearless. She released the news with a long passage describing the album and her emotions towards it on her Instagram and Twitter accounts. The full album is slated to release on April 9, 2021. Swift released Fearless when she was only 18, and it soon the most sold album of 2009. This was also her only album to be certified Diamond in the United States, where it sold over 10 million copies. The album contains massive hit songs such as You Belong With Me, Fifteen, White Horse, and Love Story. 

Taylor Swift announced that the first re-recording of a song on her album would be Love Story, and it was released at midnight on February 12th. The rest of her album would also be similarly re-recorded, and is currently available for pre-order. The new album will also contain six new songs that Swift wrote between the ages of 16 to 18, similar to the ages that she wrote the songs on her original Fearless album. She has stated that the songs that she is now including on her new album will feature the songs that “broke her to leave behind.” 

A notable element on her new song cover is that it no longer contains her name- signifying that she owns the album. Previously, there were major disputes and lawsuits of her old albums, including Fearless with Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, where she lost partial ownership over the majority of her own albums. Although she lost partial ownership over her albums, she still can choose when her work is used or not. She has vetoed many requests to license her song ever since she lost partial ownership, because the other group would profit off of her work. Swift believes that it is very important that an artist has total ownership over their work, because “they are the only one who *knows* that body of work.” Along with the album Fearless, she has announced recently that she will re-record all of her first six albums in an attempt to gain ownership over her music again.

Taylor Swift has been on a massive roll over the past year, where she’s released two new albums titled Folklore and Evermore, and has now announced that she has re-recorded the entirety of her old Fearless album & more. The new year and new decade have proved to be very successful for Swift, and it’s expected that she has a lot more to offer in her future career ventures.