Red, Taylor Swift’s 4th studio album, came out the first time in 2012. We were all 10 years younger, 10 years less wise and had 10 years less life experience. With the goal of gaining ownership over all of her old songs, Taylor is re-recording each of her albums with the new tagline, “Taylor’s Version”. This past Friday, Taylor released the re-recording of Red, her second re-recorded album.
I can remember listening to Red when it first came out and just enjoying the songs for their catchiness and pop-y tunes. This was the first era of pop songs we heard from Taylor Swift. I can fondly recall singing “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” with my friends and while in the car with my parents. I remember the title song, “Red”, being my first glance into what it felt like to experience a vicarious break-up through Taylor’s lived experiences. The metaphors and colour references in the song painted a vivid image of the tumultuous relationship, the heartbreak, and the healing. I wondered what it would feel like to go through all of those emotions myself one day, and what it would feel like to love someone and hurt just as much as Taylor did. Little did my naive, 10-year-old self know, that 10 years later Taylor would make us all re-live those experiences with her.
Listening to this album now, I realize how little I understood about the things she was singing about back then. I didn’t understand how anyone could say “I hate you, we break up, you call me, I love you”. I didn’t understand the hurt in the words “this is the last time I’m asking you this”. I definitely didn’t know what she meant by “I remember it all too well”. Now, I have my own experiences and I have friends who have had comparable experiences to what Taylor went through in these relationships. I now understand the depths and intricacies of her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal- that is, allegedly Jake Gyllenhaal. It is “unconfirmed” that this album is largely about him, *wink wink*. I can now understand the heartbreak portrayed in the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” and the stages of grief experienced in that song. This album as a whole tells a story that I was so far from catching on to 10 years ago, but find enthralling and relatable now.
There are other elements of this article that I never would have picked up on when it first came out and now seem so obvious. Taylor was also 10 years younger when Red was first released in 2012. For example, in Taylor’s short film she produced to go along with the 10-minute version of “All Too Well”, starring Dylan O’Brien and Sadie Sink, there was a blatantly obvious age gap between these co-stars. The immediate audience reaction was “OMG how could they make this 19-year-old kiss 30-year-old Dylan O’Brien?!?!”, but the age gap between these two actors is similar to that of Taylor and Jake Gyllenhaal when they were together. Does this prove an excellent point of why didn’t anyone question the age gap when it was real life between these two stars? Did no one think that it would turn out as badly as it did because of their large age difference? Taylor may have done this sneaky casting to prove a point: there should have been more alarms blaring when 21-year-old Taylor started dating 30-year-old Jake and it went horribly south (but provided one hell of an album).
The genius in re-releasing albums as Taylor is doing cannot be denied. She gains ownership over all of her old songs, produces already created content, gets to brings out old songs that were never released, and elicits nostalgia in all of her fans. The impact these re-recordings have on the 10-year-old inside all of us proves that Taylor has the whole world wrapped around her finger, just waiting to see what she’ll do next.