The singer/songwriter Taylor Swift has done it again. She has both shocked her fans and made them proud. Swift has recently begun the process of re-recording and re-releasing her first six albums. Starting with her 2008 hit-album, “Fearless”, opting to call the re-record, “Fearless (Taylors Version).”

While the lyrics themselves and the actual music has not had a dramatic change, it is the owner of these songs that has changed. 

Swift moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville near the age of thirteen to kick start her career in the music industry. In the year of 2005, she signed with Big Machine Records. While signed with this label, she released her first six albums. Swift’s contract expired in 2018, however Big Machine Records still owned the masters, or original recordings of her first six albums. When the contract expired in 2018, she changed labels and signed with Universal Republic Records. In her new contract, Swift made sure to have full ownership of any future master recordings. 

After switching labels, Swift has since released three albums in which she actually owns. However, she still does not have a claim over the masters of her first six albums. Big Machine Records sold the masters to a company called Ithaca Holdings, which is owned by Scooter Braun. Braun then sold the masters to another company, Shamrock Holdings. Both sales of her recordings were made without her consent or knowledge. Since losing the rights to her music, Swift has been very outspoken online about this issue. She expressed in a tweet how she felt silenced by Braun’s legal team, “…I would have to sign a document that would silence me forever before I could even have a chance to bid on my own work.”  Now, being unable to ever have ownership of her master recordings, Swift has planned to re-record and re-release all of her first six albums. She commented in this same post, “I have recently begun re-recording my older music and it has already proven to be both exciting and creatively fulfilling.”

Swift has begun by releasing her second album, Fearless. Along with the twenty songs from the original album, Swift also released six songs from Fearless vault. Two of the vault songs include a collaboration with both Maren Morris and Keith Urban. 

While the songs are not dramatically different from the original versions, there are still some changes that have been made. For instance, the new versions showcase the maturity in her voice when compared to the original versions. Swift made other minor changes like changing the word “The” to “My” in a line of the song, “You Belong With Me.”

Taylor Swift is now on her way to release her version of the other five albums that she does not yet own and she has already begun hinting at which one will be released next, taking to Twitter on April 18th to announce, “Been in the studio all day recording the next one – it’s really so amazing what you all have done here.”