Expanded edition features 30 songs
Taylor Swift has announced that her second re-recorded album of Red will be released on November 19th via Republic Records. Red (Taylor’s Version) will include 30 songs that were meant for the singer’s fourth album when it was originally released in 2012 via Big Machine Label Group.
“I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red,” she shares on social media.
She continues, “Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.
“Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be… over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn’t stop writing. This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.“
The expanded album will be available in clean and explicit editions. Track listing and details for physical configurations are forthcoming.
The new project follows Fearless (Taylor’s Version), her 2008 sophomore album that was the first in her series of re-recordings since leaving the Big Machine Label Group in 2018 and signing with Universal Music Group. Her original masters were part of the sale of Big Machine in 2019 when Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC purchased the label. Braun then sold Swift’s Big Machine catalog masters to Shamrock Holdings for upwards of $300 million in 2019. Swift has been at odds with the label, founder Scott Borchetta and Braun over the past couple of years as she’s attempted to purchase the masters to no avail while also being caught up in live performing rights of the same songs.
Swift broke records upon Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’s release earlier this year when it landed at No. 1 around the world, marking the first time a woman has landed three No. 1 albums in less than a year with the releases of Folklore and Evermore.
With the arrival of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Swift extends an unprecedented record, standing out as the only artist in history to release nine albums with sales of at least 500,000 copies in a single week [Fearless, Speak Now, RED, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, and now, Fearless (Taylor’s Version)].
Earlier this year, Swift broke a 54 year record held by The Beatles in the United Kingdom for the fastest accumulation of three No. 1 albums. Swift captured her third chart-topping album in a span of 259 days with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which follows Folklore on July 31st and Evermore on December 18th.
