Taylor Swift Shares Details About ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’ and New Bonus Tracks
She also called upon some familiar musicians and singers for "Love Story (Taylor's Version)".
Taylor Swift announced last week that the new versions of her first six albums are on the way and she will be releasing her 2008 album Fearless, now called Fearless (Taylor’s Version), first. Upon announcing the forthcoming record, Swift released the new version of one of the album’s standout tracks, “Love Story (Taylor’s Version).” Although Fearless was Swift’s sophomore record following her self-titled debut, she had a very specific reason for rerecording this project first.
“Deciding on what album to rerecord first was pretty easy for me,” she shared in an audio clip from her record label. “I always gravitated towards Fearless because I think that, as an album, it was a real coming of age, and I look back on that album and I just — it fills me with such pride. It was an album about hope and lessons learned and the effervescence of teenage youth and all that, so what more fun than to go back and explore that.”
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) will also include six bonus songs, which are tracks that didn’t make it onto the original album at the time. She explains how reworking the album gives her a unique opportunity for fans to experience these unheard tracks.
“These are songs that I’m calling ‘from the vault,’ and I call them that because there are songs that I wrote over the course of my career that were meant for certain albums, but didn’t end up making the track list for reasons that, to me, don’t really matter now,” she says. “I would make decisions based on, ‘Oh, there are too many breakup songs on this album, I can’t put this one on too. There are too many slow songs on this album, I can’t put this one on too.’ I think curating an album is really important, but at the same time, it’s really fun to go back and show the fans the full picture of what I had created at that time.”
While fans have to wait a little longer for the full new version of Fearless, she has already released “Love Story (Taylor’s Version).” The new version of the song is certainly a gift to fans who can hear the teenage love story reimagined with Swift’s matured voice and updated production, but the song is also a gift to Swift’s band, who have been playing the tune since its release in 2008. Swift also managed to get many of the same musicians who played on the original track to play on its new version.
“One fun thing about rerecording ‘Love Story’ is that I really wanted my touring band to get a chance to play on this version because a lot of them spent years playing this song over and over again, so it was really important to me to have my band, who I’ve toured with and shared a stage with for so many years, playing on the record,” she says. “We also have Jonathan Yudkin, the original fiddle player, we’ve got Caitlin Evanson, the original backup vocalist, and I think it’s really, really great that it’s a combination of the originals and people who have been sweating on stages with me for over a decade playing on this album.”
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) will be available beginning April 9. Pre-order your copy now.
