By Rose Cohen ’22 & Liz Lewis ’22
Arts & Entertainment Editor | Managing Editor of Content
When Mount Holyoke News asked to hear from longtime Taylor Swift fans regarding the recent release of “Red (Taylor’s Version),” Addie Ray ’22 came dressed the part, sporting a black t-shirt featuring seven or eight images of the American singer-songwriter collaged together in bright pink wash. The many Swifts peeking out from beneath Ray’s open denim jacket hailed from all the distinct musical eras that have defined Swift’s career. Swift has re-invented herself and her music countless times, but the Nov. 12 release of “Red (Taylor’s Version)” signaled the re-invention of an old fan favorite.
“Red” memories
Swift first released “Red,” her fourth album, in 2012. It was a shift in her career that blended her country roots with the sound of 2012 pop, defined by dubstep drops, catchy choruses and fast-paced, dance-friendly tempos. Like previous Swift albums, “Red” featured breakup ballads and revenge bangers, in addition to the upbeat singles, “22,” “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” During a November 2020 podcast by Rolling Stone and Amazon Music, Swift called “Red” her “true breakup album,” saying, “This was an album that I wrote specifically about pure, absolute, to the core heartbreak.”
In 2019, Swift announced her decision to re-record her first five albums after her record company, Big Machine Records, denied her the opportunity to buy back her masters. In a Tumblr post, Swift wrote, “For years, I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in.” Instead, Swift opted to record new versions of her past works — ones that she would own, no strings attached.
“Red (Taylor’s Version)” features the same songs that appeared on the original album and nine unreleased songs that didn’t make the cut on “Red,” referred to by Swift and her fans as “from the vault” tracks.
Long-time Swift fans at Mount Holyoke recalled their experiences of the album, reacting to its new incarnation with nostalgia and new perspectives.
“I’m very attached to [“Red,”] in ways that I don’t really understand,” Ray said. “Those songs sparked something within sixth-grade me.”
Ray recalled that during the album’s initial release in 2012, she was at the peak of her Taylor Swift obsession. She first became a fan of the singer when she attended summer camp as a kid in the mid-2000s, when her favorite camp counselor handed her a pair of earphones and played her two songs from Swift’s self-titled debut studio album. From that point forward, Swift’s music became a huge part of Ray’s life. Her middle school years were defined by Instagram fan accounts, DIY concert outfits and listening to “Red” on the bus to school as she watched the leaves change.
“Those middle school years are so formative,” Ray said. “You’re still developing who you are, what your opinions are and how it relates to everyone else. To have this one album of 20 songs on repeat I think really influences your perspective.”
Sarah Rixham ’24 found the album similarly influential during her adolescent years. As she remembered listening to “Red” when it first came out, she spoke about playing the album at home in her kitchen. “I had the volume all the way up, and I was rewinding so I could get the lyrics right. [I was] trying specifically to learn the lyrics to ‘I Knew You Were Trouble,’” she said.
Owen Contri ’22 and his older sister had vastly different music tastes when they were growing up. While Contri preferred folk and acoustic music, his sibling favored rap and electro-funk. “The only music we could both agree on was Taylor Swift, so we would listen to Taylor Swift every day,” Contri said, recalling the times when his sister would drive the two of them to high school.
When “Red” came out, Shloka Gidwani ’22 had trouble connecting to it. “At the time, she was singing about relationships, and I didn’t fully understand that,” Gidwani said. “I was in middle school, what [did] I know about the human condition?” Even if she hadn’t yet grown into an understanding of the more mature themes in Swift’s music, Gidwani still connected to Swift’s lyrical style. “I sort of always knew that I was going to be an English major, and I knew she had a way with language that a lot of people didn’t,” Gidwani said. “She just has these zingers — she comes up with these lines that are really catchy and make you want to sing … it really resonates with people, and they’re often very clever.” Gidwani referenced the climactic line from the fan favorite “All Too Well” as an example: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest.”
Swift’s persona
For Sarah Miller-Bartley ’24, “Red (Taylor’s Version)” unearthed some issues she’s had with the artist for a long time. Though Miller-Bartley has been a fan of Swift’s music since her self-titled debut, she saw the release of “I Bet You Think About Me (feat. Chris Stapleton) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” as a misstep in the artist’s approach to her persona. The previously unreleased track sees the return of Swift’s southern twang, an inflection present in her earlier music. The song also characterizes Swift as a working-class underdog compared to an upper-crust ex-lover, with the lines, “I was raised on a farm, no, it wasn’t a mansion / Just livin’ room dancin’ and kitchen table bills.”
Miller-Bartley said, “While artists are free to write fiction, the fictional persona of the ditsy, working class, boy-crazy Southern girl is downright offensive, especially when performed by someone who grew up quite wealthy in Pennsylvania.” She initially saw the re-recordings as an opportunity for Swift to potentially revisit and address the “glaringly obvious classism” in her earlier work, but was disappointed by this specific track. Miller-Bartley continued, “In actively choosing to not only release ‘I Bet You Think About Me,’ but also emphasize it with a video, she has shown that she will not be having that conversation.”
Perfect timing
For Rixham, the re-release of “Red” has come at just the right time. She discussed how Swift always releases music at the specific moment she needs it. With “Red (Taylor’s Version),” Rixham said she could relate to the songs in a way that she had not in the past.
“I’m starting to … be able to relate my own life experience to [these songs],” Rixham said. “It’s going from … a story in my head to something that is relatable in my real life.”
For Ray, the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version)” came at a moment of serendipity.
“Right after I turned 21, I was in a creative writing class in the spring semester, and we had to write from our middle school perspective,” Ray recalled. “I started writing, and I kind of couldn’t stop, because there’s so much to unpack there. That girl that I was is so interesting and so genuine, and she is me, but at the same time, I think middle school and high school really bruised me and tossed me around. But at the core, I think I’m still that 12-year-old.”
Just when Ray was channeling this younger version of herself, Swift announced that she’d be re-recording “Red” — one of the most definitive works of art from that time in Ray’s life — later that year. The stars, apparently, had aligned. “21 backwards is 12,” Ray said. “And that’s what I’m going through right now.”
In between those years, Ray’s tastes have changed. While she used to gravitate toward the “poppier, upbeat” tracks on the album, she now appreciates a slow build. “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” a down-tempo lament of a past love affair, is one example of a track that’s grown on her in time for the re-recording.
“I feel like this album has — this sounds like something Taylor Swift would say — two lives,” Ray said with a laugh. “One being how it was viewed in my 12-year-old eyes, and now how it’s viewed in my 21-year-old eyes. When I was 12, I didn’t really like ‘Sad, Beautiful, Tragic,’ but now I love it. So I was excited to hear the ones that I now love, that I took for granted [then].”