Switched on Pop - Speak Now (about Taylor's versions)

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Taylor Swift is currently the most streamed artist in the world as she’s commandeered the media as she embarks on her Eras tour around the globe. It's likely to be the highest grossing tour of all time, crossing $1B in sales. What’s more, she’s just released her 6th studio album since 2020, and her 3rd re-recording of her older material called Taylor’s Versions. She famously got in a spat with the new owner of her master recordings. She decided to take back control with her own hands and voice, creating mostly true-to-the-original updates alongside a smorgasbord of bonus material. First there was Fearless from 2008, then Red from 2012 and now Speak Now the last of her more country leaning albums having originally arrived in 2010. Switched On Pop listens to Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) for whats is and isn’t working musically, how the re-recordings are fairing, and where this ambitious project may go next. Joining the conversation is Lauren Michele Jackson American cultural critic, assistant professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern, author of White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation and a contributing writer to the New Yorker in her review of Taylor Swift’s midnights said “I’ve always maintained that Swift is incapable of writing a bad song.” MORE Pop Pantheon: Checking in on Taylor Swift's Re-Recordings So Far (with Charlie Harding, Larisha Paul & Nora Princiotti) SONGS DISCUSSED Taylor Swift - Fearless, Red, Speak Now, Never Grow Up, The Story Of Us, Sparks Fly, Mine, Mean, Superman, Karma, Better than Revenge, Electric Touch, Castles Crumbling, When Emma Falls in Love, I Can See You, Back, To December, Last Kiss Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

Taylor Swift is currently the most streamed artist in the world, and she's commandeered the media as she's embarked on her era's tour around the globe. It's likely to be the highest grossing tour of all time, crossing a billion dollars. What's more is that she's just released her sixth studio album since 2020 and her third re-recording of her older material. She famously got in a spat with the new owner of her master recordings and decided to take it into her own hands and voice to create these mostly true to the original updates alongside a smorgasbore of bonus material. First, there was Fearless from 2008, then Red from 2012, and now Speak Now, the last of her more country-leaning albums. Today I want to listen to Speak Now, Taylor's version, to hear what is and maybe isn't working musically. I also want to look at how these re-recordings are faring and where this ambitious

project may go next. Nate and Rihanna are out this week, so joining me in conversation is friend of the show, Lauren Michelle Jackson, American Cultural Critic, Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern, author of White Negroes when Cornrose were in vogue and other thoughts on cultural appropriation and a contributing writer to the New Yorker, where in her review of Taylor Swift's Midnights, she said, I've always maintained that Swift is incapable of writing a bad song. Welcome, Lauren. Thank you for having me. So it's been a minute since I've revisited Speak Now.

How does it fit into Taylor's career? Speak Now has a interesting fit within the course of Taylor's albums. So if we think about Red as this kind of transition moment between the country or country pop of it all to a more sort of straight injection of pop, speak now is kind of, I think of it almost as like fearless B-sides, which is why I think in the kind of course of re-recording, Speak Now still has that country sound. But Speak Now is not quite in that maturing contemplative moment of Red, but we're not quite out of the adolescent fury of Fearless. And so we get Speak Now, which is this in-between, in-between album. What does the re-recording need to do to be a success? Is this merely a commercial exercise, or do you feel like it's an aesthetic one as well?

I mean, I guess the kind of easy option is to just say both. I mean, really the kind of straightforward purpose is, you know, when you want to go back and listen to speak now, the idea is that you're going to reach for Taylor's version and not, you know, he who shall not be names version, right? Or whoever's hands, right? songs fell into next, right? And so to that end, you know, the idea is that these songs do need to be in many ways mimics of the originally recorded versions. So they do need to be pretty close. They do need to be, if not, nearly identical, which is itself an aesthetic exercise, right? One of the things that I was really interested in was the extent to which this mature vocalist could really step into the role of her younger self, of a less mature vocalist, of a less mature lyricist, and really kind of recreate and rehearse this younger self, which I don't think is an easy thing to do.

Right. She has a different voice now. She even talks about in the liner notes for this album, Speak Now, that she's addressing some of her critics who say that she couldn't sing. and she went through extensive vocal training. So we have a different voice that is more robust. It's just simply more mature. Right.

And so it's like, what do you do with this, you know, mature sensibility now going back and needing to, in many ways, replicate the version of your artistry that is of its time? Maybe we can hear a few examples. Like, when she recorded the album originally, she was between 18 and 20, and she recorded the re-recording at 32. I hear a lot of differences. Like, take the story of us. Here's the original.

Here's Taylor's version. The story of us is about teenage romance, and I think you could have an argument about, I prefer the more constrained, youthful vocal. I really enjoy the emotional performance on Taylor's version, which is more gutter-old. rasping it. It actually feels looser even though

she's a more trained vocalist at this point. Yeah, it feels warmer, rounder. I think it preserves, right, that sense of exuberance, that Disney Channel sort of like toe-tapperiness.

And yet, you know, in the original, there's a lot of that, like, the vowels are very eh, like, she has like on that, you. you know, second syllable of, you know, the I-N-G, right? It's like, it's really like kind of like, eh-sounding. On the original, I feel like there is a lot more twang on the album because she still very much is in the world of countries.

She's following up Fearless, which is like the biggest country album of all time, basically. And she still has this Pennsylvania girl affected twang, which you can hear that on Sparks Fly. Everything now. Got gnaw, wang, cane. And when she does it now, it's still a country song, but the vocal styling is not straight ahead CMT country. Right.

I love Twangy, Taylor, but it does reinforce, perhaps. Is this, like, the version or the older version, if that's kind of what she thought a sort of country-fied accent is supposed to sound like, which is like leaning super hard into these vowels. And so a little bit like by comparison does feel like, oh, you know, in addition to being, you know, younger and not having as much vocal training, it is a little bit like you can feel the cosplay maybe of the accenting in the older songs. Plenty of folks have written that she is not the first person to re-record her music. She may be getting the most press for it.

I think part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of re-recordings, often done for similar reasons, wanting to maintain ownership, get the rights to the master recordings of an album. Most of these recordings are not huge successes. Like, take, for example, Def Leopard when they re-recorded pour some sugar on me in 2012. Now, just to get our ear into the great vibe of that song, we'll listen to the original from 1987 first. And here's how they Butchered that classic in 2012 It's like a bad tribute band Released an MP3 cover in 1997

It is not good It's like somehow like thin and like empty or something Yeah totally And they're not alone Have you ever heard Gloria Gaynor's re-recordings of I Will Survive? I don't believe I have Or not on purpose We all of course know the original

Okay, and then here's the re-recording. I'll give her a strong performance, but the song literally feels like it moved from the 70s into the 80s, which it did, and it's just like, I want the 70s original. Right, it's not like bad. It's just not the other one, literally.

Yeah, exactly. It's just like definitively not the same song. It's actually probably, I would say it's a good 80s update cover of the original. Taylor is doing something else because I think her recordings are unbelievably in most cases true to the original, but they sound bigger. For me, I think of them as like the IMAX version of Taylor's recordings where there is more spaciousness. You can pick out

the individual instruments more clearly. The high end is higher, the low end is bigger. my engineer friend Jesse Cannon says that it's got a smile curve to it. Like if you look at the EQ curve of like the lows, the lows and the highs are boosted like a smile. And you can hear this like right at the top of the album on the song, Mine. Here's the original. Classic. Good. Love it.

And Taylor's version. It's like there's been a veil over the original recordings and she's taking it off because the production value is just that much. more polished and beautiful, and you can literally see everything now. I love it for that purpose. And if you're listening on a good set of headphones or a decent stereo system, the new recordings just, I think they sound better in most cases. I agree. It sounds really good. This is going to be like a strange comparison. In terms of makeup, people are always searching for your lips, but better, which is like not a nude lipstick, but it's just like your natural color, but it's like a little bit better, right? And in a weird way, this album is Speak Now, but Better. It's Taylor's

version. It's like the telos of what Speak Now was ever sort of meant to be. I feel like a big part of what's giving us that sound is how this album was made. Because originally, she worked with her earlier, long-time contributor Nathan Chapman to record this in his studio where they made a bunch of demos. And then he later went out and worked with studio musicians to replace the artificial drums that he had put in, for example, and really make the album larger than life. And the process worked. I mean, the album was definitely a success.

This time around, though, the musicians behind the album are her touring band, the group that they call themselves the agency. And they have shedded these songs so much over the last decade or more, right? In the same way that she has a stronger, more worked out vocal. This band knows these songs better than anybody. And I think you really get that live in the studio feel, which you want from her more country-oriented albums. That is the sound that we need.

you like. Right. Speaking of the vocal, which we've done a lot, I think it's necessary that we listen to the core moment about the criticism of her singing in the song Mean. Here's her in the original version. I think here she's proving that she can sing, and she really does want to show us that she has got a powerful vocal because she shows all of it off right here in the final chorus. And when she does that's even

In a big old city And all you're Ever gonna be is mean Yeah And when she does that on Taylor's version I feel like it's even bigger And all you're Ever gonna be is me

I love the big harmonies Even with the less affected vocal twang And a really pure country song I love mean Mean is like my favorite song on this album, it really just like does capture this like, I'll show you. It's like a little bit petty. It's a little bit snotty, but it knows it's doing that.

And it's just like having fun and like poking fun. And it's just like, I love that song so much. It's so fun to sing rousing good time. Me. Yeah. This album overall was not her biggest. Like mean is a song that's definitely stuck around. Back to December, I think.

think of all of her recordings is number 41 on her Spotify streams. Enchanted is the biggest song in streams on this album. It's her 18th most stream song on Spotify. So in a lot of ways, I think about this album as a fan favorite. You know, she's dropping it in the middle of a tour, which is really where she's trying to get the press. Like this, this album is not where she's trying to capture the narrative. It's all about the Eros tour right now. Literally the prime minister of Canada is tweeting at her, asking her to come to Canada on this tour. She's getting heads of state to talk to her. So this is for me a fan favorite album that has some fan favorite songs like Mean.

Are there things in revisiting you have found a new love for? I think one of the things about the album that originally made it not so much my favorite, the sort of juvenile feeling of the album, now getting to return to it, now with both the sort of safety of distance from not only the younger Taylor, but also myself as a younger person, that it really does feel like, it feels like performance and it feels like a little bit of cosplay in a way that's, you know, really fun. And one of the things that maybe have us, you know, thinking about and reminded of is that, you know, of course, it's all performance, right?

Yeah. I think you've gotten to this point with Taylor. which has always been, you know, sort of present in her fandom of just giving these sort of hyper-symptomatic readings of all of her songs, of, you know, linking this song to that person, which like has never really been that interesting project to me. Like, I don't care which one of the sort of ex-boyfriends were going to autobiographically sort of pin the content of this song to. and that's followed up the sort of Taylor's version of this album as well. But I actually think it's just like more fun to think about the repeat motifs of heartbreak and new love and all of those things. I think it's actually really fun to revisit it in this younger prism with a sort of more matured artist. I likewise am not that into the celebrity gossip of it all.

The thing that I really most enjoyed about revisiting these albums was not the celebrity gossip piece. I feel like I got to see how she has developed not just as a vocalist, but also as a melodicist. She really gets the country Nashville styling of a song. And in a certain way, some of these songs actually, for me, start to blend together. She has this way of singing simple melodies that kind of repeat and repeat and repeat with more obvious Nashville style rhymes in the chorus. You could, for example, take Mean, Speak Now, and Superman. And it could all exist in this meta mashup. It's really great.

But it's so different than how she styles her melodies today. I feel like if you listen to karma in comparison, She's doing a similar thing of using like one guide melody note that she's hanging on, but there's so much more sophistication within the structure of the melody. She starts with this little motif. Karma is my boyfriend. Karma is a god, but it comes in later in the bar. And then she repeats it again but keeps on going.

Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. And Weekend is the same pitch as boyfriend that we heard at the beginning. So she's kind of taking this motif, developing it, extending it, and folding it in on itself in all these different ways that it is for me the ultimate earworm because it's both unpredictable and totally simple at the same time. She has evolved so much in the arc of her songwriting career. So to hear karma on the radio right now and then go back to speak now, you're hearing this unbelievable evolution of over a decade of songwriting. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving. greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.

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In Taylor's version, she's not just reflecting on her past. She has made a few small changes. Most talked about is an updated lyric on the song Better Than Revenge. Do you want to set that one up for us? Better than Revenge is, you know, I guess we could say one of those songs that thematically has maybe not aged so well. It's sort of lyrically about this idea of, you know, another woman has taken your man. Very classic hobblem and many all kinds of songwriting, you know, not just country music, but, you know, it's the whole world drawn, right?

It's a trope. It's a trope. So the lyric goes, she's not a saint and she's not what you think. She's an actress. Whoa, whoa. She's better known for the things that she does on the mattress. Whoa, whoa. And so in Taylor's version, we have changed the latter portion of that phrase.

And so instead we have, he was a moth to the flame. She was holding the matches, which is this sort of explicit reference to misogyny of those earlier lyrics. How do you feel about this update? So I'm up two minds about it. I think broadly as we are progressively thinking back and sort of reevaluating the way that music can promulgate harmful ideas and by harmful ideas. One thing that sort of worries me is that I feel like a lot of the

the sort of gut response to that is to efface history rather than sort of reincorporating our sort of complex understanding of the sort of import of ideology and music into our sort of understanding and into the sort of overturning of musical history and things like that. Yeah. Which is I think maybe like a kind of like really convoluted way of maybe like accusing Taylor of being a little bit embarrassed, right? And rather than sort of do what maybe feels icky and sort of re-recording these lyrics that she no longer believes in,

we're going to change them. And that's like the kind of, I think, like, the least sort of generous reading of the switcheroo. And then on the other side, I think about, so, you know, I'm a writer. I wrote a book of, you know, modest, modest, modest, in terms of audience. Great book. Thank you.

But, I mean, if I had or would ever have the opportunity to re-release it or do another edition or something like that, like, are there things I would update and change? Like, absolutely. And that doesn't even have anything to do with a kind of like retrograde thinking, but just the fact that I'm smarter than I was in 2019. So I'd want to reflect my smarter self. And so I think artists deserve that prerogative. It's just difficult when the whole purpose of the exercise, right, again, is a sort of

almost replacement such that when I want to reach for better than revenge, like, I should be reaching for Taylor's version. So Taylor can get my streams and money, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But then when we, you know, when we change a lyric, what is the kind of limit of the amount of alteration that a project like this can sustain? I think the vast majority of people are like not going to care. Like I don't think it's either like a feminist victory or a kind of like artistic or anything like that.

More interesting, I guess, than sort of evaluating the maneuver itself is to, sort of think about what the limits of updating a new work while it's still sort of being true to its old self, what those are. I think I take no issue with people revisiting old recordings of Taylor's and engaging with that material and reliving how it might feel to be an imperfect teenager. I think the operative word in the re-recording is Taylor's version. And if this is her version now, then it makes sense that you might want to clean things up, just as you said, like, If you released your book, Lauren's version, you're like, oh, it's going to be different. And if I can give it the most generous reading, I actually think that she has, to a certain degree, improved the lyricism.

Originally, we get, she's not a saint, and she's not what you think. She's an actress. Okay, so that's kind of the setup, right? And then you have a ton of words you don't need. She's better known for the things that she does. And the update, she, I think, as simply more imagery, he was a moth. to the flame she was holding the matches is more visually evocative than she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress.

She has given us not just the same rhyme scheme, but she has given us mattress to matches. She's doing a little bit of a flex here saying, look, I know how to write a lyric. I can even update my own. I think I can improve it. Right. I don't think it changes the kind of like internal affect and constitution of the song, really. Above all, I think it's given a lot of folks with PhDs, a lot to think about in the rewriting of history. Engaging with the idea, I think is important.

Yeah, I think ultimately my like actual opinion is like, it's not that deep, y'all. I feel like we're dipping our toes a little bit into what isn't working, but I'm curious for you, are there other things in this Taylor's version that doesn't hit? I will just say that the speak now to his version is very long. I feel like that's not a very sophisticated criticism. And it is... We got an hour and 44 minutes here. Right. And also like as a maybe sort of self-identified, Swifty, it's like, why would you not want more from an artist that you like?

And yet there is something that, I don't know, it starts to maybe a little bit dilute the project with all of these songs coming out of the vault, some of which I, you know, could kind of take or leave. I mean, like, I think electric touch. I think the fallout voice song is fun. And yet, I don't think it's like an essential part of this, this project exactly. and I actually feel the same way about the Haley Williams feature too. I love the idea of putting these artists together. But I think as the album just like starts to go on, it ceases being yet another sort of tight study of a kind of like post-adolescence and instead becomes long.

I feel like the streaming era actually does this bonus material a disservice. because back in CD times when we fell in love with Taylor, you would have had a bonus disc and you kind of could interact with that on its own and there's no break between the album and the bonus material. I really like this idea of the lid being on like a bonus CD versus being like tacked on to the end of this album. You know, I think when Emma falls in love, I think is really cute.

When Emma falls in love, she paces the floor, closes the blinds and love. I love when Taylor sings about her friends, about, like, observations about, like, women. When Emma falls and laughs, she calls up her mom, jokes about the ways that this one could go wrong. We're not from the perspective of the sort of, like, I protagonist. So, yeah, I find that one really, really sweet. I think some of these bonus ones, like that song, though, also point to some of the youthfulness of the lyrics. Like, I think it is a sweet song.

it's also not her strongest chorus that she's ever written. It's kind of a bunch of non-secretor rhymes that just kind of sound nice together, but don't put you in a place. It's a catchy melody, but totally disconnected ideas. She's a kind of book you can't put down as one metaphor. Then she's Cleopatra in a small town as another idea. Then there's these good boys. And to understand her, you have to love her.

I wish I was her. It's just like, it's not doing a lot. Yeah, that's what I mean by like, fearless B-sides. Like, it does feel like a good. Again, it kind of still feels like that, like we're still in that town vibe energy. Yeah, yeah. It is definitely in the country vibe. It's doing that thing.

You know it is not in the country vibe, though. The song, I Can See You. This is like Taylor Swift's London calling. I don't know how fans of the clash would feel about this comparison. Yeah, I got like a coastal 70s vibe somehow. Yeah, it's got these like, like, 12-string guitars. It feels very much like driving coastal

California music. That exactly. I have a couple of things that aren't working for me on the album. The first is that on the original, she's credited with, of course, singing, and then playing guitar, banjo, and hand-clapping. And yet, on Taylor's version, she's only credited

for her voice. Where is the hand-clapping? No hand-clapping. And the guitar and the banjo. Now, Taylor's extremely busy. She's doing all of this. amongst the biggest tour in the world. I'm actually amazed that she got this album done at all. Now, for the most part, I really enjoy all of the vocal updates.

I like the new Taylor voice. I think it's stronger. There are a few cases where I actually think there's some audible errors. Like, in back to December, first, let's listen to the original. I love that breathy goodbye on the original, but check out Taylor's version. Do you hear that? Goodbye. There is this scoop.

Now look, every contemporary pop record has vocal tuning on it to improve the performance. I have no problem with this. I do take issue with a song, which is supposed to be an organic record, that isn't supposed to sound tuned, when there is an obvious little artifact of that tuning. It sounds like that pitch was not correct. It started lower. It went high and hit the proper pitch.

But all of the in-between doesn't sound right. To me, that is just like a forced error that should have been fixed and did not need to end up on this record. And if this is Taylor's version, if this is the new definitive, I want it to be error-free. Right. And that actually kind of reminds me Taylor Swifty Scholars notice on Last Kiss. Taylor's version had a lack of what people are calling breathiness or even shakiness. And I hope the sun shines and it's a beautiful day. And something reminds you, you wish you had stayed.

That has also been a kind of interpretation of a sort of lack of real feeling, you know, a sort of imperfect lack of perfection or something like that. Yeah. Where, you know, the original is, whether sort of real or feigned or performed, I mean, it's all performed, right? But, you know, you can actually kind of hear the emotion and the sort of wavering and the breathiness sort of works for the feeling of the song. And I hope the sun shines and it's a beautiful day. And something reminds you, you wish you had to stay. For me, it's like really on day.

Like right after day, there's like this shaky, breathy conclusion to the word. And it's a beautiful day. I think the re-recording is technically sort of better or more precise to kind of close off the sound. And I hope the sun shines and it's a beautiful day. And something reminds you. You wish you had stayed. But there is something like a little unpolished that works about the original. That might be because the original vocals were primarily her demos that she recorded.

Sometimes the first or first couple of performances capture that raw, unguarded quality that you want in pop music. And as you get to know your song better and improve at it, you kind of have to perform those moments more rather than just let them be uncertain. One of the things I have been really interested with Taylor over the past few years is her development as a vocalist. One of the things I really enjoy about the recent albums, not the re-recordings, is her willing to get more creative with her voice, uglier with her voice, to be kind of deliberately grading at times versus the criticism that she's gotten and that she's referenced. in albums like Speak Now of being accused of, you know, not being a great singer, etc. And so there is a no pun, sort of fearless kind of performing ugliness and not sort of technical perfection that is, of course, very technically difficult to do as a singer. And so in stepping back to Speak Now, I do think it a little bit is a kind of off of that

sort of track of needing to be replicating the old with the kind of wisdom of the new that isn't as risky as maybe some of her latest work. To close out, I want to look at how is it going for Taylor and what we think we're going to see next, at least what we hope to see next. I did a little bit of digging and was surprised to see just how successful these re-recordings have been. We've seen plenty of press, but when I log into chart metric, a site that looks at all streaming everywhere

and puts it on nice, easy to interpret graphs, you'll see that the re-recordings of her biggest songs are growing much faster in listens than her earlier recordings. Music Business Worldwide reported Taylor Swift's Taylor versions re-records may be exceeding even her high expectations They said that according to data from Luminate that the 222 red Taylor's version was played 961 million times while in the same year the original red was played 254 million times down 41% year over year from 432 million plays in 2021.

That is bonkers to me. How should we think about the phenomenon of the success of these albums? I mean, mission accomplished. Those numbers are so mind-boggling. It's hard to even... We use the word unprecedented willy-nilly, but I do think we're like treading that territory, right? Like, this is a level of pop stardom that it is actually hard to kind of wrap your mind around. I mean, that's just like thinking in terms of like listens.

That doesn't even account for, right? The tour itself, the discourse for better and for worse. And just like all of the kind of attendant auxiliary fanfare that's accumulated just around. Again, re-recordings of albums that already happened, moments that already happened. Right, right, right. So I feel like this raises a big question about where it can go because the first re-release, there's all the press about, oh, re-releasing your music. She really owned the narrative about ownership.

And then when Fearless came out, it had one pivotal song all too well, the 10-minute version that had this music video, a celebrity in it, it was this whole celebrity gossip and the whole blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It captivated a lot of folks. now she's at her peak in terms of media awareness, but largely because of this tour. And I think that Speak Now is, again, a smart album to release at this moment because it's not being buried by the tour, but it's not the album that I think people are looking for the most. Maybe fans are looking for the most. So good timing.

Where can you go from here? She has three more records, her debut self-titled, 1989, and reputation. What do you think we're going to hear? What do you want to hear? And what can you do with it? So I'm really excited for us as a community to reevaluate the importance of reputation as an album. It will be interesting to revisit that album absent the political era in which that album came out. Right.

Which I thought. In 2017, right after major political campaign, new president. We don't have to get into it. That album, I think, got unfairly sort of imbricated in a lot of elsewhere sort of turmoil that was, like, happening at the time. And if part of the kind of project of revisiting the albums is to revisit the music, I also say that Taylor has been very smart about the timing of the re-releases. And she sort of finds a thesis with each album that does sort of keep us paying attention such that it's not just a visitation of what came before. And so I am kind of interested to see what her theses will be for these remaining albums. I do not doubt at all that she'll find a way to create moments for these next.

albums. I think the only real kind of open question to me is what happens with self-titled. It's just like kind of... Yeah, with the debut album, yeah. Hang. And like, I you know, I don't know.

I mean, I'm sure fans are clamoring, but is it guaranteed that she's going to re-release that one? You know, it's probably the commercially least important, right? It gets fewer streams than other other 1989 or

which of course were both released in the streaming era. And so those are some of her most streamed albums. She has the most to gain financially from those albums. I think the real question is really how she addresses the material. With these country-ish albums and her sort of turn to pop but with still some country stylings and red, she has this organic band. Like it makes a lot of sense to update it, make it sound more high-fi, IMAX version of Taylor Swift.

You probably could assume the same thing for the self-titled, but because it's her most youthful voice, I kind of hope that we'll hear some more reimagining. And probably because if it's less essential commercial nature, it might merit. The real question marks, though, for me,

are the two big albums, 1989 and reputation. These are pop albums. And how does she go about redoing these? Where they are sample-based, their synthesizer-based. Yeah, these are my two favorite.

albums, they sound so. They do sound crisp. They do sound perfect. In contemporary pop music, it's really important to get the sounds right. Like, if the sounds are different, like the Gloria Gaynor that we played earlier, you're just like the reverb on the drums is wrong and it sounds like 1980s. It's a different song. It's a harder task, I think, to update contemporary pop music and keep you in the same vibe. Where it could work for me is that I actually really love when big pop songs go on the road and finally get a band. And sometimes the band, the band can add more to it. So I don't know. I guess if I had my way, I would like to hear a little bit more of this, this great touring band on her pop albums. But I'm really curious, as you shared,

how is she going to own the narrative of each of those releases so that it is yet the next big thing that we can talk about? She will find a way. Isn't that what she always does? Lauren, it's been so much fun. Thanks for talking Taylor. Anytime. I help you come back. Switched-on-pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producer is Nashaw-Kirwa, a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of Switched-on-Pop at our website, Switchedonpop.com. On social media, we are at Switched-on-Pop, including now on threads. If you want to follow Lauren Michelle Jackson, she is pros before bros.

That's pros, the letter B, the number four, the letter B. B-R-O-S. If you want more on Taylor's version's re-recordings, I was recently on the Pop Pantheon podcast hosted by DJ Louis X-14th. It's a very comprehensive look at all of the re-recordings, and it's a lot of fun. I'll share that in the show notes. We'll be back again next Tuesday with a look into the past. We'll be listening to 100 years of Louis Armstrong.

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