Taylor Swift has announced the next of her re-recorded early albums. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), first released in 2010, is out July 7. She announced the news from the stage during one of her Eras Tour stops in Nashville.
Speak Now was Swift’s third album, featuring singles like “Mean,” “Ours,” “Sparks Fly,” and “The Story of Us.” The record sold more than a million copies in its first week, setting a record for the highest number of sales by a solo female country artist. It was nominated for a Best Country Album Grammy, with “Mean” winning for Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song.
Swift announced her plans to re-record all of her pre-Lover material in the summer of 2019, in the wake of Scooter Braun had purchasing her catalog without her involvement. She released Fearless (Taylor’s Version), an update of her 2008 record, in April 2021 after issuing two new albums, folklore and evermore, in 2020. She followed it up in November 2021 with Red (Taylor’s Version), a 30-song update of 2012’s Red.
Though she didn’t put Fearless (Taylor’s Version) up for any Grammys, Swift submitted her Red re-cut for consideration in multiple categories for the 2023 awards. She took home one trophy, winning the Grammy for Best Music Video with “All Too Well: The Short Film.” In 2014, the original version of the album had been up for Album of the Year and Best Country Album, losing to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and Kacey Musgraves’ Same Trailer Different Park, respectively.
In August, Swift set a new record for most Video of the Year awards at the MTV VMAs upon winning for her self-directed visual for the extended version of “All Too Well.” She used the opportunity to announce her tenth album Midnights, releasing several teasers about the project in the weeks leading up to its release. Swift followed it with seven more “3am tracks” within hours of Midnights’ arrival in October, with folklore and evermore collaborator Aaron Dessner joining her on three of them. Midnights debuted at No. 1, marking Swift’s eleventh consecutive album to top the Billboard 200 upon its release.
Between albums, Swift recorded the song “Carolina” for Olivia Newman’s film adaptation of the 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing. The track earned Swift an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, plus a Golden Globes nod for the same. She announced her so-called Eras Tour in November, but Ticketmaster buckled under fans’ demands for tickets, sparking multiple lawsuits and a Senate sub-committee hearing about business practices at Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. Swift is reportedly set to direct a feature-length film from her own script, but further details of that project have not yet been made public.
Revisit Pitchfork’s “Taylor Swift’s Music Ownership Controversy With Scooter Braun: What It Means and Why It Matters.”
