Taylor Swift debuted “four previously unreleased songs” ahead of the Friday launch of her highly anticipated, Ticketmaster-breaking stadium tour.
The “Anti-Hero” and “Lavender Haze” hitmaker dropped the quartet of singles at midnight “in celebration of the Eras Tour,” which follows the October release of her critically acclaimed and record-breaking “Midnights” album. Swift announced her latest auditory offering Thursday via Instagram Stories and they manifested on Spotify hours later, feeding the frenzy of which Swift album would get the full “Taylor’s Version” treatment next.
The tunes are all “Taylor’s Version” tracks, meaning they are re-recordings of music that got stuck in ownership limbo when her former label, Big Machine Records, was sold to Scooter Braun in 2019. Swift lost the master recordings to her first six albums but later “devised a plan to rerecord her early work as a way to devalue those masters by essentially supplanting them in the marketplace with product she owns,” Times music critic Mikael Wood explained. (Braun later sold the label for a reported $300 million to the private-equity group Ithaca Holdings).
Following the 2021 “Taylor’s Version” remakes of her Grammy-winning “Fearless” and beloved “Red” albums, the country-crossover star on Friday released the handful of recordings branded with her subtle-flex parenthetical. They include the guitar-heavy rock ballad “Eyes Open (Taylor’s Version)” and “Safe & Sound (Taylor’s Version)” featuring the Civil Wars’ Joy Williams and John Paul White. Both songs were featured on the soundtrack to the 2012 blockbuster “The Hunger Games.”
The 33-year-old superstar on Friday also debuted “If This Was a Movie (Taylor’s Version),” whose previous iteration hailed from the Target deluxe edition of her 2010 “Speak Now” album, her third studio album. The original song was also released as a promotional single by iTunes and Amazon in 2011.
The fourth track is the love song “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” a previously leaked outtake from her seventh studio album, “Lover.”
Naturally, Swifties celebrated the arrival of their queen’s new music and fueled speculation about which historic album would next be made over by the singer-songwriter. They also complained that the songs weren’t immediately available on Spotify at midnight. You’ll recall that the streaming platform briefly crashed in October following the release of her “Midnights” album. Don’t mess with the Swifties, OK?
The Eras Tour kicks off Friday with back-to-back shows in Glendale, Ariz., whose mayor temporarily rebranded the town as “Swift City” to sanctify the launch. The tour stops locally in Inglewood, Calif., this summer, with a five-night stint at SoFi Stadium on Aug. 3-5, 8 and 9. That makes Swift the first artist to present that many shows at the 70,000-seat, $5-billion venue, which opened in 2020 and serves as the joint home of the NFL’s L.A. Rams and L.A. Chargers.
