Taylor Swift re-records breakout album ‘Fearless’ after feud over master recordings

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Taylor Swift on Thursday announced she will release a re-recording of her 2008 breakout album “Fearless,” the first step in a plan to wrest back control of all her early music.

“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)”, is expected to be released in April while the first track, “Love Story” will be available from midnight on Thursday.

“I’m so excited to share with you that tonight, at midnight, I’ll be putting out my version of my song ‘Love Story,’ which was originally on my album ‘Fearless,'” Swift told viewers in an appearance on TV show “Good Morning America.”

“This process has been more fulfilling and emotional than I could’ve imagined and has made me ever more determined to re-record all of my music,” Swift later told her 147 million Instagram followers.

The re-recorded “Fearless” album will include Taylor’s big teenage hits like “You Belong to Me” and “Fifteen,” as well as six previously unreleased tracks that did not make it onto the 2008 album, the singer, now 31, said.

The re-recordings are expected to hew closely to the original songs. They will give the 10-time Grammy winner control over licensing her music for commercials, movies, and other ventures, and potentially diminish the value of her original master tapes.

Swift lost control of the master recordings of her first six albums when she left the Big Machine record label in 2019, triggering a bitter and public dispute with its new owner, music executive Scooter Braun. Braun last year sold Swift’s master recordings to a private equity company in a deal reported to be worth more than $300 million.

“Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work,” Swift wrote on Instagram on Thursday.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York and Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Bill Berkrot)