From Taylor Swift to William Wordsworth – can the remake replace the original?

Last week, Taylor Swift released her third album in ten months. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is on course to top the UK charts – following in the footsteps of Folklore (2020) and Evermore (2020). If a casual listener were to hear the album, they might wonder why these songs sound familiar. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is a re-recorded version of Fearless (2008), Swift’s second studio album. Swift’s master records of her first six albums – the eponymous 2006 debut up until Reputation (2017) – were sold to the pop-manager Scooter Braun in 2019. Braun then sold the back catalogue to the private equity firm Shamrock Holdings. Swift plans to re-record each of the albums to own the rights to her music.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying that despite Fearless’ (Taylor’s version) domination of the 2021 charts, it is not truly a 2021 album. There are six previously unheard songs from the vault, but the other twenty songs on the album have counterparts on the original 2008 record. The differences between the albums are interesting. Swift claims that she wanted to create the “same but better”’ with only improvements in “sonic quality”, but a thirty one-year-old recording songs originally written and sung by a teenager raises inevitable issues. 

Fearless (2008) has some of the most quintessential Swift songs of her early small-town country-girl days. Fifteen is the tale of being a freshman in High School and falling in love with a “boy on the football team”, while Hey Stephen is the narration of a crush so intense it could only ever truly be sung – or felt – by a teenager. You Belong With Me – complete a music video that rivals Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for era-defining influence – was one of the most pervasive sounds of the 2010s. Love Story, Swift’s rewriting of Romeo and Juliet, is arguably the album’s best song. I’ve been unable to listen to it without wincing since my English teacher at some point in the mid-2010s exclaimed, with true pathos, that he wished Swift’s teacher had been able to get the tragedy plot across to her. 

As good as Swift’s re-recordings are – and she does try to be sensitive to the younger woman’s original inflections – the 2021 Swift can never re-capture the youth, naivety, and freshness of the 2008 artist. The intro to The Way I Loved You is sung by a heartbreakingly young voice in the 2008 album that leaves the 2021 version sounding over-mature and dissonantly confident. And it is hard to keep a straight face listening to the multimillionaire pop-star sing about being in a ‘small town’ rather than Hollywood in the song White Horse. This is not to say that the recent album is a failure – it alters the occasionally over-shouty tones of the earlier album – but re-making an album that is so inextricably bound up in youth and young love leaves us with a somewhat dissatisfying product.

All of this raises the key question: what does Taylor Swift have in common with William Wordsworth? 

It is an unfair comparison – there are too many points one could make (well-catalogued disputes with musical/literary partners; a predisposition to writing about outdoor spaces; a youthful dalliance with the bloody radicalism of the French Revolution). But, the most illuminating comparison to be drawn is between Fearless (2008, 2021) and The Prelude (1798-99, 1805, 1850). 

Wordsworth’s The Prelude is an epic poem that tells the story of his boyhood to poet-hood; “fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. Initially written in two books in 1799, it expanded to five and then thirteen books in 1804-5, before being posthumously published in fourteen books in 1850. By the 1850 version, Wordsworth had altered much of the language and imagery of the earlier poem.

Critics such as F. R. Leavis argued that these changes constitute a “representative improvement” as images are condensed, and his “philosophy” is more readable, whilst others have argued that the “tightness and economy” of the later version violates the “delicacy and spontaneity” of the earlier; “the later Wordsworth had forgotten much that the younger poet was trying to do”. Swift’s own quest for improved “sonic quality” – country twang is replaced with a more balanced sound – has the grown-up singer forgotten much that the younger artist was trying to do? 

I am not claiming that Swift re-recorded Fearless to expunge her former pantheistic or revolutionary tendencies, nor that she regularly changes imagery and phrase, only that what we have now is not simply a re-recording. With its extra material and altered voice, it has to be analysed and considered as a different album alongside the original, much like a side-by-side edition of The Prelude. 

Swift claims she will re-record the other five albums she does not have the rights to, but one has to ask whether simple re-creation is ever possible? Or, if some songs, albums, and emotions can only ever exist as spots in time.