Taylor Swift fans: set those reminders on your smartphone. Tonight at midnight, the hit artist is releasing a re-recording of her 2008 smash single “Love Story” called “Love Story (Taylor’s Version).”
It’s all part of the build-up to the upcoming release of her re-recorded 2008 album Fearless, of which “Love Story” was the first single. Why, though, is the Evermore singer re-recording an album that came out 13 years ago? It all has to do with some behind-the-scenes drama regarding swift and the rights to the music she has created.
Scooter Braun is a music manager who is best known for managing Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. In 2009, Braun bought the master recordings of Swift’s first six albums as well as Big Machine Records, her previous label.
While Braun has claimed there has been a lot of miscommunication involved, Swift said that the music manager was keeping her from performing any of those songs from her first six albums during her concerts. But in November 2020, Swift gained the legal right to recreate the music, and she has been busy ever since re-recording songs.
Why, though, would Swift fans be interested in buying a new version of an old album? In addition to the fun of hearing how her performance has (or has not) changed, Swift’s Fearless re-recording will include six songs the world has never heard before. These are songs that Swift wrote when she was 16–18 years old. Given the quality of other music she wrote around the time, there is plenty of reason for fans to get excited over the new tracks.
Swift announced everything via Twitter and possibly gave her fans a mystery to encode. She describes the re-recording process as “more fulfilling and emoTional” [sic] than she had imagined and hopes that her fans will enjoy “traveling back in time” as she did to record the new album.
Look closely and you’ll notice that Swift has capitalized many letters in an unusual way throughout the message. Some think that this is a secret message for fans to try to puzzle out.
Sure enough, if you combine all the capitalized letters, you get the hidden message “APRIL NINTH.”
April 9 is the release date for Fearless (Taylor’s Version), according to her website.