Taylor Swift: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) review – re-recording project starting to feel wearying and pointless
Originally released in 2010, Speak Now was the first Taylor Swift album to go studs up, foregrounding the combative spirit that would come to define her. It is to date her only entirely self-written record, her attempt to vanquish critics who had credited her co-writers with the success of her first two albums. (The sing-songily vindictive Mean called out one directly.) The fairytale romances of her first two records turned bitter as Swift turned 20 and experienced real heartache. In the bruised epic Dear John, one of her greatest songs, she rebuked musician John Mayer, 12 years her senior, for treating her poorly when they dated. Her country sound hardened accordingly, skewing towards pop-punk and gothic rock. Even the ballads expanded to an indomitable scale, primed to fill the vast rooms she was now selling out. Eleven of the original 14 tracks are classics, and Speak Now (the 2010 version) remains a fivestar smash.
The album is premised on Swift saying the things she wished she had said: an extended fantasy about having the last word in heartbreak – but also, for the first time, her own narrative. (Innocent consoles Kanye West, who in 2009 invaded Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music awards, instigating a pop-cultural paradigm shift that we’re still living through.)
Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is a continuation of that spirit. It’s the third album in Swift’s project to re-record her first six records, made for the label Big Machine, after the masters were sold to an old foe, Scooter Braun. Swift claimed she wasn’t offered the chance to buy them back herself; re-recording them gives her ownership of the new master recordings and forces any directors wishing to sync her music to use her versions. The saga educated a generation of young fans about music rights and made supporting this extremely lucrative re-recording campaign an ethical issue.
Your mileage may vary. Still only halfway through, the project is starting to feel a little wearying and pointless, other than in the business sense. There is limited value in playing spotthe-difference between the recordings, and only a few of the bonus From the Vault tracks – recorded at the time but not released – have been keepers.
I hope the three albums still to come – her self-titled debut, 1989 and Reputation – arrive as some sort of box set: the first is just endearing juvenilia; the other two, along with their attendant, gruelling press cycles, live far too fresh in the memory to revisit.
And Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) dilutes some of the original’s acid. One issue with Swift revisiting her older work is that her voice has changed with age. Now 33, she’s a much richer and more skilled singer than she was then, but their piercing, youthful twang was what made these songs kick harder in all their dressing-downs and rabid desires, emphasising the sense of a girl wading into adult waters. “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” from opener Mine, is one of her best lyrics, but here its reckless glee is a touch muted. Mean also sounds more conciliatory in its new softness. Otherwise, the musical consistency is as impressive as ever.
More than the re-recordings of Fearless or Red, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is a project of revisionist history. As well as these re-recordings, Swift is currently engaged in a huge retrospective project, the world-conquering Eras tour, in which she plays songs from each of her albums (bar the debut). (Canny branding again: most tours have a wide-ranging setlist.) On one recent date in Minneapolis, she instructed fans not to go after Mayer when she released the updated Dear John, telling them: “I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together … I’m not putting this album out so that you can go and feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about.”
While that song preserves her youthful sense of being hurt, another has received an edit. Pre-release, there was speculation about whether Swift would change the lyrics to the raging Better Than Revenge, in which she sang of a romantic rival: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” Swift hasn’t performed it since the original Speak Now tour, and in 2014 told the Guardian: “I was 18 when I wrote that. That’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realise no one can take someone from you if they don’t want to leave.” Sure enough, the new version has different lyrics: “He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches.” The song remains a banger, with a massive firework of a “whoa-oh!” in the chorus, but the lyric change feels feeble, as well as inconsistent with the rest of the project. It’s the point where re-recording becomes relitigation.
It feels bad faith to her fans, too: no one listens to the original and thinks, “Yes, slut-shaming is good!” Hayley Williams of Paramore appears on one From the Vault track – an artist who has reckoned very publicly with the same issue. For years, the pop-punk band stopped playing their 2007 song Misery Business due to the line “once a whore, you’re nothing more”. Then, in 2022, Billie Eilish asked Williams to perform it with her at Coachella, and this year the band restored it to their setlists in response to fan demand. Both lyrics are valuable artefacts of how girlhood felt in the late 2000s, when women were still routinely pitted against each other culturally and “not like the other girls” culture thrived.
The song with Williams, Castles Crumbling, is the best bonus track from a slightly bland selection. As with Nothing New, a From the Vault collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers from Red (Taylor’s Version), the crestfallen, delicate song finds Swift and Williams reckoning with fame and falling from grace – a prescient song for Swift to have written at the outset of her imperial phase. Although Castles Crumbling is nowhere near pop-punk, Williams’ presence, along with that of Fall Out Boy on the rueful stadium chugger Electric Touch, is a good bit of revisionist history, rightly honouring Speak Now as emo canon.
I Can See You is actively bad Maroon 5-core, though the lyrics are intriguingly sexual for an artist who kept things pretty chaste lyrically well into early adulthood: “I could see you up against the wall with me,” she sings.
These bonus tracks are mostly notable for this streak of raging fantasy, from the carnal to, in Timeless, Swift finding old photos of couples in an antique shop and imagining herself yearning for a lover who’s gone off to war. It’s endearingly unhinged, and she knows it. On the limpid, puttering Foolish One, she sweetly chides herself for her naivety: “Stop checkin’ your mailbox for confessions of love / That ain’t never gonna come” – Swift the realist v Swift the hopeless romantic. Some of her best songwriting puts her in conversation with herself like this. Parts of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) feel more like she’s silencing herself.