Taylor Swift Vows to Record Country Albums Again: ‘I’m Gonna Be Busy’

Long before Taylor Swift was a pop superstar, she was a precocious country music darling, bursting onto the scene with the release of her eponymous freshman album in 2006, when Swift was only 16 years old. Now, with the purchase of her former record label, Big Machine Records, by Scooter Braun, Swift announces she will re-record her first five records, which include her four country albums, and her pop debut with 1989.

“My contract says that starting November 2020, so next year, I can record albums one through five all over again,” Swift shared on Good Morning America. “I think it’s important for artists to own their work. I’m gonna be busy; I’m very excited.”

Smith’s latest album, Lover, was just released, and marks the first time she owns her own music, since the record was released by Republic Records and Taylor Swift Productions.

“Something that’s very special to me about this album is it’s the first one that I will own,” Swift acknowledged.

The Pennsylvania native did not hide her disappointment that Braun had purchased Big Machine Records, and thus her entire catalog of masters of her previous six records.

“For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work,” Swift wrote in a far-reaching post on Tumblr. “Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past. Music I wrote on my bedroom floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then clubs, then arenas, then stadiums.”

Swift, who called the purchase by Braun her “worst case scenario,” blamed the fact that she was allegedly not given the rights to her work the fault of being taken advantage of because of her young age at the time.

“This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,” Swift wrote. And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”

Braun praised Swift’s Lover album on social media, although Swift has yet to reply to his post. In addition to her freshman record, other albums Swift plans to record include Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989.

Purchase Lover at her official website.

Photo Credit: Getty / John Shearer