'Fearless' Taylor Swift: Unveils Cover Art for Re-Release of 2008 Album,' New Version of 'Love Story' Drops Midnight

Nearly two years after Scooter Braun sold the master rights to Taylor Swift's first six albums, [...]

By Allison Schonter

Nearly two years after Scooter Braun sold the master rights to Taylor Swift's first six albums, the multi-award-winning megastar is back with the highly anticipated re-release of her 2008 album, Fearless. After smashing records with the back-to-back releases of Folklore and Evermore in 2020, Swift is as busy as ever by releasing even more music in 2021, announcing Thursday morning she re-recorded the version of her hit song "Love Story," which will drop at midnight. The 10-time Grammy winner further shared how the re-recording of Fearless will be titled Fearless: Taylor's Version and feature 26 songs, including six new songs "from the vault."

Swift shared the exciting news during a Thursday morning appearance on Good Morning America. In a message to fans, she announced her excitement, sharing, "Tonight, at midnight, I'll be putting out my version of my song, 'Love Story,' which was originally on my album Fearless." She also teased that she has since "finished re-recording all of Fearless, which will be coming out soon." Although Swift did not reveal a release date for the album, she said it "will have 26 songs on it because I've decided to add songs from the vault, which are songs that almost made the original Fearless album, but I've now gone back and recorded those so that everyone will be able to hear not only songs that made the album but the songs that almost made it: the full picture."

Following the announcement, Swift shared the news to Instagram, where she also shared the album's cover. Set in sepia tones, the cover features Swift recreating her pose from the original Fearless album. In the included message, Swift used some of her old antics of capitalizing certain letters to reveal a message, which read, "April Ninth," a likely hint at the album's release date.

In the post, Swift reflected on that earlier era of her career, writing that when she "thinks back on the fearless album and that you turned it into, a completely involuntary smile creeps across my face." She said Fearless "was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth." Speaking of the songs being released from the vault, Swift said she wants fans "to have the whole story." The six new songs, she said, were written between the ages of 16 and 18, adding that they are "the ones it killed me to leave behind."

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A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

Swift first announced in August 2019 that she would be re-recording her first six albums. The decision came after the multi-million-dollar acquisition of her original masters by Scooter Braun, who assumed ownership of her masters after Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group. Swift first teased the re-recording of "Love Story" in December.

During a speech at Billboard's first-ever Woman of the Decade in 2019, Swift used her speech to call out Braun and his company, Ithaca Holdings who purchased Big Machine Label Group for a reported $300 million — a situation Swift previously referred to on her Tumblr at the time as her "worst-case scenario."

"Of course, Scooter never contacted me or my team to discuss it prior to the sale or even when it was announced," Swift said in her speech. "I'm fairly certain he knew exactly how I would feel about it, though, and let me just say that the definition of the toxic male privilege in our industry is people saying 'but he's always been nice to me' when I'm raising valid concerns about artists and their rights to own their music. And of course, he's nice to you — if you're in this room, you have something he needs."

"The fact is that private equity is what enabled this man to think, according to his own social media post, that he could 'buy me,'" she continued. "But I'm obviously not going willingly."

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