Don’t you wish you could go back to the time in your life when you would dance around your childhood bedroom and scream the lyrics to gut wrenching country breakup songs as if you had experienced something as tragic as the lyrics?
Well, Taylor Swift is about to allow us to do just that because Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is coming April 9th (or so we think?).
Before we begin, let us reflect on the timeline of Taylor Swift’s surprises over the last year and a half…
In June of 2019, Swift told us over Instagram Live that she would be releasing her sixth studio album called Lover on August 23rd. It is the first album that she would own her master recordings outright under her own name (this was huge!!).
Less than a year later, on July 24th, 2020, Taylor Swift released another album with less than a day’s notice. Her announcement came at 8 a.m. that Thursday, and by midnight, her seventh studio album, Folklore dropped. Which again, she owned the masters under her own name.
Just under five months later, on December 11th, the sister album to Folklore, called Evermore, would arrive and prove to be even more magical and magnificently lyrical than expected.
Since then, Swifties across the globe have been anticipating another surprise. With theories of what the next bombshell could be floating across social media, it was suspected that a third album in the Folklore-Evermore series could be coming, or possibly the long-awaited re-records, which Taylor was eligible to begin recording again in November 2020 to begin her (love) story all over again.
Although we got a glimpse of what this new “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” would sound like a couple months ago in Ryan Reynolds’s Match.com commercial, there was still too much of the song that had not yet been released. Looking back now, that should have been a hint as to what was coming next.
On Thursday, February 11th, Taylor announced that she would not only be releasing the re-recorded version of “Love Story” but she would also be releasing the re-recordings of her entire Fearless album, originally debuted in 2008 when Swift was only 18 years old.
She recently tweeted: “Hey guys so who’s gonna tell 18 year old me that our love story would still be going strong all these years later? Thanks for the ways you fill my life with love 24/7, every damn day. Happy Valentines Day.”
In the letter which she released on Thursday morning after her announcement on Good Morning America, there were randomly capitalized letters which spelled out “APRIL NINTH.” It seems like a hint, however, something like that is just too blatantly obvious for Taylor. She also mentioned that her Fearless re-record would be coming “soon,” but April 9th is not exactly “soon.”
Swifties have begun to notice, contrary to her most recent albums, Folklore and Evermore, that announcing her singles weeks and months ahead of a scheduled album release date would put the Fearless re-record back on a normal release schedule. She had used this method early on in her career and carried it through to Lover with the occasional creative anecdote, but has not done it since.
Back in 2008, like many other traditional albums, Taylor’s first single released in honor of Fearless was indeed “Love Story.” She then went on to release four more singles leading up to the album release: “You Belong with Me,” “White Horse,” “Fifteen,” and lastly, “Fearless.” If Swift were to follow this schedule once again, these five songs may stretch out long enough to hold Swifties over until the ultimate release on April ninth which is said to have six extra songs from “the vault” which never made it onto the original Fearless album. The names of these six songs have yet to be released.
Did she think we weren’t going to realize that she is wearing what looks like Romeo’s shirt from the original “Love Story” music video? Could this be an allusion to something to come?
We can stay hopeful that the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version) will come sooner than April 9th, but in the meantime, hold on tight to “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” and keep it on repeat!