In wormholes on Tumblr and TikTok, you’ll discover a new language of signs and symbols, and a bounty of messages waiting to be decoded.
Is Red really trying to exist anywhere else? The second of six albums that Swift is remaking from scratch to regain financial and legal control of her catalog, it’s built on the well-founded belief that her fandom will consume anything spun by her hands—even lightly retouched versions of songs that came out less than a decade ago, plus a fistful of contemporaneous unreleased tracks for good measure.
After a three-album progression away from country, she revealed the extent of her pop ambition, calling in producers Max Martin and Shellback—Swedish heavy-hitters who had sent Britney Spears and P!nk up the charts—to cue the synths and drop the bass.
Some of it is new only in the sense of being newly attached to this album or newly reclaimed by Taylor: “Ronan” was a one-off charity single in 2012; Little Big Town recorded “Better Man,” a stolen rearview glance on the drive away from toxic love, in 2016; and the venom-laced air kiss “Babe” was released by the country duo Sugarland in 2018.
Not all of them are additive; Swift’s beyond-her-years analysis in the final verse feels disconnected from the in-process pain of the version that we know, and when she opens up the song for its subject’s input , she undermines the definitiveness of her own account.
Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff; see the garish cheer of “The Very First Night,” the too-obvious hook of “Run” .
In light of the song’s subject, this feels significant: By inviting a popular younger artist who has studied her textbook to share her stage, Swift suggests that there’s ample room for them both.
Red, often lauded as Swift’s best album, is not perfect; it contains some of her great masterpieces may be a commercial endeavor first, but that doesn’t mean it lacks an underlying artistic statement: that sometimes we must revisit our past, both the flattering and the less flattering bits, in order to get to our future.