In the song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” she nodded to the aggressive and trendy sounds of E.D.M., adding a light dubstep drop before the chorus.
At the end of the song, she offers a bit of doctrine: “Love is a ruthless game / Unless you play it good and right.” As with much of Swift’s music, it seemed like an innocent declaration, but it also carried a threat: play by the rules, she implied, or else.
In 2019, in a Tumblr post, she described a galling proposal from Borchetta: she could earn back her masters if she returned to Big Machine; for each new album, she would regain control of an old one.
Swift declined the offer, and Borchetta soon sold Big Machine—and the six Swift albums—to one of her enemies, Scooter Braun, a music manager who had handled the career of her longtime adversary Kanye West during the peak of the artists’ feud, in 2016.
Last year, she began rerecording the six albums. This past April, she released a new recording of “Fearless,” her sophomore album, and this month she released “Red .” The new recordings are not designed to recast the music.
1 hit, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Some of the songs, like “Stay Stay Stay,” had the feel of cheesy jingles, and Swift has used this opportunity to make them slightly more sophisticated.
The song, a downcast acoustic track, sounds more of a piece with the folksy poeticism of Swift’s latest albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” than with “Red.” Swift and Bridgers sing about the passage of time and the inevitability of their irrelevance.
In September, as Swift was preparing to reissue “Red,” TikTokers seized on “Wildest Dreams,” a track from her 2014 record, “1989,” and began using it as a backdrop for silly videos in which they slowly zoomed in on their own faces.
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