Borchetta refused, unless Swift rejoined Big Machine (she’d left and signed with Republic Records) and “earned” her old masters, “one album back at a time, one for every new album I turned in,” Swift wrote in a heated Tumblr post in 2019.
As her catalogue grew more valuable over time, the ever-shrewd Swift tried to buy the masters for her first six albums from Big Machine. At the beginning of her career, Swift signed with a small indie label in Nashville called Big Machine Records, which was run by a record executive named Scott Borchetta. It was not a move born out of an artistic impulse, but a desire to regain control over her catalogue.
Last week, Swift released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a newly recorded version of her 2008 album, the first of six re-recorded albums that she’s planning for in the coming years. Over the years, this taste for vengeance has migrated from the realm of the personal and romantic to the professional. She was a hopeless romantic trying to write her own fairy tale, but she was also developing a serious hunger for vengeance against anyone who dared to disappoint her. On “Fearless,” Swift sharpened her lyrical specificity, using proper nouns and detailed renderings of conversations and experiences to create an indelible image of Taylor Swift, the savvy naïf. “Fearless” was also where she began to develop the emotional and attitudinal signatures that she has carried through almost every era of her career, and which have defined her as a songwriter. The album, which followed the self-titled début that made her an industry darling, was the first in many incremental evolutions that Swift has made from a Nashville-based country singer-songwriter to a globally bound pop superstar. It was one of the standout tracks from Swift’s sophomore album, “Fearless,” which came out in 2008. By the age of eighteen, a breakout country star named Taylor Swift felt like she’d accrued enough hindsight to reflect on her younger self with authority: “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team / I didn’t know it at fifteen,” she sang on “Fifteen,” a ballad about her freshman year in high school.
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