How Taylor Swift reclaimed her past

LOS ANGELES — In 2012, before streaming overtook downloads and physical media as the music industry’s dominant format, the year’s two biggest-selling albums were Adele’s “21” followed by Taylor Swift’s “Red.” As 2021 draws to a close nearly a decade later, this year’s biggest sellers — those records that inspired fans to buy a CD or LP or to find someplace where you can still pay to download rather than stream — are almost certain to be Adele’s latest, “30,” followed by … Taylor Swift’s “Red.”

By now you know how “Red” reentered the picture: Outraged by the 2019 sale of her old label Big Machine — including the master recordings of her first six albums — Swift devised a plan to rerecord her early work as a way to devalue those masters by essentially supplanting them in the marketplace with product she owns. (Big Machine’s buyer was Scooter Braun, the music exec known among other things for a stint managing Swift’s nemesis Kanye West; Braun sold the label last year for a reported $300 million.)

The enterprise seemed quixotic, to say the least, when she announced it. Yet Swift, who wrote and recorded two albums of original songs in 2020, began making good on her wild promise this year, releasing her redo of 2008’s “Fearless” in April — “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” she called it — then dropping “Red (Taylor’s Version)” in November. Both meticulously reproduced the sound of the originals with help from Swift’s collaborators at the time; both lured fans with newly completed renditions of outtakes from Swift’s so-called vault.

And both were prodigious commercial triumphs: “Red (Taylor’s Version)’s” debut atop the Billboard 200 gave Swift her fourth No. 1 album in 16 months — the fastest any artist has ever racked up that many chart-toppers, according to the trade magazine. “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” will likely finish 2021 as the fourth-biggest seller of the year, behind “30,” “Red” and the second of Swift’s made-in-quarantine LPs, “ Evermore,” which is nominated for album of the year at January’s Grammy Awards. (“Folklore,” her first 2020 joint, took that prize at the most recent Grammys in March.) iHeartMedia, the country’s largest radio conglomerate, even said it would replace Swift’s songs with “Taylor’s Version” cuts as she makes them available.

The singer’s follow-through — acts such as Def Leppard and Electric Light Orchestra have re-recorded hits, though never at this scale — reflected her singular blend of determination and wherewithal, not to mention her time off from the road during the pandemic; that the rerecordings have met with such unprecedented success is an indication of her fans’ unique devotion. More striking, though, was the creative energy the 32-year-old drew from this ostensibly business-minded undertaking — how alive she made the past seem as she held it in her hands.

On the made-over “Fearless,” she reshaped her old songs “ Fifteen “ and “ The Best Day,” both of which she wrote as a smart but wide-eyed teenager, to carry the disappointments she faced in the years after they came out; the songs are still about young love and about a parent’s devotion, but now Swift’s slightly wearied vocals speak too of toxic masculinity and of her mom’s lengthy battle with cancer.

“ Mr. Perfectly Fine,” one of the vault tracks on “Fearless,” brought Swift’s long-gone relationship with Joe Jonas (!) back into the spotlight, which was nothing compared to the frenzied chatter Swift set off with the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” she included on “Red (Taylor’s Version)” — and which she went on to sing recently on “Saturday Night Live.”