Taylor Swift performs onstage during the 55th Academy of Country Music Awards at the Grand Ole Opry on September 16, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Taylor Swift has surprised fans with two new albums over the past year, “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and revealed she had been rerecording her first six albums in an effort to control her own masters.
The musician announced Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that her rerecorded version of the “Love Story” song will be available at midnight ET. Swift also teased that she had finished rerecording her album “Fearless” and would be releasing it to the public “soon.”
Her official website is offering preorders of the album, which are set to be delivered on April 9.
The album features six songs that didn’t make the cut when the original was released. The album is officially called “Fearless: Taylor’s Version.”
“My version of ‘Fearless’ will have 26 songs on it because I’ve decided to add songs from the vault, which are songs that almost made the original ‘Fearless’ album, but I’ve now gone back and recorded those so that everyone will be able to hear not only the songs that made the album, but the songs that almost made it,” Swift said.
“Fearless,” which was originally released in 2008, is the most-awarded country album of all time. It is the only country album in history to win the Grammy for the all-genre album of the year and country album of the year, as well as the top awards from the Country Music Association, the Academy of Country Music and the American Music Awards.
Swift confirmed in November that the rights to her first six albums had been sold by Scooter Braun to a private equity firm in a deal worth more than $300 million.
Swift tried to buy back her masters, but said Braun’s team wanted her to sign a nondisclosure agreement before she was permitted to look at Big Machine’s financial records. The NDA would also have required her to never speak out against Braun.
The singer promised to rerecord her old songs, recognizing that it would reduce the value of her masters.
Braun and Shamrock Capital Advisors weren’t immediately available to comment.
A month after the deal was announced, Swift teased the new version of her hit song “Love Story.” She told fans at the time that she wasn’t finished rerecording all of her music yet, but allowed friend Ryan Reynolds to use the new iteration for a Match dating site ad.
“I’ve spoken a lot about why I’m remaking my first albums,” Swift wrote in a Twitter post. “But the way I’ve chosen to do this will hopefully illuminate where I’m coming from. Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really *knows* that body of work.”
Correction: This story has been revised to correct that Swift’s interview with ABC was Thursday.
