The most obvious reason for Swift’s fidelity to the original Fearless is business. Read: Taylor Swift misses the old Taylor Swift, too Does it make you cringe? She’s telling you to go easier on your past self.
Think back to something you expended a lot of effort on 13 years ago. Swift’s faithfulness to her teenage vision is unexpectedly moving. “You Belong With Me” remains one of the best songs in pop history, and the pre-chorus simile in “Breathe” is still kind of clunky. If notes, lyrics, or tempos have shifted, you can isolate how only with careful use of the pause button. Her voice has deepened, she sometimes emphasizes fresh syllables, and her team has tweaked some instrumentation and sonic mixing, but the compositions are fundamentally the same. Her new rerecording of Fearless, titled Fearless (Taylor’s Version), simply affirms who she was in 2008. The Taylor Swift who’s now 31 does not sound like she wants to change her past. The album captured the act of painting over naïveté with experience-a common process in adolescence, when a couple of months of aging can feel like a lifetime of education.
On “White Horse,” she chided, “Stupid girl, I should’ve known,” as she thought back to a breakup. “Wish you could go back / And tell yourself what you know now,” she said on “15,” a reminiscence about her freshman year of high school. Across her smash second album, Fearless, Swift sang about moments she wanted to relive and, in some cases, rewrite.
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