Taylor Swift:?how money drives artists to remake albums

It is a remarkable achievement because these are re-recorded versions of previous big-selling Swift albums. Speak Now was originally released in 2010 and 1989 — named after the year of her birth and is generally thought to be her best album — in 2014. It is a sign of her enormous popularity and fervour of her fanbase that she can shift huge figures for new versions that are only lightly re-done.

Already, Swift has released four re-recorded albums — all billed Taylor’s Version — and there are two more to go. The enterprise has helped push her past the likes of Bruce Springsteen when it comes to US number one albums.

The reason for the reworking her albums is strictly financial. Swift’s original record deal was inked when she was just 15 and as so many young stars did and do, she signed away ownership of her recordings, or masters, as they are known in the business.

In 2019, her former manager Scooter Braun acquired her first six albums which had been released by Big Machine Records. It immediately gave the controversial impresario control of much of her back catalogue. Swift had been in the process of trying to purchase them, and losing out to Braun — whom she has accused of bullying her — was the final straw. Hence the ‘revenge’ of selling her own version and asking her fans to purchase and stream those rather than the originals.

There’s little, from an artistic point of view, to excite about the scheme. The original version of 1989 is a wonderful power-pop album that doffs its hat to the synth pop and soft rock that characterised the ‘80s. The new incarnation, while perfectly fine, doesn’t improve on the 2014 version. In fact, it sounds a little beige in places. But the key, from Swift’s viewpoint, is she has complete ownership.

The commercial performance of the albums is being watched with keen interest by the industry. If Swift can do it, the thinking is that other huge names will follow suit. Why bother going to the trouble of writing and recording a brand new album, when you can simply rejig old songs?

In many ways, that’s exactly what U2 did with their latest album, Songs of Surrender, which was released on St Patrick’s Day. Something of a companion piece to Bono’s absorbing memoir, Surrender, it saw the Edge rework 40 of the band’s career-spanning tracks. In fairness to the guitarist, many of the songs are completely reinvented and some of them benefit from an entirely new approach.

The band see it as an official studio album, but few fans are likely to think of it that way. For cynics among us, it is a mere stop-gap to a proper album and a sign of U2’s creative stagnation when it comes to songwriting. The band, sans Larry Mullen Jr, may be attracting glowing reviews for their spectacular looking residency at the Sphere, Las Vegas, but a comeback single Atomic City, is among the most hackneyed and least inspired songs they’ve released in a 43-year recording career.

But while U2 reworked songs from all their previous albums, Roger Waters has opted to re-record just one album, Dark Side of the Moon. Waters is, by some distance, the most contentious Pink Floyd member and he has and he has regularly been accused of antisemitism – an allegation he denies. It takes considerable chutzpah to re-record one of the most celebrated rock albums ever and, in contrast to Taylor Swift’s light dusting, the 80-year-old has taken a blowtorch and hammer to the album he made with David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason in 1973.

Dark Side of the Moon Redux, as Waters calls it, is an intriguing album and a fascinating companion to the original. Good luck trying to find someone to argue that it’s better than the ‘73 record, but those who give it a chance are likely to find plenty to appreciate. Waters’ gruff singing — many of the lyrics are completely new — take the songs into fascinating new places and there’s a real sense that he’s trying to be respectful to the original songs while finding new meaning from them too.

The reviews have veered from good to highly enthusiastic, but the new take on The Great Gig in the Sky isn’t a patch on the original, not least because it erases Clare Torry’s astonishing vocal performance. The album got to number four in the UK chart but it barely made an impression in the US, reaching just 142 in the Billboard 200. Let’s not fret on his behalf, however. Waters’ net worth is estimated to be around €300m.

One of Waters’ contemporaries, who has even more money in the kitty, also got in on the re-releasing game, amid some controversy. Paul McCartney always loathed the florid production that Phil Spector brought to the Beatles’ final studio album, Let It Be, and in 2003 he finally released the album he felt it should always have sounded like.

Let It Be… Naked saw McCartney strip away virtually all of Spector’s trademark arrangements, especially on The Long and Winding Road. John Lennon had called in the American producer behind McCartney’s back, such was the fractious atmosphere during the recording sessions at Abbey Road. Many prefer the sparser, Macca version, but at the time there were question marks about the ethics of tampering with Beatles’ music when Lennon was not alive to give his yay or nay.

Rick Rubin, who has long been one of the world’s most in-demand producers, perfectly captured the mixed emotions that so many people had felt about McCartney’s handiwork and about re-released albums in general. Declaring “mixed emotions”, he said he was excited by a new Beatles release and praised the sound of Two of Us and how the de-Spectored Long and Winding Road got to the heart of the song’s essence.

Outside of re-recorded albums, acts frequently re-record old songs. Phoebe Bridgers did just that on her Copycat Killer EP, when adding orchestral parts to four songs from her Punisher album. Back in the early 1980s, two of America’s great college rock bands, REM and the B52’s re-reordered their debut singles, respectively Radio Free Europe and Rock Lobster, for their debut albums. More recently, Kanye West was tinkering with songs even after they had been released — a perfect example of an artist suffering a crisis of confidence.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift will be finishing off her lucrative reworkings with the final pair of albums, Reputation from 2017, and her self-titled 2006 debut, likely to appear next year. The canniest operator in pop is certainly getting the last laugh, but not everyone is enthused. A curious by-product is the delays that other musicians are having to accept when it comes to getting their own worked pressed on vinyl.

Such is Swift’s power, that she gets first dibs when it comes to getting Taylor’s Version albums pressed on 12-inch.