Music /Album Reviews

Thirteen Years Later, Taylor Swift is Fearless

After spending years battling for ownership over her music, the multifaceted songstress is finally in control.

By: Rayne Fisher-Quann

Taylor Swift:

Fearless: Taylor’s Version

Sound: The classic country twang that made Swift famous gets a mature, modern makeover
If you like: Carrie Underwood, Kasey Musgraves, Carly Rae Jepsen
Why you should listen: The album that jumpstarted Taylor Swift’s rise to fame has been completely reimagined with sophisticated production, mature vocals, and a bevy of previously-unreleased songs
Best track: Love Story

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In case you haven’t noticed, Taylor Swift has had a pretty prodigious decade.

She’s traversed several genres, faced some of the most high-profile scandals in pop culture history, and made some powerful enemies during her rise from small-town country singer to one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

And after a lengthy legal battle over the rights to her music, she’s embarked on a mission to re-record and re-master every one of her albums, starting with the album that kickstarted her prodigious rise, 2008’s Fearless.

Any Swift fan knows that 13 is her lucky number — she’s worked it into everything from stage costumes to Instagram posts to song lyrics — , and given her proclivity for Easter eggs, it hardly seems coincidental that the first release of her Taylor’s Version series is coming out exactly 13 years after its original debut.

Considering that this is one of the most ambitious and almost entirely unprecedented projects in modern music history, I’m sure some extra luck felt good, but she didn’t need it. Fearless: Taylor’s Version is a rare improvement on an already phenomenal album.

The songs are transformed by Swift’s mature voice and newly sophisticated production, but beyond their technical merit, this album holds immense ideological importance. She now owns the songs she first wrote when she was 17. For the first time, after more than a decade of exploitation at the hands of the music industry, Swift is in control again.

Once this project is complete, she’ll finally be able to exercise autonomy over every piece of art she’s created. Hopefully, she’ll also be able to set a new precedent for what young artists deserve.