By Sophie Hart
Taylor Swift attended the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Friday to screen her All Too Well short film.
The fifteen-minute-long clip starring Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink and Teen Wolf’s Dylan O’Brien was released in November last year upon the re-release of her 2012 album ‘Red’ and is now in running for the chance to win an Oscar.
The decision to re-record all her previous albums comes in light of a very public dispute in 2019 between Swift and her former record company, where it was revealed that the albums had been sold to an investment company and Taylor now had no control over her work.
Although the Love Story singer is far from the first musician to re-record old albums, (Queen and Prince fans know the drill all too well)- it is undeniable that Swift brings a fresh demeanor to the practice.
With new photoshoots and new merch, the 32-year-old songstress celebrates the re-recordings as if they are brand new albums.
For OG fans, years of anticipation come to a screeching halt at the release of new tracks “from the vault” – songs recorded at the time of the album’s original release but were discarded from the original, some of which we were teased with but were never able to enjoy fully until now.
Swift commented at TIFF that she was eventually able to view the loss as a moment of opportunity to not only revisit her creative output, but to also reshape the aesthetic and emotional narratives of each record.
She also stated in the discussion at TIFF that the All Too Well short film benefited from the distance a decade gave her, and that at the time of writing and releasing it she would not have been able to create such a vulnerable music video.
So far, Fearless and Red have been re-recorded, and it is expected that her eponymous debut, Speak Now, 1989 and Reputation are to be re-recorded in the near future and we look forward to re-discovering the revised magic we’ve fallen in love with over the years.
