Taylor Swift debuted “four previously unreleased songs” ahead of Friday’s launch of her highly-anticipated Ticketmaster-busting stadium tour.
The “Anti-Hero” and “Lavender Haze” hitmaker dropped the quartet of singles at midnight “in celebration of the Eras Tour,” which follows the October release of her critically acclaimed album “Midnights,” which broke records. Swift announced her latest audition offering Thursday via Instagram Stories and they rallied on Spotify hours later, fueling the frenzy over which Swift album would get the full “Taylor’s Version” treatment next.
The tunes are all “Taylor Version” tracks, meaning they’re re-recordings of music that was caught in ownership limbo when her former label, Big Machine Records, was sold to Scooter Braun in 2019. Swift lost the tracks. master recordings of her first six albums, but then “had a plan to re-record her early work as a way to devalue those masters by essentially supplanting them on the market with products she owns,” Times music critic Mikael Wood explained. (Braun later sold the label for $300 million to private equity group Ithaca Holdings.)
Following 2021’s “Taylor’s Version” remakes of his Grammy Award-winning albums “Fearless” and “Red,” the crossover country star released a handful of recordings on Friday marked with his subtle flexible bracket. They include the guitar-heavy rock ballad “Eyes Open (Taylor’s Version)” and “Safe & Sound (Taylor’s Version)” featuring Joy Williams and John Paul White of Civil Wars. Both songs were included on the soundtrack to the 2012 blockbuster “The Hunger Games.”
The 33-year-old superstar also debuted Friday with “If This Was a Movie (Taylor’s Version),” the previous iteration of which came from Target’s deluxe edition of her 2010 album “Speak Now,” her third studio album. The original song was also released as a promotional single by iTunes and Amazon in 2011.
The fourth track is the love song “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” a previously leaked outtake from their seventh studio album, “Lover.”
Naturally, the Swifties celebrated the arrival of their queen’s new music and fueled speculation about which landmark album the singer-songwriter would make next. They also complained that the songs were not immediately available on Spotify at midnight. You’ll recall that the streaming platform briefly crashed in October following the release of his “Midnights” album. Don’t mess with the Swifties, okay?
The Eras Tour kicks off Friday with back-to-back shows in Glendale, Arizona, whose mayor temporarily changed the city’s name to “Swift City” to hallow the launch. The tour stops locally in Inglewood, California this summer with a five-night stint at SoFi Stadium August 3-5, 8-9. That makes Swift the first artist to host as many shows at the 70,000-seat $5 billion venue, which opened in 2020 and serves as the joint home of the NFL’s LA Rams and LA Chargers.
