- Taylor Swift announced "1989 (Taylor's Version)" during an Eras Tour show in Los Angeles.
- The newly rerecorded album will be released on October 27.
Taylor Swift has officially launched the "1989" revival.
In the midst of a concert in Los Angeles, to close the first US leg of the Eras Tour, Swift revealed that "1989 (Taylor's Version)" will arrive in October.
The rerecording of her blockbuster fifth album, originally released in 2014, will also be the fourth installment of her "Taylor's Version" series following "Fearless," "Red," and "Speak Now."
During a speech onstage, Swift said she decided to make the announcement on August 9 — the eighth month of the year and ninth day of the month — continuing her passion for numerology. She also teased the announcement throughout the show with new blue versions of her classic tour outfits.
"There's something I've been planning for a really, really, really, ridiculously, embarrassingly long time," Swift said before unveiling the album cover on the big screen.
"The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways," she also wrote in a statement shared online. "To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I've ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can't believe they were ever left behind."
Here's everything we know about the much-anticipated release.
It will feature 21 songs, plus one bonus track
In addition to the 16 songs on the original deluxe album, "1989 (Taylor's Version)" will include five more that have not yet been heard, as revealed by the CD presale on her website.
On each album Swift has rerecorded, she has added several new cuts that she describes as "from the vault," meaning they were written during the initial creation but "held back for different reasons."
"Those reasons seem unnecessary now. I've decided I want you to have the whole story," she previously explained in 2021.
"I've spoken a lot about why I'm remaking my first six albums, but the way I've chosen to do this will hopefully help illuminate where I'm coming from," Swift said. "Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really *knows* that body of work."
There will also be an additional bonus track included on the "Tangerine Edition" of the vinyl, available exclusively at Target.
Swift revealed the vault track titles after teasing fans with online puzzles
Swifties were sent into a frenzy on Tuesday, when the singer shared a video of a shimmering blue vault on her Instagram.
The clip reveals a jumble of letters: T, S, U, and L, as well as two quotation marks and an exclamation point. Fans are tasked with unscrambling the letters to reveal one of the vault track titles, a strategy Swift previously used for "Fearless (Taylor's Version)" and "Red (Taylor's Version)."
"You can tell me when the *search* is over… if the high was worth the pain," Swift wrote in the caption, referencing lyrics from the hit single "Blank Space."
Additional puzzles began to appear when fans searched for Swift on Google. There were 89 different options, according to the search engine.
After 33 million puzzles were solved worldwide, the other four song titles were revealed: "Say Don't Go," "Now That We Don't Talk," "Suburban Legends," and "Is It Over Now?"
—Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) September 20, 2023
Just one day after the puzzle-hunting began, Swift officially unveiled the complete tracklist, including the original song title that was teased: "Slut!"
This vault track will likely grapple with the slut-shaming Swift experienced ahead of the original "1989" era, which she discussed during a 2019 interview with Zane Lowe.
"When I was, like, 23 and people were just kind of reducing me to … kind of making slideshows of my dating life and putting people in there that I'd sat next to at a party once and deciding that my songwriting was like a trick rather than a skill and a craft," she said.
"In a way, it's figuring out how to completely minimize that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut-shame," she continued. "That happened to me at a very young age, so that was a bit hard. That was one of the first times I was like, 'Wow, this is not fair.'"
The official tracklist doesn't include any features, but Kendrick Lamar may still return
The Target-exclusive bonus track may be a rerecording of the "Bad Blood" remix, featuring Kendrick Lamar, which was released as the fourth single for "1989" but never added to the official tracklist.
It could also be Swift's own version of "This Is What You Came For," the hit Calvin Harris and Rihanna collab that Swift wrote under a pseudonym.
The most likely collaborator to return is Jack Antonoff, who cowrote and produced three songs on "1989" ("Out of the Woods," "I Wish You Would," and "You Are In Love"). Since then, Antonoff has been Swift's most consistent creative partner and has worked on every "Taylor's Version" remake thus far.
Other "1989" producers include Ryan Tedder and Noel Zancanella ("Welcome to New York," "I Know Places"), Ali Payami ("Style"), Mattman & Robin ("All You Had to Do Was Stay"), Greg Kurstin ("I Wish You Would"), Nathan Chapman ("This Love"), and Imogen Heap ("Clean"), plus the famed Swedish duo Max Martin and Shellback, who touched 10 of the album's original 16 tracks.
Some of the songs are already out
Swift released two songs from "1989 (Taylor's Version)" long before it was announced: "Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version)" in September 2021 after the original went viral on TikTok, and "This Love (Taylor's Version)" in May 2022 as part of the soundtrack for season one of "The Summer I Turned Pretty."
These give us small hints about what to expect from the album's production. While both are faithful renditions of the originals, "Wildest Dreams (Taylor's Version)" was coproduced by Swift and Shellback, as before, but Christopher Rowe's name replaced Martin's.
Martin also did not appear in the producer credits for "Red (Taylor's Version)," despite producing the original versions of "I Knew You Were Trouble," "22," and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."
It looks like Swift and Martin are no longer working together, even though he was promoted as the co-executive producer of "1989." This could be due to any number of things — scheduling conflicts, imbalanced media coverage of his role in her crossover success, or perhaps a disagreement over cowriter credits.
Rowe also coproduced "This Love (Taylor's Version)," taking over Chapman's role.
'1989 (Taylor's Version)' will be released on October 27
The album will arrive just over three months after "Speak Now (Taylor's Version)," before Swift embarks on the South American leg of the Eras Tour.