taylor swift

When Taylor Swift posted a photo of herself leaning back and smiling, her first six studio albums scattered in front of her, on Friday (May 30), the party was on.
Swift’s announcement that she had successfully purchased the master recordings of her first six albums, for an undisclosed sum from investment firm Shamrock Capital, was met with jubilation by her millions of fans. Swift finally had full control of her intellectual property, in a byzantine music industry where such ownership was incredibly difficult to come by, even for the biggest superstars. The importance of such artistic freedom was not lost on Swift, who rightfully treated the occasion as a hard-fought celebration in a letter to fans on Friday. “To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” she wrote.

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As even casual pop culture observers likely know by now, Swift spent over a half-decade re-recording her back catalog to combat this previous lack of creative ownership, with Taylor’s Version albums of 2008’s Fearless, 2012’s Red, 2010’s Speak Now and 2014’s 1989 offering faithful re-creations under her domain. Not only did these re-recorded albums prove wildly successful – as fans rallied around the vision and motivation of their favorite artist, and helped 1989 (Taylor’s Version) score an even bigger debut than the original album – they also inspired real industry change, from other artists exploring ways to re-record their own material to label groups reworking standard contracts to prevent them from doing so.

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Still, the news that Swift had bought back her masters was met with some consternation about the future of the Taylor’s Version albums: Swift wrote that her 2006 self-titled debut was fully re-recorded, while Reputation (Taylor’s Version) was not. “Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” she wrote of her 2017 full-length.

So will the long-sought-after Reputation (Taylor’s Version) ever get completed? Will Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version) receive a release date in the near future? What’s the point of a re-recorded album, now that Swift owns all of the original albums? And what do we do, moving forward, with the four Taylor’s Version albums that did get released?

We don’t know the answers yet, but we know how much the Taylor’s Version albums have already given us – including “All Too Well (10-Minute Version),” an irreplaceable linchpin recording in her catalog.  

We’ll see if and when this project gets completed, how the Taylor’s Version re-recordings will age, and what versions of her hits and deep cuts fans will gravitate toward in the future. But just because the battle is now over, it’d be shortsighted to declare all for naught. The four Taylor’s Version albums presented her back catalog to a new generation – helping first to prime fans for the globe-conquering, catalog-revisiting Eras tour, and then to help cement her career year while the trek was underway.

Plus, fans received over two dozen unheard “From the Vault” songs — castoffs from the original albums that Swift reworked to include on her Taylor’s Version releases. These previously unheard goodies across the bonus cuts on the four re-recordings ranged from collaborations with Maren Morris and Fall Out Boy, to a late-breaking radio hit in the effervescent Red (Taylor’s Version) dance-pop track “Message in a Bottle,” to another Hot 100 chart-topper in the wistful “Is It Over Now?,” from 1989 (Taylor’s Version).

Which brings us to the greatest “From the Vault” song, and the one that stands as the greatest musical legacy of the entire re-recording project. When Red was released in 2012, the five-and-a-half minute “All Too Well” was positioned on the track list as an extended songwriting showcase in between shorter, more radio-friendly pop singles like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22.” While those hits helped Swift transition to pop superstardom with 1989 two years later, the power of “All Too Well” as a richly detailed examination of a failed relationship endured, becoming a fan favorite in the years following Red. 

The song, and its cult status, also marked an important inflection point for Swift as a storyteller. A year before Red (Taylor’s Version) arrived in 2021, Swift pivoted away from top 40 on Folklore and Evermore, using an indie-folk aesthetic to explore different characters and narratives with the same care as one of her fiercely embraced album cuts.

A 10-minute version of “All Too Well” had long been teased, and the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) proved to be the perfect occasion for its unveiling. Any Swift purist could have been reasonably worried about the decision to nearly double the length of one of her best-loved songs. Yet the supersized version of “All Too Well” was not overstuffed — instead, “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” towers above the original. Expanding the song’s world of stray thoughts and heartbreak totems while expertly navigating the story’s twists and turns, Swift turned a for-the-fans album cut into an authoritative epic.

With 10 minutes to work with, Swift lets each new detail of “All Too Well” simmer without building to a boil. The profane keychain that gets tossed her way, her subject’s refusal to “say it’s love,” the inquisitive actress, the charming chats with her father, the heartbroken 21st birthday — each new line is woven into the tapestry of a reflection that already exists, and Swift delivers them with varying degrees of frustration and regret.

Most of Swift’s songs wouldn’t improve if pushed to the 10-minute mark, but the structure of “All Too Well” — verses stacked upon one another, chorus lyrics shapeshifting to reflect her curdling emotion — allows for the bulked-up format. By the time the song starts to fade out with the refrain “Sacred prayer, I was there, I was there,” the passage of time is made explicit, as Swift’s recollections are stored in a time capsule that needed to be made a little bit bigger. Sure, there are new Easter eggs for fans to pore over and peruse – but nothing about “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” feels forced, and that’s why it provoked such a strong reaction upon its release.

All Too Well: The Short Film, written and directed by Swift, was released along with the 10-minute version, and she performed the song in full on Saturday Night Live the day after its release. With so much pre-release hype and release-weekend promotion, “All Too Well” shot to the top of daily streaming charts immediately – and one week later, the song sat atop the Hot 100, the first Taylor’s Version track to come anywhere close to the chart’s peak. The flashpoint of excitement around its release demonstrated Swift’s still-rising commercial power, about a year before she made it unignorable with the record-setting success of 2022’s Midnights. 

It also clued in countless casual listeners to one of her best songs. “All Too Well” isn’t just a fluky chart hit; the song now stands as a defining work for Swift, and an encapsulation of her legacy as a modern songwriter. In the future, critics, writers and historians will need a song to represent Swift’s cultural impact, and that song may very well be “All Too Well” – which simply wouldn’t have been the case without the Taylor’s Version moment.

That impact was on full display during the Eras Tour, where “All Too Well” was performed in its 10-minute incarnation as the final song in the Red portion of the show. Each night, stadiums full of Swifties sang along to its fourth, fifth and sixth verses, and bellowed “F—k the patriarchy!” with uninhibited glee.

Now that Swift’s Taylor’s Version project has entered a new phase of existence, those sing-alongs are worth considering as part of its legacy. “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” wasn’t just a commercial ploy, or catnip for the critics. It’s now an anthem for all of us.