By: Sophie Johnson and Addie Strack

Taylor Swift recently came out with a re-recording of her 5th album, ‘1989’. This was an exciting moment both for her fans and herself as it is one step closer to her being able to own and profit off her own music. This is an achievement that she has been working towards for many years, and since she wasn’t previously able to own her music, she decided to re-record her albums and call them (Taylor’s Version).

‘1989’ is one of our favorite overall albums and we were super excited when she announced the release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ last summer. The newly recorded album was released on Friday, October 27th, 2023. Not only did Swift record every single one of the tracks from the original album, but she added five new songs that she had written during the era of this album but chose not to release at the time. These five tracks are called: (from the vault).

One of the vault tracks that we both love is called “Slut”. This song, despite the title having a derogatory meaning, has a beautiful melody and almost a nostalgic sound to it. When listening to the new vault tracks for the first time, this one stood out to us because of the smooth and angelic tone of it. Her voice is almost softer this song but it still holds so much emotion which adds to the effect of the song. This song was our favorite out of all the 5 new vault tracks on the album.

Another one of the vault tracks that we really enjoyed was a song called “Is It Over Now?”. This song has more of an upbeat rhythm than the first one, and we really liked the use of different background instruments to pull the lyrics and the song together. This was our second favorite song out of the vault tracks on ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’.

Overall, we think that the album improved from the original album released in 2014, but there were several tracks on the new album that we wished had stayed more similar to the original. One of these tracks is “I Know Places”. We both loved this song from the original album, and when we heard the new Taylor’s Version of it, we thought it used too much auto tune. However, the auto tune was mostly used in the beginning of the song, and the rest of the song gets better as it goes on.

A lot of the songs were even better that we imagined. “Clean” was arguably the best song on the album and we agree that this was the most improved from the original ‘1989’ album. The bass in this song was really defined and once again the instruments in the background added many different factors to the song.

Another song that we think is better now than the original is a song called “You Are In Love”. The high notes in the song “You Are In Love” were really amazing and a big improvement that we noticed from the original song. In the bridge of this song her voice sounds especially strong and we think that her vocal range and skills have generally improved in these past nine years since the original ‘1989’ was released.

After listening to the newly recorded ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ as well as her other re-recorded albums including ‘Speak Now’, ‘Red’, and ‘Fearless’, we think that the majority of the music sounds better than it did before. The background music fits better with her vocals and overall we think that her singing and vocal abilities improved as she got older, and she also got more talented.