If that bloke underestimated her youth, Swift, then in her early 20s, was also acutely aware of her novelty fading. She still misses him, she admits, before donning the Swiftian velvet gloves: if only he’d been less of a schmuck, well, they might have stood had a chance. Better Man (a Swift song previously recorded by country band Little Big Town) is a richly filigreed Nashville ensemble number about defying the demeaning expectations of an older man by actually daring to leave him. The keepers, though, entrench the album’s brutal obsession with time: how long it takes to get over someone the shelf life of any young woman’s appeal the pitiful plight of emotionally frigid ex-boyfriends forever doomed to stagnate in their obsessions with status over love. Mercifully, these tendencies were nipped in the bud – and just two years later, Swift perfected her own gleaming, 80s-influenced take on pop with the album 1989.
There is a fair amount of the saccharine stuff among these newly added tracks: another Sheeran duet in the generic intimacies of Run forays into new sounds in the beachy, skippy pop-ska of Babe and Message in a Bottle, a Max Martin production that sounds horribly like tropical house via Coldplay and was probably dropped from Red in favour of the melodically similar but much better 22. While fans enjoy poring over the granular differences, the “From the Vault” bonus materials – that is, previously unreleased tracks from the Red sessions – suggest how the original album might have taken on a different cast. The lack of burn and twang here slightly blunts the rabid, deliciously vindictive edge that fuelled the original’s tumultuous depiction of heartbreak, sketched in appropriately vaulting shades of pop, country, balladry and electro-tooled aggression. She has often wielded her innocence as a weapon, but nowhere more so than on Red, where she used it to rebuke the older man (widely reputed to be actor Jake Gyllenhaal) who broke her heart at 21. But revisiting this earlier material there was always going to be the problem that Swift’s voice is richer and more mature than it was a decade ago. The new version is more widescreen than the original, which was by no means a wallflower to start with. It’s the album on which she embraced synth-pop, presumably making its faithful replication slightly easier than the primarily organic Fearless – simply set the controls and go. Held up as a classic, 2012’s Red is one half some of the greatest pop songs of all time – I Knew You Were Trouble is the rare pop-EDM crossover that still stands up, the chorus drops hitting like bratty stomps of frustration at her own naivety We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is a euphoric cheerleader chant so ingratiating you wonder how nobody came up with it before – and one half schmaltzy stuffing, including collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody. A fter Fearless earlier this spring, Taylor Swift reaches the second instalment of her project to re-record (and regain ownership over) the six albums she released for label Big Machine, which were apparently sold out from under her to an old foe.
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