Taylor Swift to rerelease Red with all 30 of its original songs

Taylor Swift will reissue her acclaimed 2012 album, Red, on Nov. 19, the artist announced on Friday. The LP, which features songs like "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," "I Knew You Were Trouble," and "Red," is the latest album that Swift will rerecord, following 2008's Fearless, which she rereleased as Fearless (Taylor's Version) in April.

The singer explained in an Instagram post why she chose Red as the next album to reissue.

"Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person," Swift wrote in her post. "It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I'm not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way."

Swift promised that Red (Taylor's Version) will include every song that was intended for its original release, hinting that she was quite prolific at the time.

"Sometimes you need to talk it over (over and over and over) for it to ever really be... over. Like your friend who calls you in the middle of the night going on and on about their ex, I just couldn't stop writing," she wrote in the post. "This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red. And hey, one of them is even 10 minutes long."

Fans were quick to point out that the news of Red's rerelease arrives on the 40th birthday of Scooter Braun, the record executive the singer-songwriter has sparred with in recent years. Braun sold the master rights to Swift's first six studio albums to the private equity company Shamrock Holdings at the end of 2020, just over a year and a half after he bought them when his Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group, Swift's former record company. According to Variety, which first reported the news, Braun sold the catalog for north of $300 million. In a message posted to her social media accounts, Swift claimed that she and her team had attempted to buy back her masters from Braun but were met with an "ironclad NDA stating I would never say another word about Scooter Braun unless it was positive, before we could even look at the financial records of BMLG."

In June 2019, the singer-songwriter took to her Tumblr page to express her outrage over Braun's purchase of her masters, calling his acquisition the "worst case scenario" and saying the news made her "sad and grossed out," in part because she alleges that Braun engaged in "incessant, manipulative bullying" against her. The news led to an extensive back-and-forth between Swift and her team and Braun, his wife, and other supporters.

The Nov. 19 release date of Red (Taylor's Version) is 22 weeks from the day Swift shared the news she was rerecording it, which has fans wondering if she is alluding to her 2013 single "22," the sixth track on Red. The song, which describes the joys of being 22 years old, has helped turn 22nd birthdays into a cultural phenomenon.

The original version of Red featured collaborations with Max Martin, Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody, and Swift's pal Ed Sheeran. Before her announcement on Friday, many fans had suspected that 1989, Swift's 2014 album, would be the next album she'd rerelease.

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