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reputation (Taylor's Version)

Unconfirmed

This article is about the re-recording. For the original album, see reputation (2017).

reputation (Taylor’s Version) is the upcoming re-recording of Taylor’s sixth studio album, reputation (2017). It will be released by Republic Records but has yet to be announced officially.

Taylor Swift. It’s a name that – in 2017 – had reached monumental levels of fame, or rather, infamy. For every headline that praised Taylor, there were nine more that tore her to pieces. From her notorious dating history to her high profile feuds, no part of her life had been untouched. reputation featured snake imagery; the music video for its lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” saw Taylor killing off younger versions of herself. She remembers the album being met with uproar and skepticism.

«I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life.»

Taylor Swift

She had also satisfied her record deal with Scott Borchetta, and knew she wanted out. “The molecular chemistry of that old label was that every creative choice I wanted to make was second-guessed,” she says. “I was really overthinking these albums.”

Background

As per her contract with her former label Big Machine Records, Taylor released six studio albums between 2006 and 2017. In November 2018, her contract with the label expired; she hence withdrew from Big Machine and signed a new recording deal with Republic Records, a division of Universal Music Group, which secured her the rights to own the masters of the new music she would release going forward.

In 2019, American businessman Scooter Braun and his company Ithaca Holdings acquired the Big Machine Label Group. As part of the acquisition, ownership of the master recordings to Taylor’s first six studio albums, including reputation, transferred to Braun. Taylor immediately denounced Braun’s purchase of the label and announced that she would re-record her first six studio albums, to own the masters to her life’s work herself. In November 2020, Braun sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings, an American private equity firm owned by the Disney estate, under the conditions that Braun and Ithaca Holdings would continue to financially profit from the albums. Taylor began re-recording her first six studio albums in November 2020.

Release

During her “Person of the Year” interview with Time Magazine in late 2023, Taylor spoke about re-recording reputation for the first time:

«It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure. I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, 'Sick snakes and strobe lights.'»

Taylor Swift

She promsied that the upcoming vault tracks for reputation would be “fire.” The re-recordings project felt like a mythical quest to her, she said. “I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.”

Title Significance

Taylor went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world — “an imperial phase,” as she called it in her “Person of the Year” interview with Time. She didn’t realize it would also give her much farther to fall. Public sentiment turned—sniping about everything from her perceived overexposure to conspiracy theories about her politics. “I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she says. Rapper Kanye West wrote a song with vulgar lyrics about her, and claimed that Taylor had consented to it, which she denied; West’s then wife, Kim Kardashian, released a video of a conversation between West and Taylor that seemed to indicate that Taylor had been on board with the song. The scandal was tabloid catnip; it made Taylor ook like a snake, which is what people called her. She felt it was “a career death,” she says. “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.” It was a bleak moment.

«You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.»

Taylor Swift

With reputation, Taylor finally fought back. As she declares on “Look What You Made Me Do“: “Sorry, the Old Taylor can’t come to the phone. Why? ’Cause she’s dead!” One began to wonder whether the Taylor of yesteryears was actually gone. With reputation, she created a larger-than-life caricature of the petty, vindictive snake she had been made out to be. By album’s end though, she assesses her crumbling empire and tattered reputation, discovering redemption in love.