Taylor Swift dropped her latest track remake Friday morning, letting fans know that “This Love” is “alive, back from the dead.”
“This Love (My version!) is out & I’m currently reliving the 1989 tour in my head and spiraling, it’s fine,” Swift announced early Friday on Instagram.
Like her other rerecorded takes, “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” features some artistic tweaks to the original song. The intro was changed, and the melody is infused with a more indie-genre vibe. Swift’s voice also sounds less processed, though her lyrics about the resurrection of a long-lost love remain the same.
The song initially began as a “fun, short little poem” she said she wrote in her journal in 2012. Then she began hearing a melody in her head and realized “that it was going to be a song,” the singer shared on Tumblr.
Eventually, “This Love” wound up on Swift’s highly acclaimed “1989” album as the only song she wrote solo. While the track did not reach the same level of commercial success as the album’s other hits, such as “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off,” Swift found “This Love” to be the one she “kept going back to,” she told PopCrush.
“It’s kind of like hypnotic in a way, and it kind of is somewhat romantic and wistful and relaxing,” she told the entertainment site.
Swift vowed in 2019 that she would rerecord her first six albums after music executive Scooter Braun purchased her former label, Big Machine. The deal essentially left the master rights to her repertoire to Braun, which Swift deemed her “worst-case scenario.” A year later, Braun sold the artist’s chart-topping catalogue to Shamrock Holdings, a private equity firm. Under the terms of the deal though, he’d still profit from Swift’s work, The Washington Post reported.
Braun told MSNBC’s Ari Melber last week that “Taylor has every right to rerecord” but that he disagreed with her “weaponizing a fan base” against him.
Swift has made so-called “Taylor’s versions” of her second and fourth albums, “Fearless” and “Red.” The launches for her remakes are unpredictable and sporadic, leaving fans searching for hidden clues in her videos and social media posts about which tracks might be next.
On Thursday, Swift shared the trailer for “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” an upcoming Amazon Prime show based on a book series by Jenny Han. The clip featured snippets of “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” hours before the song dropped.
The post left fans speculating that a fully rerecorded “1989” could be in the works.
The singer remade another song from the album last year when she released “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version).” This week, Swift also dropped a new collection of “1989” merchandise.
Other fan theories posit that the artist might be prepping to rerelease her 2010 album, “Speak Now,” for which she also released new merch.
As the clock struck midnight Friday, Spotify user outage reports spiked from 8 to 2,255 — with fans speculating the crash resulted from a flood of users trying to listen to Swift’s new version of “This Love” when it launched.
“THIS LOVE CRASHED SPOTIFY,” one user wrote on Twitter. “THE POWER OF TAYLOR SWIFT.”