It’s official: After an endless wait, ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ is finally coming to our playlists. Now is your time, Swifties: Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Global superstar Taylor Swift surprised her fans and audience at the Eras Tour stop in Nashville as she revealed that her next release will be the re-recorded studio album, ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ during her first of three shows at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium on Friday night (May 5). The re-recorded version of the hit 2010 third studio album — which became her first album to cross the one million sales milestone in its debut week and topped the Billboard 200 — will be out on July 7. This is her latest effort to reclaim her early albums following a highly publicised ownership dispute.
Swifties had been speculating about the release of ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ since last year. Instead, she surprised her fans with an original record — her 10th studio album, Midnights, which racked up the biggest debut week of her career and any album in 2022. But something was up last Sunday after light-up wristbands given to attendees of her “Eras Tour” turned purple—which sort of represents the album colour—at the end of a concert at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
The Taylor Nation Instagram account went live from the concert for this spectacular onstage surprise, which gathered all the Swifties. The singer directed their attention to the screens around the stadium, which read: “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Available July 7,” before announcing it on social media.
Taylor noted this album is completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20, and her life inspired the songs “marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions, and wild wistfulness.” Adding further, it “tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing… and living to speak about it. With six extra songs I’ve sprung loose from the vault, I absolutely cannot wait to celebrate Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) with you on July 7th.”
Taylor also shared a photo with a message that read, “I always looked at this album as my album, and the lump in my throat expands to a quivering voice as I saw this. Thanks to you, dear reader, it finally will be. I consider this music to be, along with your faith in me, the best thing that’s ever been mine.”
In classic Taylor Swift fashion of breaking records left and right, her tweet announcing the re-recorded album became the top-performing post on Twitter for this week. It received huge exposure with over 894,000 likes and 290,000 retweets as of 1:45 p.m. EST Saturday despite being up for less than 24 hours. This illustrates Taylor Swift’s enormous stardom, unparalleled fans’ expectations, and how anxiously they have awaited this forthcoming release.
‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ will follow in the footsteps of ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’ and ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’, both released in 2021, as the third re-recorded studio album in her six-album endeavour. In 2019, Swift announced she’d be re-recording her first six albums, after Big Machine Records, who Swift originally signed with at the start of her career, sold the rights to the albums to music manager Scooter Braun in 2019. Braun subsequently sold the rights—known as her masters—to Shamrock Capital, and Swift later revealed that she attempted to negotiate with Big Machine to gain ownership of the masters of her first six albums, but was denied down.
Taylor Swift is currently on her Eras Tour, which kicked off March 17 in Glendale, Arizona.
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