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Taylor Swift is America’s most prominent music icon right now, and possibly the world’s. The 33-year-old Pennsylvania native keeps jumping levels of superstardom, and may now sit on her own level in the entertainment world.
She’s had a massive last few years following an equally massive previous decade. Taylor Swift took advantage of the increased downtime and interest in the arts people had during the pandemic when she released sister albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” in July and December 2020. Both were Grammy nominees for Best Album, with Folklore winning.
And, the release of her 10th original album, “Midnights”, in October of 2022, was one of the most hyped album releases in recent memory. She announced a tour, ‘The Eras Tour’, that is ongoing right now. All that is doing is creating the most in-demand tickets possibly in American history for a stadium tour. As of this writing, when Taylor Swift plays three shows at MetLife Stadium in suburban New York City, the cheapest ticket on StubHub before fees is $1088. No, that’s not a typo. When you consider that she’s playing three shows there, as well as three shows in Philadelphia, a place easily reachable by car or train in just 90 minutes, that is an absurd level of demand.
When she’s not busy writing Grammy-winning albums or going on a tour that is going to smash the world record for gross earnings per show, she is re-recording her old albums due to a spat with music mogul Scooter Braun. Braun bought Taylor Swift’s master copies of her records in 2019, a relatively complicated legal concept that I won’t get into, before selling them to a holding company in 2020. Swift has decided to re-record release all of her albums prior to 2018 in protest of the way she feels she was treated by Braun.
She’s already released the remasters of albums “Fearless” and “Red”, leaving her four more that she made when she was a part of Big Machine Records, the company owned her masters and sold them to Braun.
On Friday night in the first of her shows in Nashville, Tennessee, Taylor Swift announced she will be releasing the remaster of her 2010 smash-hit album “Speak Now”.
It fills me with such pride and joy to announce that my version of Speak Now will be out July 7 (just in time for July 9th, iykyk 😆) I first made Speak Now, completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20. The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their… pic.twitter.com/oa0Vs5kszr
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) May 6, 2023
If you’re man named John, and you’ve ever broken up with a woman before, you’re going to have a bad time when the album comes out in July. That’s because, arguably, the most memorable song on the album is “Dear John” a balled the then-19-year-old Taylor Swift wrote about her much older ex-boyfriend John Mayer. It’s a ballad in similar vein to her hit “All Too Well” that she wrote about Jake Gyllenhaal.
When Taylor Swift re-released “Red”, the album that included “All Too Well”, she released a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” that set off quite the wave of Jake Gyllenhaal bashing on the internet.
And, if you’re a guy named John who broke a girl’s heart, a TikTok about you will be dropping this summer.