Taylor Swift is continuing her quest to re-record six early albums (and regain control of that career-defining work), announcing a new version of 2012’s Red as her next release.
Marking the second re-recorded album to drop, Red (Taylor’s Version) will arrive November 19 — and it will be much bigger than the original.
Posting to social media, Swift says she’s expanding Red to feature 30 songs in total, as she includes every song that was “meant to go” on the album. One of those new tracks even stretches 10 minutes long, and she says now they all came from a deeply wounded period in her personal life. At the time, Swift had been romantically linked to actor Jake Gyllenhall, and fans speculated that many tracks were about their breakup.
“Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person,” she wrote. “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.”
The original Red arrived as Swift’s fourth studio album, and helped lay the groundwork for her transition into pop. It included hits like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22” and more, and featured 16 tracks in its first incarnation. A deluxe edition was released later that added six more.
Red (Taylor’s Version) will follow the re-recorded version of Fearless which Taylor Swift released in April. She plans to re-do each of her first six albums, after a dispute over the sale of her former record label, Big Machine.