Taylor Swift’s ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ Vault Tracks Bridge the Gap Between 2014 and the ‘Midnights’ Era: Album Review
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It was a very good year, 1989 was. And by 1989, of course we mean 2014.
That’s the year Taylor Swift put out her biggest and most transformative album, ensuring that, for the rest of our lives, any citation of “1989” will make just about anyone in the world immediaately think of “Shake It Off” and “Bad Blood,” not “My Prerogative” or “Wind Beneath My Wings” or any of the music that actually came out in Swift’s birth year.
Now “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” has arrived, complete with never-before-heard Vault tracks to go along with the 16 re-recorded numbers from the original album, as is her custom with these “TVs.” And what calendar year do you suppose these five wholly fresh (to us) tracks conjure up?
Not 1989, of course, but not 2014, so much either. They may have been written in the same era as “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York,” but in terms of their production and arrangement, there’s no exact fealty to the style of nine years ago.
Read more on variety.com
