Taylor Swift releases re-recorded Speak Now album with shock new lyrics

The superstar has delivered a surprising rewrite to one of her older songs in the release of her re-recorded album Speak Now.

Taylor Swift has just dropped the re-recorded version of her Speak Now album. Picture: Getty Images

Taylor Swift’s powerful flex to assert artist rights by re-recording her old albums has made her omnipresent in the pop universe.

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the third in her campaign was released on Friday with Swifties immediately putting its 22 tracks on high rotation.

The biggest shock of this new version of songs written between the ages of 18 and 20 is the lyrics rewrite on Better Than Revenge.

Since it was first released in 2010, fans have been singing their hearts out to the misogynistic chorus lyric, allegedly addressing former flame Joe Jonas dating actor Camilla Belle after splitting with Swift.

“She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think / she’s an actress, whoa / She’s better known for the things that she does / On the mattress, whoa,” was the original lyric.

Now 13 years later, an older, wiser and feminist Swift has replaced the latter brutal problematic mattress lyric with “He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches, whoa.”

Swift began re-recording her old records in 2020 to reclaim ownership of her back catalogue after music mogul Scooter Braun secured the rights to the masters when he bought her initial label Big Machine Records. Fans now refer to the original recordings of her first six albums as the “stolen versions.”

Speak Now follows the release of Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) in 2021.

She solely wrote all the songs for her third record in reaction to critics who assumed the then teenage country pop crossover star had a team of writers behind her success.

“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 brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness,” she posted when confirming the new version last month.

“I love this album because it tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing … and living to speak about it.”

Taylor Swift’s previous cover art for Speak Now.

Swifties matched the songs with her famous exes at the time, including Jonas, Twilight star Taylor Lautner (Back In December) and pop star John Mayer (Dear John).

She recently cautioned her loyal fans not to go after any of her former flames on social media when the album dropped as they had actor Jake Gyllenhaal who was rumoured to be the subject of a clutch of songs on Red.

A #prayforjohn hashtag has been circulating on social media since May.

Taylor Swift performs onstage during her The Eras Tour in Ohio. Picture: Getty Images

“I’m putting this out now because I want to own my music and I believe that any artist who has the desire to own their music should be able to. That’s why I’m putting out this album,” she said at her Eras Tour show in Minneapolis last month just before performing Dear John as one of her surprise acoustic numbers.

“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19, except the songs I wrote. … So, what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not putting this album out so that you should go and feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written the song about 14 million years ago.”

Taylor Swift has dropped her re-recorded version of Speak Now. Picture: Getty Images

Swift has exerted a chokehold on the global charts releasing seven records, featuring more than 150 tracks, in just four years.

As an artist who has championed emerging songwriters and bands, she has left little oxygen in the streaming ecosystem for other new releases each time she has dropped one of her projects.

In the wake of the Australian tickets hysteria last week, her singles and albums swarmed the ARIA charts with 10 of her hits in the top 50 singles and nine records in the top 50 albums.

There are six unreleased From The Vault tracks on the revamped Speak Now including Electric Touch featuring rockers Fall Out Boy and Castles Crumbling with her childhood friend Hayley Williams of Paramore.

Like previous works, Swifties have a suite of different Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) coloured vinyl editions to choose from as well as CD, digital and cassette versions.

There are bracelets and necklaces, T-shirts and hoodies, playing cards and photo frames. Taylor Inc will bank tens of millions of dollars in merch sales alone from the Speak Now reissue campaign.

And Qantas will also score a Swift-led bump courtesy of her Eras Tour leg in Australia, announcing on Friday they have added 60 additional flights to and from Sydney and Melbourne between February 15 and 27.

Originally published as Taylor Swift releases re-recorded Speak Now album with shock new lyrics