The singer’s performance of “All Too Well” on SNL was a bold reminder of how far she has come as an artist.
When Taylor Swift was only 22, she laid awake at night and worried about her age. That’s the confession the now-31-year-old singer makes on “Nothing New,” a track she wrote for her 2012 album, Red, but only released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the new, rerecorded version that came out on Friday. In the song, she describes how society tells young women to have fun and then shames them for experiencing life. She wonders why she seems to lose confidence with each passing year. “Lord, what will become of me,” she sings, “once I’ve lost my novelty?” Sad as it may seem, this was a fair question for a prodigy to have been asking. In pop, success is fleeting: Conventional wisdom says that an act’s “imperial phase”—a career-defining hot streak—rarely lasts for more than a few years. Many women in the entertainment business can attest to the public’s limited appetite for ingenues who continue to evolve. When she was writing the original Red, Swift was already three hit albums into an astonishing career that began when she was just 16 years old. Even though she’d barely matured into drinking age, continued relevance wasn’t assured. Swift’s latest project, rerecording her first six albums, not only demonstrates how impressively long her reign has turned out to be. It also is helping extend that reign while illuminating the secrets to her success. When in 2019 she announced her plan to recycle her own catalog to thwart a business rival, many observers suspected that the undertaking would be a minor diversion. Instead, it has been a dazzling victory lap that seems likely to inspire a whole new race.
