In its original incarnation, Taylor Swift’s 2008 album Fearless remains encumbered by two significant liabilities: The technical aspects of Swift’s singing and an insular point of view that attempted to cast the then 18-year-old as the protagonist of not only her own life, but of everyone else’s. The now 31-year-old’s re-recording of the album resolves just one of those two issues. To her immense credit, Swift has put real work into improving her vocal technique over the years, and every performance on Fearless (Taylor’s Version) boasts at least one phrase, note, or inflection that highlights her growth as a singer.
The maturity and control of Swift’s voice re-contexualizes the songs on the album. The precociousness of “Fifteen” is replaced by a lived-in wisdom and pathos when she sings, “This is life before you know who you’re gonna be,” while the chorus of “Change,” on which she talks of revolution and winning, is given far greater heft by the genesis of the re-release itself. The song is no longer a show of teenage-rebellion cosplay; it’s the sound of a grown woman declaring her agency over people and systems that have wronged her, and Swift bites into every “hallelujah” of the refrain with aplomb.
Swift’s voice is most affecting on the final chorus of “White Horse.” All too aware of how intensely her love life has been scrutinized by both the press and her fans, she brings a newfound authority and conviction to the sneering kiss-off, “I’m gonna find someone someday/Who might actually treat me well,” and it’s among the most riveting moments in her entire catalog. “White Horse” remains the best song on the album and a harbinger of the even weightier material and ambitious structures of Swift’s later releases.
But while Swift did an admirable job of re-recording Fearless, tweaking the production in subtle ways that give the album a slightly different texture (note how much more prominently the banjo figures in the mix of “Love Story”), the songs themselves are largely unchanged. The images conjured by “The Way I Loved You” remain juvenile, while “You Belong with Me” still hinges on harsh judgments of another girl who’s never presented as a fully formed human with her own agency, and the misused literary references in “Love Story” scan as more egregious coming from a gifted thirtysomething singer-songwriter than a wunderkind. From the teen love-triangle triptych on Folklore to the invigorating pop-country of “No Body, No Crime” from Evermore, Swift has proven herself capable of writing far better songs in these exact veins.
The album’s bonus tracks—all written during the original Fearless sessions—don’t move the needle much in terms of the project’s overall quality. They all showcase Swift’s preternatural gifts for song structure and melody, but again, the lyrics are a mixed bag: “You All Over Me” invites a remarkably sleazy reading that’s an outlier within the album’s other lyrical motifs, while “Mr. Perfectly Fine” is noteworthy for the first appearance of the “casually cruel” phrase that Swift would deploy to far greater effect on Red a few years later. Though none of the new songs would have been an obvious choice to replace anything from the original tracklist, they attest to the consistency of Swift’s songwriting just two albums into her career.
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