In 2019, Taylor Swift felt her career was in an excellent position when she signed to a new record label. She had more creative control over her music and was prepared to utilize it to the fullest extent. As she prepared to release her first album with the label, though, her old label sold her catalog of music, thus wrenching it from her control. The turn of events devastated her and made her feel that there was no way to move forward.
Taylor Swift said she thought her career was over when she lost the rights to her music
In 2019, Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings purchased Big Machine Records, Swift’s first label. As a result, she lost ownership of the masters of her first six studio albums. She said the move made her feel helpless.
“With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” Swift told Time in 2023.
She said she initially saw no path forward for herself.
“I was so knocked on my a** by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’”
She spoke about the decision to re-record her music
Before long, people in Swift’s life began encouraging her to re-record her old albums. She initially pushed back against the suggestion.
“I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it,’” Swift said. “My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away.”
Ultimately, however, she released Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), and 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
“It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she said. “I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”
Taylor Swift also felt she could lose her career over a feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West
Just a few years before this, Swift felt her career was in another precarious position. After she expressed frustration that Kanye West referred to her as a “b****” in his song “Famous,” Kim Kardashian released a video. In it, Swift and West discussed the song, and she seemingly indicated that she had no problem with the song. Public opinion quickly turned against her.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before.”
She spent time out of the public eye, and later released the album Reputation in response to the situation. When the album didn’t perform as she’d hoped, she worried she wouldn’t be able to move past the fallout.
“I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she said.
