Taylor Swift Tears Up Recounting How She Got Her Masters Back: “It Was Like An Intrusive Thought”

During her appearance on the New Heights podcast with Travis and Jason Kelce on Wednesday, Taylor Swift went more in-depth about how she reclaimed her master recordings, which she announced earlier this year.

Swift first revealed the moment in May on her Instagram. During the segment of today’s podcast that starts at around the 11-minute mark, Swift divulged that she met with her team after the Eras Tour had ended, and they decided the timing might be good to approach Shamrock Capital, the private equity firm that had bought the recordings from Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings.

“It was like an intrusive thought that I had every day. I wanted to buy my music outright. I [didn’t] want to be in a partnership. I [didn’t] want to own 30% of it. I want it. I want to own all of it. I deserve that, but it was a long shot to think that they would do that they would sell that, that asset to me. It’s a big asset. It’s a huge decision for them to make, to sell that to anyone, including me,” she said. “I decided that, rather than this be like a business conversation. I’m in the business of human emotion. I would so much rather lead heart first in something like this.

“Because for me, this is not, ‘Oh, I want to own this asset because of its returns, because of the dividends that I will receive over the years.’ I want it, because this is my hand-written diary entries from my whole life,” she added. “These are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life. This is my photography, my music videos, my most of which I funded. My artwork, everything that I’ve ever done is in this catalog.”

Swift got emotional going into specifics about the details of the meeting that got helped her secure her life’s work.

“Rather than send lawyers or management like in a big crew, I sent my mom and my brother, who I work with, to L.A., and they — sorry — They sat down and they like — This happens. I don’t ever really talk about it — because they sat down with Shamrock Capital, and they told them what this meant for me. They told them the whole story of all the times we’ve tried to buy it, all the times it’s fallen through, all the times we had gotten plans together and figured out something we thought was going to work and it didn’t at the last minute,” Swift said. “And so, my mom calls me afterwards, she’s like, ‘Look, they were wonderful. They heard us out. We have no idea which way they’re going to go with this.’ And so I was like, ‘I get it. I get it. I haven’t gotten my hopes up about this in a decade.’”

The singer-songwriter, who earlier in the week teased her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, coming out October 3, on promo videos for the podcast, also clarified that her publishing was protected, which factors into the use of her ‘(Taylor’s Version)’ songs in films or TV shows.

Jason Kelce asked her what the master recordings entail.

“It’s the actual vocal, band, production, mixing, mastering, that actual thing. Mine also included my album artwork, my music videos, everything that went along with any era of music that I had done for my first six albums every year,” Swift said. “There’s another category, which is publishing. I own my publishing, which is why I have control over, if my song is used in a film I and I want them to use Taylor’s version instead of the original version, I, the songwriter, can decide that. I’ve always been very lucky because my publishing was protected.”

Swift likened the desire to own her work to a negative “intrusive thought” before she heard the news that the deal had been made. She also revealed that she called musician Phoebe Bridgers to tell her the news while sobbing.

“I have to tell the short version to everyone, because it is still like this. This will affect the rest of my life. I think about this every day now, but instead of it being like an intrusive thought that hurts me, it’s ‘I can’t believe this happened. Like, how lucky am I? How grateful am I? I’m so grateful to, like, the artists that helped me with my re-records,’” she said. “Because when I did my re-records, I started doing those in 2021 and a lot of, like, most of the industry trades were like, ’This is a bad idea. This is her derailing her career, in a way. Nobody’s interested in you doing the same album twice. Fans are not going to be engaged with this. This is not going to go well for her.’”

When Kelce asked Swift if she had a favorite album she recorded, she responded that she loved doing them all, but that Red (Taylor’s Version) was special, specifically because fans would not let go of her “glorious, fortuitous mistake” of mentioning that there was a 10-minute version of her beloved ballad “All Too Well.”

“I really liked them all, but I think Red was very special. There were songs that I called ‘From the Vault’ songs, and there was one which I think is maybe my favorite song I’ve ever written, called ‘All too Well,’ the 10-minute version where I unearthed there were there originally so many more verses in that song than ended up being on the on the album that I had put out when I originally put out red I made the the glorious, fortuitous mistake of saying that to my fans in an interview, you’re so handsome. So basically, I said that in an interview to my fans, and they just like, hung onto it. They were like, where’s the 10-minute version? Give us the 10-minute version. And when it came time to doing Taylor’s version and re-recording the album, I went back in, found the verses, restructured the song to the way that it pretty much was when I had originally written it, put them back in.”

Swift released re-recorded versions of four of her first six albums — Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989 — each with additional “From the Vault” songs that weren’t on the original recordings.