At midnight on July 9, 2023, millions of people, myself included, wrecked their sleep schedule. History was made as the record for the most single-day streams of any country album ever was broken, with 126.3 million on its first day. Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her third full-length studio album had dropped. Along with the original tracks, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) boasts six bonus “From The Vault” songs, which didn’t originally make the cut in 2010: “Electric Touch,” “I Can See You,” “When Emma Falls In Love,” “Foolish One,” “Castles Crumbling,” and “Timeless.”
THE GOOD:
It’s hard to pick a favorite of the new vault songs, but the ones that especially stood out to me were “I Can See You” and “Electric Touch,” featuring Patrick Stump from the band Fall Out Boy. “I Can See You” has a great beat and is an instant earworm. “Electric Touch” has impressive guitar riffs, and Swift and Stump’s voices complement each other perfectly. Both songs describe the dizzying, intense feeling of falling in love with someone: “got a feeling your electric touch could fill this ghost town up with life.” They transport you away from whatever you’re doing at the moment and into the mind of the singer.
THE BAD:
The production in the vault songs doesn’t seem to match the overall vibe of the original Speak Now. The difference is especially clear in “Castles Crumbling,” which has production resembling her newer pop albums. It sticks out like a sore thumb in the country-rock of Speak Now. I don’t fault Swift and her team for wanting to use newer production, but it makes the transition from original songs to vault songs choppier. The vault songs simply don’t feel like they were from the original album.
THE TIMELESS:
Is it cheesy to say “Timeless” is what makes Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) the timeless masterpiece that it is? “Timeless” has a beautiful melody and immersive storytelling, describing how the narrator would fall for her lover in any life, whether it be “on a crowded street in 1944” or “in the 15th century off in a foreign land.” What I find most captivating about “Timeless” is how it’s the perfect ending to the album, bringing you full circle back to the beginning. “Mine,” the opening track, and “Timeless,” the closing track, both have the singer dreaming of a rosy, romanticized life with her lover. After the entire album, they “still would’ve been mine, we would’ve been timeless.”
Even 13 years after the original release, Swift’s fans clamor together in excitement to hear the songs re-recorded. The legacy of Speak Now has been immortalized in time and over a decade later, remains as iconic as ever.