Taylor Swift teases ‘Speak Now’ revisit with previously unreleased songs
Swift shared re-recordings of ‘Eyes Closed’ and ‘Safe and Sound’ from ‘The Hunger Games’, plus ‘If This Was a Movie’ and ‘All of the Girls You Loved Before’
By Larisha Paul
It wouldn’t be Taylor Swift without some elaborate release coinciding with a major event in her career. To celebrate the Eras tour kick-off in Glendale, Arizona today (17 March), the singer is making a trip to the past with re-recordings of ‘Eyes Open’ and ‘Safe and Sound’ (featuring the Civil Wars) from The Hunger Games. Swift also shared ‘If This Was a Movie’ from Speak Now alongside the Lover era vault track ‘All of the Girls You Loved Before’.
Swift’s precise timing couldn’t be better as the two singles from 2012’s The Hunger Games: ‘Songs from District 12’ and ‘Beyond’ feed into the frenzied social media resurgence of content around the four films since their recent arrival on Netflix. ‘Safe and Sound’ dropped first, at the very end of 2011, and went on to earn the singer a Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media.
The set of releases also tees up the singer’s next album of re-recorded songs as she makes her way through her early catalogue to regain control of her master recordings. She started with Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in early 2021, though even that release with all of its shiny new vault tracks seemed subdued and eclipsed by the scope of Red (Taylor’s Version). The album arrived only a few months later, but dropped a bombshell with ‘All Too Well (10-Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)‘ and its accompanying Grammy Award-winning short film/music video starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.
One of the tracks from the 1989 re-recording, ‘This Love (Taylor’s Version)’, arrived last year in promotion of the Prime Video series The Summer I Turned Pretty from To All the Boys I Loved Before author Jenny Han, but Swift has a purple gleam in her eyes. Shifting gears towards Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), ditches 1989’s self-transformations and whirlwind romance snapshots for Speak Now‘s similar, much younger, navigations of early adulthood and all that entails.
Four new songs arriving at the launch of the biggest tour of Swifts’ career may feel like a gift to comfort the Swifties who fought the battle with Ticketmaster and lost. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift wrote in a statement in November, shortly before her fans starting filing lawsuits against the ticketing giant. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Nothing heals fresh wounds quite like listening to ‘If This Were a Movie’.