Taylor Swift Announces ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ Coming in July
Taylor Swift let fans in her hometown of Nashville to be the first to get the official news: “Speak Now” will be the next album in her “Taylor’s Version” series of re-recorded albums.
Swift is giving fans plenty of time to pre-order the album: She revealed that it’s coming out July 7.
“I think rather than me speaking about it,” she said, to screams, as fans realized from the language that the long-awaited announcement was at hand, “I thought I would show you, so if you would direct your attention” to the big screens…” There, the album cover and release date were shown on the big screen.
Upon the announcement at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium, the city turned on purple lights on the nearby bridge over the Cumberland River.
Fans had a pretty strong indication of what was coming. Wristbands given out to fans turned purple at the end of her previous concert this past Sunday, and electronic banners coming into Nissan Stadium were purple-hued.
Swifties had long speculated whether “Speak Now” or “1989” would be next to get the re-recording-plus-bonus-tracks treatment, with the evidence increasingly weighing in her third album’s favor.
The Taylor Nation account went live on Instagram to carry the spoken announcement for fans, with barely a minute’s advance notice.
So far on the Eras Tour, Swift has only been performing one song on a nightly basis from the “Speak Now” album, “Enchanted,” far less than any other album she’s put out except for her debut, which has no nightly representation. Rather than lead fans to suspect that she disfavors the album, that peculiar choice to make the album practically MIA in the three-hour-plus sets only heightened anticipation that she might be waiting to add more material from “Speak Now” until she was ready to announce the re-recording.
Swift has been recording all-new versions of all of her Big Machine releases, with only “Fearless” and “Red” having come out so far in “Taylor’s Version” editions. The new albums have been strong sellers, as fans follow her wishes to buy and stream only the versions where she owns the recordings outright, after her public distress at her Big Machine catalog having been sold against her wishes. The “TV” editions have also included copious bonus tracks of songs Swift wrote but never released during those eras.
This story first appeared on Variety.com.
