Taylor Swift moves on
Swift has bought back her masters, halting the project she has been engaged in for years of rerecording her past work. She may release more vault songs, and maybe even a complete version of her debut, but not a rerecorded Reputation.
Charmingly, she said it “couldn’t be improved upon” by rerecording it. But also that it was inevitably of its time. And it actually feels almost unimaginable for her to reproduce all that rage, betrayal, and awkward posturing eight years later. Reputation deliberately shreds her own reputation in an attempt to bring down her enemies - her fellow musical artist Ye (then Kanye West) and his then-wife Kim Kardashian, but also the entirety of the internet. “Maybe,” she says in one of its songs, “the world moves on” but she won’t move with it, secure in the knowledge that “I got mine but you’ll all get yours.” Her goals have grown bigger, or maybe smaller: she got hers and then moved on, leaving the past alone.
Speaking of not moving on, I’m still writing my book. But I’m starting to get excited about the big plans I have for this newsletter once the book is done! I’m not going back to sending regular newsletters for a few more months, but do please stay subscribed - and thanks to those of you who have signed up despite the newsletter being on hiatus!
While you try to soldier on in the absence of this newsletter, here are a few other things to read that are either definitely Swift related or vaguely Swifty:
Tyler Foggatt in the New Yorker explores the idea that some of the rerecordings were “never that great to begin with,” pointing particularly to production issues in the rerecording of 1989 that meant listeners under a certain age could hear a high pitched sound in the background of some songs, noting that “The cruel irony is that, had there been an issue like this with the original ‘1989,’ which Swift recorded in her early twenties, she would likely have heard it herself.”
Jon Caramanica in The New York Times says it’s “a relief” that Swift won’t rerecord Reputation. “Declining to revisit ‘Reputation’ underscores both the limits of technology to recreate a work of tactile art, and also honors its divisive-at-the-time rawness.”
There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, by Kevin Evers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). I would normally never pick up a book on business if it didn’t have the sugar coating of also being about Taylor Swift (yes this is probably why my Substack isn’t monetized). Having picked it up, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a compelling and well researched discussion of Swift's career that introduces the reader to some key business terms. It can sometimes feels a bit limiting to discuss art in terms of brand management, but in this case I think it provides a useful counterbalance to discussions that ignore the financial and business aspect of Swift's work entirely. (I received an ARC of this book via NetGalley; all thoughts, such as they are, are my own).
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade, Nora Princiotti (Ballantine Books, 2025). This is a well-researched and approachable book that describes the work and careers of pop singers from Avril Lavigne to Rihanna to (of course) Taylor Swift. Princiotti discusses how their careers were shaped by, and helped shape, the cultural and social context of the 2000s. The chapter on Swift is about the internet and Swift’s direct relationship to her fans via platforms such as MySpace. I really recommend this book if you have any interest in 2000s popular culture. (I also received an ARC of this book via NetGalley; all thoughts still my own).
Deep Cuts: A Novel, Holly Brickley (The Borough Press, 2025). Like Isabel Banta’s Honey, which I reviewed last year, this is a novel about people writing songs in the 2000s. It’s a really quick read that feels a bit like a romance but not too much.
Or if you don’t want to read about Swift/the music industry more generally:
Counter Craft, by the fiction writer Lincoln Michel, contains frequent and excellent analysis of the consequences of the rise of generative AI for the creative industries.
My sister Finley Doyle is a visual artist and has her own Substack.
And Shakespeare possibly liked his wife. Heartwarming!1
If you read the scholarly article, the evidence is pretty shaky but there’s some great historical detective work trying to pin down the identity of John Butts and the location of Trinity Lane, not to mention whether “Mrs Shakspaire” could be Shakespeare’s wife or someone with the same name.