the key difference between Fearless TV and RED TV is that while the Fearless vault tracks were beautiful and creatively insightful, they didn’t recontextualise the narrative of that album at all. Fearless has a less definitive mythology than RED - new additions have a weaker effect altering the overall album - whereas RED, whose settings and characters and storyline have always been crystal clear, is pretty fundamentally changed by the vault tracks.
RED is a beloved oddity - it’s her most concrete imagery, paired with a near-incoherent emotional and sonic fluctuation. it’s campy singles and country ballads and EDM-esque pop back-to-back. and we’ve known for a long time that the instabilities - the wild genre choices and the lyrics reframing the same moments totally differently - are an intentional device reflecting the volatile relationship the album is centred around.
but if RED was an album of contradictions, it was better for it - it captured perfectly the hysterical rambling of a 22 year old recounting a bitter break up. the missing pieces in the half-stuttered story simply showed the true grief in it. the vault tracks fill in the some of the emotional gaps (between Stay Stay Stay and WANEGBT), the sonic gaps (between IKYWT and I Almost Do), the chronological gaps (between All Too Well and 22), but more than that, they confirm what her audience often wondered as we rode RED’s roller coaster - was the hurt at the core of the album actually more crushing than RED’s most dramatic lyrics? was the noxious heartbreak too raw and left on the cutting room floor? this is the question the vault tracks answer. reopening a wound.
in 2012 this generation’s heartbreak songwriter wrote her definitive heartbreak album and told us the where, when, who and how. in 2021, RED finally has its why.
the other core difference between the Fearless and RED vaults is that any of the Fearless tracks probably could have gone on the original 2008 release. RED’s, for various reasons (too mature, too unfiltered, too drunk, too humiliated, too painful, too incompatible with Taylor Swift’s 2012 brand image), could never have gone on the original album. the bodies can only be exhumed now because the general public’s perception of both Taylor Swift’s songwriting process and her dating life has changed significantly in the last 10 years. it seems strange from the outside, this retroactive vulnerability, but it also retrofits the album with a closure it maybe never had. the vault tracks put a lid on the narrative; reflective, older and wiser, it’s Taylor Swift’s last confession of damage - just how bad that age (and the power-imbalance in that relationship) was for her.
to many, the new context the vault tracks provide is going to feel like petty revisionism. her fans though, who remember Taylor Swift at 22, who have now been 22 themselves, well, you were there, you remember it all.
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