Why Red is Tay's red letter album

MUSIC Forget 1989, this was the one that really made Taylor into the super mega-star we all adore, says Katie Rosseinsky

- Katie Rosseinsky

THIS is the golden age of something good and right and real,” Taylor Swift sings on State of Grace, the stadium-ready track that ushers listeners into her fourth album, 2012’s Red. In this opening song, the then-22year-old was conjuring the sense of possibility that comes when you first fall in love with someone. Things get messy almost immediately afterwards — this is, as Swift herself put it last year, the singer’s “only true break-up album”, and on the title track, she goes on to describe the same relationship as “like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street.”

Still, even if this particular “golden age” quickly loses its shine, Red marks the start of another one. It is Swift’s most important crossover record, her leap into music’s major league, combining pop hooks with some of her most emotionally eviscerating lyrics to date and laying out the formula that has made her one of the world’s biggest artists.

No wonder, then, that instead of working through her old albums chronologically, the singer has decided that Red will be the second of her records to get the Taylor’s Version treatment (as part of her on-going effort to re-record her back catalogue after it was sold off to Scooter Braun in 2019). Just like her re-do of second album Fearless, released in the spring, this will be an expanded version — featuring 30 tracks and new collaborations.