Taylor Swift has announced the next of her re-recorded early albums. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is out July 7. She announced the news from the stage during the first of her Eras Tour stops in Nashville.
In a social media post, Swift indicated that Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) has six previously unreleased tracks on it. She wrote, in part:
I first made Speak Now, completely self-written, between the ages of 18 and 20. The songs that came from this time in my life were marked by their brutal honesty, unfiltered diaristic confessions and wild wistfulness. I love this album because it tells a tale of growing up, flailing, flying and crashing … and living to speak about it.
Speak Now, released in 2010, was Swift’s third album, featuring singles like “Mean,” “Ours,” “Sparks Fly,” and “The Story of Us.” The record sold more than a million copies in its first week, setting a record for the highest number of sales by a solo female country artist. It was nominated for a Best Country Album Grammy Award, with “Mean” winning for Best Country Solo Performance and Best Country Song.
Swift announced her plans to re-record all of her pre-Lover material in the summer of 2019, in the wake of Scooter Braun purchasing her catalog without her involvement. She released Fearless (Taylor’s Version), an update of her 2008 record, in April 2021 after issuing two new albums, Folklore and Evermore, in 2020. She followed it up in November 2021 with Red (Taylor’s Version), a 30-song update of 2012’s Red.
Though she didn’t put Fearless (Taylor’s Version) up for any Grammys, Swift submitted her Red re-cut for consideration in multiple categories for the 2023 awards. She took home one trophy, winning the Grammy for Best Music Video with “All Too Well: The Short Film.” In 2014, the original version of the album had been up for Album of the Year and Best Country Album, losing to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and Kacey Musgraves’ Same Trailer Different Park, respectively.