Courtesy of Taylor Swift/TikTok
Taylor Swift Makes TikTok Debut to Promote ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ With New Light Blonde Look
Taylor Swift made her TikTok debut on Monday, August 23, to promote the November 2021 release of Red (Taylor’s Version), complete with her light blonde locks she wore in 2012.
The singer, who always matches her albums to a certain aesthetic, showed off the looks that had been her theme for her 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore, with her short bangs and sandy-blonde hair.
The first shot showed her in the sepia tones she used for her Grammy-winning Folklore‘s promotional art, before swiping to wearing an oversized black and white checked blazer with a tight braid down her back to represent her second album of 2020.
She then wiped to wearing a bright yellow floral sundress to symbolize her innocence when she released Fearless (Taylor’s version) in April 2021, harkening back to how she was only 18 when the album originally came out. When Red dropped in 2012, Taylor was older, wiser and had her heart broken a few times. Her black turtleneck and long, light blonde locks in her TikTok video was visually reminiscent of that period of her life.
@taylorswift Lots going on at the moment: Red (my version) vinyl is up for presale on my site and oh I’m on tiktok now let the games begin 😺 #SwiftTok
Taylor then added the brilliance of lip-synching to British rapper Dave‘s tune, “Screwface Capital,” in which he name-checks the singer. For each aesthetic, she matched a verse from the song that goes: “I made a link with the Russians / Six figure discussions, dinners in public / My linen all tailored / My outstanding payments swift like Taylor / And boy I owe ‘dem men a beatin’.”
The singer’s re-recorded Red album will drop in November 2021. The CD will feature a whopping 30 songs, including nine from her “vault,” which are original songs that never made it onto the original release. It also includes brand new album art of Taylor tucking her hair into a red newsboy cap while wearing a tan trench coat, as opposed to the original, which showed off her bright red lips underneath the shadow of a hat obscuring the top of her face.
Taylor is re-recording her albums to gain the rights to her “masters,” the original recordings of the albums that were owned by her first record company, Big Machine. The label’s owner Scott Borchetta sold her masters to her first six records to music manager Scooter Braun for $300 million in June 2019, infuriating the “Cardigan” singer. After he became the owner of her life’s work — and the one who would profit off of those recordings — Taylor took matters into her own hands.
While she no longer owned her masters, since Taylor wrote all of her songs, she owned the composition rights to her music. In late 2019, she announced her intention to re-record her first six albums, saying “artists deserve to own their work. I just feel very passionately about that.” Taylor is now with Universal Music Group, where she has owned the rights to her masters ever since her first album, Lover, with the label.
