![]() The Star Wars special editions, for instance, are perfectly fine movies, but their ungainly CGI effects and weird storytelling choices don’t improve upon the original cuts. I don’t know that I’ve ever met an artist who can look at even their most acclaimed work and say, “Yeah, that’s perfect as it is.” Artists are tinkerers, and no matter how good something is, there’s something that got left behind on the journey from their brain onto the canvas or page.īut it’s relatively rare for a revisited work to turn out better than the original. They might just be older and have a new perspective. They might now have the power to finally do something with their art they couldn’t do when it first came out. They might feel they didn’t quite get something right the first time. The impulse for an artist to revisit their old work can spark from a number of places. And “Fifteen” as released by a 31-year-old Swift sounds surprisingly different from “Fifteen” as released by an 18-year-old Swift, despite little but the singer having changed. Now, thanks to Swift’s decision to re-record all of her old music to gain control of the rights tied to the master recordings, she really is revisiting songs like “Fifteen” from the perspective of a woman in her 30s. Which is not to say that teenagers can’t experience nostalgia for their younger selves - have you met a graduating senior? But it is to say that “Fifteen” has a world-weariness to it that fit Swift a little awkwardly when Fearless was originally released. “Fifteen” is a fairly famous song, so you might well know that Swift wrote it in her own teen years, and released it on the album Fearless in 2008, when she was just 18 years old. ![]() In particular, the idea that Swift didn’t know who she was supposed to be at 15 sounds like a woman in her 20s or 30s smiling and shaking her head at the many twists her life has taken since then. That sweetly devastating lyric has the feeling of looking back on adolescence after many intervening years. ![]() She didn’t know then what she knows now, and that made all the difference.Īnd you just might find who you’re supposed to be And as she sings, Swift looks back on that period in her life with a kind of bittersweet fondness. (Teenage boys, it turns out, aren’t always the nicest.) They learn lessons about broken hearts and forever friendships. Told in a series of autobiographical vignettes, “Fifteen” follows Swift and her best friend, Abigail, through their freshman year of high school, as the two become friends and date boys who end up treating them poorly. If you read the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen” without knowing anything about the song, you might easily assume they were written by an adult woman looking back wistfully on her adolescence.
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