Taylor Swift has every right to change the lyrics in her songs, but that doesn't mean I think she should've.
For those who don't know, Taylor Swift is an American actress known for her role as Bombalurina in the 2019 film adaption of Cats, but she has also carved out a successful niche for herself as a singer-songwriter and touring musician. Her most recent endeavor has been rerecording her first six studio albums after ownership of the original masters ended up in the hands of famed music executive and world-renowned frat star Scooter Braun.
The whole point of these rerecorded albums — known as "Taylor's Versions" — is to make them as faithful to the original recordings as possible so the masters owned by Braun are devalued. The goal here was never to be flashy. The goal was very much to make these rerecordings like supermoons: something everyone hypes up a ton in the weeks beforehand and then experiences on the day-of and thinks, "Huh. I can hardly tell the difference."
And I think Taylor largely accomplished this on the rerecordings of Fearless and Red. I didn't hear anyone complain about any major changes they heard. But when Speak Now (Taylor's Version) was released in July of this year, fans got their first taste of revisionist history: a lyric swap in the my-first-iPod banger "Better Than Revenge."
The original song is a pretty fiery account of a girl who stole Taylor's boyfriend, no lyric more pointed than the chorus one-two punch of, "She's not a saint and she's not what you think / She's an actress, woah / She's better known for the things that she does / On the mattress, woah." However, when Taylor rerecorded the song, she changed the second half of this lyric to be, "He was a moth to the flame / She was holding the matches, woah." Only Taylor knows the specific reason she made this change, but the general consensus is that 13 years later she thought this lyric sounded either a bit misogynistic or just generally too harsh for someone she's no longer pissed at.
And once again, Taylor has every right to make this change. They're her songs. The whole point of her doing this rerecording project is so she can reclaim ownership of her discography, so I'm not going to stand here and tell her what she can and can't do with her music.
But I wish she didn't change the lyric. First because "She's better known for the things that she does / On the mattress, woah" is just freaking fire. It hits in a weird way because it's the exact kind of awkward, fumble-y lyric you write when you're a teenager really wanting to say something biting but are too scared to use a dirty word. It's a really adorable burn.
But the real reason I wish she didn't change the lyric is because I think it sets a bad precedent for what songwriting should be. I very much believe in the Jarvis Cocker theory of, "A songwriter's job is to explore." It's not to be righteous. It's not to be wise. It's not to be funny. It's just to explore. A songwriter is supposed to dig their fingernails into all the different shades of what they're feeling and what they're seeing and reflect that back to the listener as honestly as possible. A songwriter's job isn't to capture how they should feel; it's to capture how they did feel, and by doing so, provoke the question, "Was that appropriate?" And a songwriter doesn't really have to answer that question. They just have to ask it.
When people are pissed off, they can be unreasonable and say kind of rude things they regret and show a side of themselves they're not proud of in the same way that when people are sad they can be short-sighted and insufferably dramatic. What makes music relatable is that songwriters don't judge these characters or water them down into something more defensible after sobering up. They capture them honestly. It could be good, it could be bad, and it's often ugly, but it's always true.
And that's why I don't like the idea of going back 13 years later and changing a lyric. Because what Taylor wrote over a decade ago was surely the much better record of what she felt in that moment, and now that's obscured
I don't care if you're not proud of that person you were back then, Taylor. I would rather see a true version of your younger, angsty self than a palatable version of who you wish you had been.
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