When the song “This Love” appeared on Taylor Swift’s “1989” in 2014, it was a bit of a sleeper track that didn’t get undue attention amid the splashier run of singles off that blockbuster album. But fans won’t be sleeping on it today. Swift has just teased an excerpt from a remake of the song, “This Love (Taylor’s Version),” in the trailer for a new Amazon Prime Video series, “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” Followers won’t have to wait long to hear the whole track: It’ll be out in full as a digital single tonight at midnight ET/( p.m. PT.
There’s no concurrent album announcement coming with the release of the single, so Swift’s vast audience will have to wait a little longer to see if this really means what it would seem to mean — that “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” will be the next album out in her series of six full-length recreations (with bonus tracks) of her original six Big Machine studio albums.
Fans have a lot of trailer action to take in on the Swift front recently. A preview released last month for David O. Russell ’30s period drama “Amsterdam” offers a glimpse of Swift acting in a more serious and possibly bigger film role than she’s had before. And the trailer for another upcoming film, “Where the Crawdads Sing,” had a snippet of a brand new song Swift wrote for that movie, “Carolina.”
Swift had been dropping Easter eggs that already seemed to augur for “1989” being the next in line to get the self-cover treatment. There’s just one thing that makes many not too quick to leap to any assumptions: Swift already released one track from the “1989” remake sessions, “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version),” leading fans then to imagine that “1989” would be on deck next, only to have hr put out “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” instead.
But there is a critical difference between “Wildest Dreams” and now. With that song, Swift indicated that she put it out when she did because the Big Machine version of the song was already trending on TikTok as part of a meme, and she wanted Swifties to be able to use the newly recorded version instead, since it was already in the can. In this case, releasing “This Love” would seem less reactive and more part of a master plan.
If it is “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” that will be coming out next, it will represent the possible jewel in the crown of the series, as a fresh look at the biggest album Swift put out in her career. The album came out on the tail end of the era when blockbuster CD sales could still be a thing — even with the star withholding streaming from free sites for the initial rollout of the release — and it’s been RIAA-certified for nine million copies sold in the U.S. Fans are especially eager to hear what the songwriting outtakes from this prolific era might sound like.
“This Love” was reportedly the first song written for “1989,” the only one on the album that was co-produced by the man who’d been her collaborator on her previous four albums, Nathan Chapman, and also the one song on “1989” she wrote solo. Although, buried late in the track list, it was one of the least remarked-upon songs from “1989” at the time,Swift later remarked that it was a tune she returned to again and again.
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” premieres on Prime Video June 17. It’s based on author Jenny Han’s YA novel of that name. Han recently signed an exclusive development deal with Prime Video and is the showrunner for the series with Gabrielle Stanton. The series stars Lola Tung as Isabel “Belly” Conklin, an ordinary teenage girl who spends a summer vacation with her mother and older brother and gets caught up in a triangle with a childhood friend and his brother.
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