Dear Gossips,

Taylor Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first of six re-recorded albums, is dropping tomorrow – or tonight, if you’re counting from midnight. For the last several days she’s been building excitement for the release, dropping a digital puzzle for her fans to decode the “from the vault” songs that will be included, in addition to the tracks that were part of the original album, and yesterday she revealed the full version of one of them, “Mr Perfectly Fine”, lovingly mocking herself for the past pettiness that inspired her old work:

The song is rumoured to be about Joe Jonas. You’ll recall, back then, she not only wrote the breakup songs, she put the boys who broke up with her on blast on talk shows. While promoting Fearless, Taylor went on Ellen and told the world that Joe broke up with her over the phone in 27 seconds. It’s wild watching it back now. And she thinks so too because in 2019 when she returned to Ellen, she said that she and Joe laugh about all that “teenage stuff” now, calling herself “too much”. These days, she and Joe’s wife are exchanging compliments on Instagram. Sophie Turner posted about “Mr Perfectly Fine” yesterday and Taylor reacted:

What seemed so intense and important 13 years ago has become a bonus track and part of a much bigger beef. What will be resolved – or not – 13 years from now?

The bigger beef is the reason this song came out in the first place, which is the dispute over Taylor’s masters that led her to re-recording her back catalogue and from tonight the music industry will be on watch to see what kind of impact Fearless (Taylor’s Version) will have. Taylor can sell. Taylor always sells. Her surprise album folklore was the biggest album of 2020. And evermore, the follow-up to folklore, which only came out at the end of 2020, again by surprise, also sold a million copies worldwide in its first week of release – which is a streak she has maintained since the original Fearless album. With the exception of her debut album, Taylor has hit the million copy mark on each and every one of her albums.

So if she can do that with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), an album that is mostly songs people have heard before, that sound almost exactly the same, so as to devalue the masters, if she can move a significant number of copies, with a third album in JUST NINE MONTHS, well, it’ll be monumental. The most monumental of flexes. Can she get to a million? That might be ambitious, even by her standards, although I don’t want to say it’s impossible. There are other benchmarks though. Even if she doesn’t hit the million but gets to a number that no one else has come close to in a while, off of old songs, it’s still a stomp.

So far, the biggest album of 2021 has been Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous which sold 265,000 copies or copy-equivalents in its first week. For Taylor Swift, surpassing that number is easily achievable. The current top album on the Billboard 200 is Rod Wave’s SoulFly which moved 130,000 album equivalents in its first week. I can’t see that being a problem for her. SoulFly, by the way, knocked Justin Bieber’s new album Justice out of the top spot after a week. In its first week, 154,000 copy-equivalents of Justice were sold. JB, of course, is managed by Scooter Braun. So, you know what I’m getting at. We’ll see in a week.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Joe Jonas Gossip

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