Taylor Swift has yet again surprised fans with new music – a new version of “Wildest Dreams” – after dropping two albums (“Folklore” and “Evermore”) without much warning in 2020.
@taylorswift Someone said slow zoom makes you look like the main character I said make it Taylor’s Version pls #wildestdreamstaylorsversion #swifttok #slowzoom
♬ original sound – Taylor Swift
and it isn’t a teaser track for “Red (Taylor’s Version),” which is coming out in November. Instead, it was a new “Taylor’s Version” of the song “Wildest Dream” from the “1989” album, unexpectedly bumping that track ahead in the pecking order of remakes.
“Someone said slow zoom makes you look like the main character I said make it Taylor’s Version pls,” Swift captioned in a TikTok post announcing the re-recording (and appearing to capitalize on a TikTok trend). The text on the video itself reads: “If you guys want to use my version of wildest dreams for the slow zoom trend, here she is!”
“Wildest Dreams” has been rising in popularity on TikTok because of its association with a “slow zoom” filter on the service. Rather than have the prior Big Machine rendering of the song benefit from the surge, Swift decided to rush-release her new version of the song, which presumably otherwise would have been held for whenever her full “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” would have been set to come out in her gradual rollout of complete-album remakes.
“Wildest Dreams” hadn’t exactly left our cultural lexicon. “Bridgerton” fans will recall an instrumental version of “Wildest Dreams” appeared in the series’ first season released last December.
Production credits that were released along with the track on DSPs seem to solve the mystery of who would be co-producing “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” with her. The producers are listed as Christopher Rowe, Shellback and Swift. Shellback co-produced the original 2014 version with Max Martin, who apparently did not make the return trip to work on this re-recording. (Martin remains listed as a co-writer along with Shellback and Swift, of course.) Rowe has been credited with working on the previous full re-recording Swift has put out, the “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” album.
Swift is re-releasing her first five albums – “Taylor Swift”; “Fearless” (re-released in April 2021); “Speak Now”; “Red” (to be released in November); and “1989” – to gain a new sense of ownership of her music after music executive Scooter Braun bought and sold her masters recordings.
As with any Swift news, fans collectively lost their minds.
“i physically REMEMBER scream singing wildest dreams at the age of 9 and now i’m sobbing,” @maybankshalo wrote. @dernswift added: “the fact that we were expecting her to drop wildest dreams months ago and now when we’re anticipating red she surprise drops it.”
We’ll be tangled up with this all night.
