Taylor Swift's Re-Recordings

I hope something we all can learn from Taylor Swift's re-recordings of her previous albums (here's what's happening with that situation if you haven't heard) is how to treat our old work with kindness and respect. 

When I listened to the re-recorded version of Fearless, I was honestly a little surprised by how nearly identical it is to the original, aside from Swift's voice sounding more mature and some very subtle differences in instrumentals and production — which can hardly be avoided when this version came out over a decade after the first. 

Which brings me to what I think is the most important thing to take from the whole situation: when Taylor Swift was given an opportunity to completely redo her previous albums, she chose to stay as true to the original as possible. She didn't change the lyrics to align with her shifted perspectives or alter the musicality to better suit what she's capable of now. She treated this creation she made at 18 years old with the utmost love. 

Most people, especially me, have the knee-jerk reaction of cringing when we go back and look at something we made a long time ago. It's easy to take a negative emotion like that at face value and assume it's because the art we made is bad. It's harder to acknowledge the reality that seeing nothing but faults in old work is evidence that we've grown and improved since then. It's harder to embrace that without our sophomore album or debut novel or DeviantArt page full of a 13-year-old's sketches, we wouldn't be where we are now. We create the best we know how to at that point in our lives, we learn something from the process, our "best" improves as a result, we do even better the next time around, and we repeat. Growth isn't linear by any means, but it is upward motion, assuming we make ourselves open to it. 

Swift's re-recordings are empowering in their assertion that artists should hold the rights to their own work, but I think what's impacted me even more than that is Swift's message that her old songs are still of immense value to her, even if they're not at the level she now can achieve. 

It's possible to love something and learn from it at the same time. Old work is still part of the journey — it's just in a place that we're not at anymore.