offers fans, aside from the purported pleasure of helping Swift stick it to Scooter Braun, is a wistful revisiting of that breakthrough through the frame of the intervening 13 years and the listener’s personal attachment to the arc of her creative and personal life since then. Oh, plus six bonus tracks.Sonically, the new edition is all but identical to the original, an invisibly impressive feat of craft.
But as is nearly always the case in human sensory perception, it’s damn near impossible to say how much of that resonance is in the music and how much is filled in by the receiver’s mind. Personally, I didn’t climb completely aboard the Taylor train until 2010’sclassics . But on a first night’s listening, what I noticed most was that I started getting salty-eyed whenever the songs made explicit reference to specific ages, the passage of time, memory, and the like.