Aww shit, she's back at it! Taylor Swift has been fairly quiet since the end of the long and lucrative Eras Tour. She's only been in the news for reasons that she might not like -- a subpoena in the legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the President of the United States crowing online about how she's "no longer 'HOT.'" But now, Swift has returned to one of her favorite promotional tactics -- teasing the releases of future Taylor's Version re-recordings when a new version of one of her old songs turns up on TV.
Swift has done this before. The re-recorded "Love Story" was in a Ryan Reynolds Match ad in 2020. The re-recorded "Back To December" was in a trailer for The Summer I Turned Pretty in 2023. Thus far, Swift has released the Taylor's Version re-records for four of the six albums that she released on Big Machine, her original label, with only her self-titled debut and Reputation left to go. Swift has teased her re-recorded Reputation once already, when her version of "Delicate" played during a Summer I Turned Pretty episode in 2023. But now there's more version to believe that the revamped Reputation might be right around the corner, since her new version of the vengeful lead single "Look What You Made Me Do" soundtracked the opening of the most recent episode of The Handmaid's Tale, Hulu's Margaret Atwood adaptation about a dystopian patriarchal society.
I haven't been keeping up with The Handmaid's Tale, so I don't really know what's going on in the episode opener that "Look What You Made Me Do" soundtracks, though it sure looks dramatic. Elizabeth Moss and a bunch of other handmaids march purposefully down a street, and some shit blows up. We hear a good chunk of the re-recorded "Look What You Made Me Do," and it sounds just like the original.
Elizabeth Moss is an executive producer of The Handmaid's Tale as well as its star. In a statement to Billboard, she says:
I’ve been wanting to use a Taylor song for many years on the show, and we finally found the perfect spot for a track from her, and I’m so glad we waited because there could not be a more perfect song for a more perfect moment. Taylor has been such an inspiration to me personally. As a Swiftie myself, and I think I can speak for [co-star] Yvonne [Strahovski] and our entire cast as well, who are all Swifties, it’s such an honor to be able to use her music in the final episodes of our show... I said to my editor, Wendy, "I really want to find a place for a Taylor track in the last two episodes of the show," and we wanted to find a music queue for the opening of [episode] nine, and all the credit goes to Wendy for picking this track for this moment!
This needledrop has presumably been in the works for months, and its arrival presumably has nothing to do with a Donald Trump shitpost or even a Justin Baldoni legal situation. Still, the timing feels auspicious. Watch that moment from last night's episode below.
It's been about a year and a half since the last re-recorded Taylor Swift album, her new version of 1989. The extended Taylor's Version project has been a blockbuster success, and there have been some rumors that Swift will make an announcement at next week's American Music Awards.
