Taylor Swift surprised fans with revised lyrics to two songs on her 2017 album, Reputation, via Apple Music.
Eagle-eyed fans took to social media early Friday, December 12, to point out lyric changes to “I Did Something Bad” and “Delicate” after the streaming service updated all of Swift’s albums to Dolby Atmos sound.
On “I Did Something Bad,” the Grammy winner previously sang, “If a man talks s***, then I owe him nothin’ / I don’t regret it one bit ’cause he had it comin’.”
The lyrics have now changed to, “If a man talks s***, then I owe him nothin’ / And if he calls me a bitch, then he had it coming.”
“Delicate” features a subtle lyric change too, with Swift now singing, “Goddamn, never seen that color blue” instead of, “Oh, damn, never seen that color blue.” (The original “Delicate” lyrics, however, remained in Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour: The Last Show, which hit Disney+ on Friday.)
Swifties on social media quickly began speculating whether the updated lyrics may have been recorded for the long-anticipated “Taylor’s Version” of Reputation, the original of which was released in November 2017. Others speculated whether the surprise Easter egg is teasing something bigger to come.
“My clown theory is that we’re getting Reputation vault tracks and originally written/unedited lyrics updated on album tracks,” one fan theorized on X. “Probably recorded with Max Martin and Shellback while working on [The Life of a Showgirl] because Taylor Swift is a genius business woman artist queen?????”
Swift, 35, has released rerecorded versions of all her albums, dubbed “Taylor’s Version,” except Reputation and her self-titled debut album. She began rerecording her first six albums after her former record label, Big Machine, sold the masters to the records to a third party. (Swift regained control of her masters in May.)
“Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of [Reputation (Taylor’s Version)],” Swift told fans in a letter shared via her website in May. “The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposefully misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief.”
She added, “To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in those first six that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music or photos or videos. So, I kept putting it off. There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for unreleased vault tracks from that album to hatch.”
The singer revealed in the same letter that she had rerecorded her debut album; however, she was waiting to release it. (Swift dropped her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October.)
“I’ve completely re-recorded my entire debut album, and I really love how that sounds now,” Swift wrote in May. “Those two albums can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about. But, if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
Swift’s lyric changes also coincide with Friday’s release of her new Disney+ docuseries, The End of an Era, which follows the star behind the scenes on her record-breaking Eras Tour.
Swift also released a new concert movie, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour: The Final Show, filmed in Vancouver in December 2024. A sequel to her 2023 theatrical release, The Eras Tour, the new film features Swift performing her revised Eras Tour set list after she dropped her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April 2024.
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