Taylor Swift has finished re-recording Fearless as part of her ongoing effort to re-record her first six albums after the master recordings were sold by her former record label.
The singer announced on Good Morning America on Thursday that her 2008 album is the first in a series of full-album remakes she vowed to create after failing to acquire her master recordings, which were initially bought by Scooter Braun, sparking a bitter row between the music icon and the mogul.
Fearless: Taylor's Version will include six never-before-heard tracks, and the single, Love Story (Taylor's Version), will be released on Thursday at midnight, mirroring the lead single from the original album.
"I have now finished re-recording all of Fearless which will be coming out soon," Taylor said on GMA. "My version of Fearless will have 26 songs on it, because I've decided to add songs from the vault, which are songs that almost made the Fearless album, but I've now gone back and recorded those so that everyone will be able to hear not only songs that made the album but the songs that almost made it. The full picture."
As well as appearing on GMA, the singer also updated fans about the new release on her social media.
"Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work," she wrote. "For example, only I know which songs I wrote that almost made the Fearless album. Songs I absolutely adored, but were held back for different reasons (don't want too many breakup songs, don't want too many down tempo songs, can't fit that many songs on a physical CD).
"I've decided I want you to have the whole story, see the entire vivid picture, and let you into the entire dreamscape that is my 'Fearless' album. That's why I've chosen to include 6 never before released songs on my version of this album, written when I was between the ages of 16 and 18. These were the ones it killed me to leave behind."
Although Taylor didn't share a release date for the project, fans quickly picked up on the fact that capitalised letters in her social media message spell out "APRIL NINTH".
Fearless won the singer her first Grammy Award for Album of a Year, a feat she later repeated with 1989.