Taylor Swift wasn’t happy when Scooter Braun purchased the rights to her old songs and now she has plans to rerecord her old music.
“Might you do that?” journalist Tracy Smith asked Swift in a forthcoming episode of CBS Sunday Morning. “Oh yeah,” Swift said.
“That’s a plan?” Smith asked. “Yeah, absolutely,” the singer replied.
Swift spoke to the press ahead of her upcoming album, Lover. A reporter asked the questions about the controversy around her discography, and whether she’d been allowed to purchase the music she’d written and recorded on the label.
Braun is a well-known record executive, has worked with some of today’s biggest pop stars, including Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and Demi Lovato. He has also worked with Kanye West, aka Swift’s longtime nemesis.
In late June, there were rumors that Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings, purchased Big Machine Records, a music label owned by Scott Borchetta. It’s also the place where Swift recorded her first six albums.
“This is my worst-case scenario,” said Swift in a statement via her Tumblr at the time. “This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is just a contractual concept.”
In the same statement, Swift accused Braun of having some of his clients bully her. “Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work,” she said. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.”
In a recent interview with BuzzFeed News, Todrick Hall, who is a singer and choreographer and also a friend of Swift, defended her and talked about his own experience working with Braun.
Hall, who is black and gay, was once managed by Braun and said he felt discriminated against in their working relationship over his race and sexual orientation.
“Racism is just the belief that your race is superior to another race. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have friends or employees that are of another race,” Hall said. “It just means that at the end of the day you believe that your race is superior. And I think the same thing with homophobia.”
Braun has not commented publicly on Swift’s claims, but his wife said, the singer was given the chance to purchase her masters and was throwing a “temper tantrum.”