Taylor Swift announced on March 16 she is surprising her fans with four previously unreleased songs ahead of her upcoming tour.
“In celebration of The Eras Tour, I’m releasing four previously unreleased songs tonight at midnight,” she shared in a post to her Instagram story, which featured a backdrop of three photos of her from throughout her career.
According to her post, the four new tracks will include re-recording of her songs “Eyes Open” and “Safe & Sound” featuring Joy Williams and John Paul White — both formerly of the music duo The Civil Wars, which disbanded in 2014. Both of the tracks were created for the 2012 soundtrack to “The Hunger Games” album “The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond.” There will also be a re-recording of her 2010 hit “If This Was a Movie” and an original song titled “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” which, according to Variety, was created during the singer’s “Lover” era.
Swift confirmed in 2020 that she would begin to re-record her albums after the sale of her masters, or original recordings. Previously, Swift’s songs were released under Big Machine Records. She had signed a deal at the age of 15 with the company that gave the studio ownership of her first six albums.
Swift’s surprise release of new songs has gone over all too well with her fans.
“SKDKKGOEOKXKKC FOUR NEW SONGS TN OMFG OMG OMG OMG,” one completely aghast fan tweeted in response to the news Thursday.
“4 NEW SONGS COMING MIDNIGHT,” another replied with a GIF of the singer dancing. “So excited!!!”
Swift’s “The Eras Tour” marks her first tour in five years and will kick off on March 16 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Last November, fans were disappointed and outraged when sales company Ticketmaster's servers buckled under demand for tickets to the tour.
For the initial rollout of tickets, Ticketmaster held a “verified fan” presale for those who had successfully applied for a code for early access to tickets. However, Ticketmaster.com crashed upon the launch of its presale on Nov. 15, 2022, leaving fans waiting in virtual ticket lines for hours.
“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been canceled,” Ticketmaster shared in a tweet at the time.
In response, Swift expressed her disappointment in a Nov. 18 post to her Instagram story and shared her desire to make things right with fans.
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” She wrote at the time. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse. There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets, and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could.”
