In a recent interview, Kelly Clarkson revealed that Scooter Braun immediately ‘took offense’ to her suggestion that Taylor Swift re-record her masters.
Kelly Clarkson revealed in a recent interview with Andy Cohen for a SiriusXM Town Hall special that Scooter Braun reacted negatively to her publicly suggesting to Taylor Swift that she re-record her masters amid Swift’s 2019 battle with Braun and her former record label, Big Machine Records.
In 2019 after news broke that Braun purchased the rights to Swift’s masters for her first six albums with his acquisition of Big Machine, Clarkson tweeted at Swift, “Just a thought, you should go in and re-record all the songs that you don’t own the masters on, exactly how you did them, but put brand new art and some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions.”
“I think Scooter took offense to it because we ran into each other, and I think he reached out at the time to my manager. I was like, ‘It wasn’t anything against him,’” Clarkson tells Cohen. “When (Swift) came out and said that, and I heard about it, I was like, ‘Whatever. Re-record them. Your fans will support you.’ Uh, they did. She has like every top record right now in the charts.”
Clarkson clarified that Braun never said anything to her directly.
“He called my manager at the time, I heard, and I don’t know what happened or what was said, but I think he thought I was attacking him,” she says. “I was like, ‘I honest to God didn’t even realize who had (the rights).’ I didn’t even know all the information.”
“I knew it was important to her, so I thought, ‘Why don’t you just re-record them? Your fans will support you.’ Literally, she’s a genius,” Clarkson continues. “Not only did she re-record it, she planned this Eras Tour — like, this woman is brilliant.”
Clarkson also says she doesn’t necessarily think Swift got the idea to re-record her music from Clarkson’s suggestion.
“I think she is brilliant. She would’ve come up with that on her own, and she maybe already had before I even tweeted it.”
Swift has re-recorded and released new Taylor’s Versions of her albums Red and Fearless, with preparations to release the newly recorded version of Speak Now on July 7. She has also said she plans to do the same for her albums 1989, Reputation, and Taylor Swift, in order to own the masters of all her work.
