Back during the 2019 battle over masters between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun, Kelly Clarkson took to Twitter to suggest that the pop superstar re-record the albums she doesn’t own.
“@taylorswift13 just a thought, U should go in & re-record all the songs that U don’t own the masters on exactly how U did them but put brand new art & some kind of incentive so fans will no longer buy the old versions,” she wrote at the time, and in a new SiriusXM interview on Thursday (June 23), Clarkson reflected on her four-year-old tweet.
“I think Scooter took offense to it … we ran into each other, and he reached out at the time to my manager,” she told host Andy Cohen. “I was like, ‘It wasn’t anything against him.’ When she 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!”
She added that at the time, she didn’t know much about the situation in which Braun acquired Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records Label Group and Swift’s catalog for $300 million. Braun later sold Swift’s masters in 2020, prompting Swift to begin the process of re-recording her first six Big Machine albums. “All I heard was, ‘Man, I really want to own.’ […] She writes everything! It’s so important to her. She’s a businesswoman,” Clarkson said. “It felt wrong that she didn’t have the opportunity, right? That’s the thing. If you have the opportunity and you choose to not pay that much money, that’s one thing, but to not have the opportunity to own something that is really important to you — I’m not that artist. I don’t care like what I own. I’m not a businesswoman at all.”
Clarkson concluded by noting that Swift is a “genius,” not only for re-recording her albums but also for setting out on her massive The Eras tour. When asked if she was “thanked” by Swift for her idea, Clarkson replied, “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.”
Watch the clip below.
