Nobody loves a surprise more than Taylor Alison Swift. The “Red” singer has all but abandoned the traditional album rollout in favor of risking the collective cardiac health of her fandom by announcing new releases mere hours in advance.
So on Thursday, true to form, Swift took to Instagram to share the first teaser for Prime Video’s upcoming YA series The Summer I Turned Pretty, based on the Jenny Han novel of the same name. The brief clip features never-before-heard snippets of the re-recorded version of “This Love” off her 2014 blockbuster album, 1989.
Anyone who says they didn’t get chills immediately upon hearing Swift’s first haunting “ohahohhh…ohhh” is lying. The echoing, crystal-clear notes are what I imagine you might hear when you hold a magical seashell up to your ear. This is the song mermaids used to tempt sailors to their deaths in marine lore, probably. So yeah, it’s truly the perfect soundtrack to a summer love story set in a charming beach town.
For those not intimately familiar with their work, Swift and Han are a match made in teen rom-com heaven. Han is the author of the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before books, which inspired the wildly popular Netflix trilogy starring Lana Condor and Noah Centineo. The To All the Boys books and movies share the sweetly, hopelessly romantic sentiments of Swift’s earlier music in particular; they pretty much read like a companion piece to the “You Belong With Me” music video.
Han wrote The Summer I Turned Pretty five years before she wrote To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. It follows a teenage protagonist, nicknamed “Belly,” whose life changes irreversibly one eventful summer when she gets entangled in a love triangle with her childhood best friends. The teaser trailer for the upcoming TV adaptation shows Belly (Lola Tung) pulling up to a picturesque Cape Cod-style home, cryptically declaring in voiceover, “I thought this summer was going to be like all the other summers, but…it’s not.”
The chorus of “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” swells dramatically over a montage of beautiful sun-kissed teenagers splashing in the waves, twirling in the sand, and watching fireworks. “This love is good, this love is bad, this love is alive back from the dead,” Swift sings. I’m crying. I’m frantically scrolling through my contact list to see if anyone I know has a beach house I can crash at this summer. Apologies to Jeff Bezos and Jenny Han, but this is no longer a trailer for your Prime Video show, but for 1989 (Taylor’s Version). It’s Swift’s world and we’re all just living in it.
OK, so I may be getting a little ahead of myself here—Swift has yet to set a date for the full 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album release. And why would she when she seems to have so much fun keeping us in blind suspense as we feverishly snap up any little teaser and then write slightly unhinged articles about it?!
While we await further news, fans can listen to “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” beginning at midnight. Now let’s all hope the beloved 1989 bonus track “New Romantics” will be next.
