Taylor Swift's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Taylor wanted her songs back, and she had no idea what she'd signed to lose them. She sat on the floor of her recording studio, surrounded by gold walls and boxes of paper. Every song she had ever written now belonged to the label that once promised to protect her. She meant to take them back. But she couldn't fight a contract she had never read. Her lawyer had asked for it three times. The label kept stalling. So Taylor drove out to the studio herself, the one they'd built her years ago, before the deal turned sour. She still had a key. Somewhere in these rooms, the original paperwork had to exist. She pulled open a filing cabinet behind the mixing board. Contracts, invoices, old lyric sheets. Her hands shook as she flipped through folders. Coffee stains. Dead phone numbers. Nothing with her signature on it. Then she found a locked drawer at the bottom. She jammed a letter opener into the seam and pried. The wood cracked. Inside sat a single manila envelope, her name printed across the front. Taylor tore it open. The contract was thirty pages long. She read fast, then slow, then again. On page nineteen she stopped. One clause named a buyback price. Another set a deadline. She could reclaim every master recording, but only within a ninety-day window that opened when the label changed hands. Her breath caught. She grabbed her phone and searched the label's name. A press release from that morning glowed on the screen. The label had been sold to a new owner at midnight. The window was open. It had opened today. Taylor lowered the phone. For years she'd begged for a chance to buy her songs back, and lawyers told her the door was shut. It wasn't. The contract gave her a way in. She finally knew the exact terms she'd been fighting blind against. But ninety days was nothing. The buyback price on page nineteen was a number she read twice to believe. She didn't have that kind of cash sitting in a bank. Not close. She stood and looked around the gold-walled room, at the boxes, at the mixing board where she'd made half those songs. The deadline was real now. The price was real now. She had traded one problem for a harder one. Taylor folded the contract and slid it into her bag. She had proof, a clock, and a number. Now she had to find the money before the door swung shut again. She locked the studio behind her and drove home to the white house by the coast. The whole way, she counted days in her head. Eighty-nine left. She already knew where she had to start making calls.