Time to celebrate! Taylor Swift won big at the 2020 American Music Awards on Sunday, November 22.
The “Betty” singer, 30, took home the trophies for Favorite Female Artist – Pop/Rock, Favorite Music Video (“Cardigan”) and Artist of the Year, the latter of which marked her third consecutive year winning the night’s top category. She virtually accepted the awards from her recording studio.
“Thank you so much for this. This is a fan-voted award, which means so much to me,” she said. “You guys have been beyond wonderful all the years of my career but especially this one when we’ve been so far apart. We haven’t been able to see each other in concert, but I still feel really connected to you through the music, your reaction to Folklore and all the ways in which your imagination honored that album. I just love you so much, and I’m really, really lucky because of you.”
Swift went on to explain why she did not attend the 48th annual ceremony, which Taraji P. Henson hosted at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
“I’m actually rerecording all of my old music in the studio where we originally recorded it,” she revealed. “It’s been amazing, and I can’t wait for you to hear it.”
The Grammy winner announced in August 2019 that she planned to rerecord her first five albums — 2006’s Taylor Swift, 2008’s Fearless, 2010’s Speak Now, 2012’s Red and 2014’s 1989 — beginning this November, when her contract with Big Machine Records officially ended.
“I just think that artists deserve to own their own work,” she said on CBS Sunday Morning at the time after Scooter Braun purchased her master recordings. “I just feel very passionately about that.”
Swift, who is now signed to Republic Records, slammed the music manager, 39, in July 2019 over the estimated $300 deal, claiming via Tumblr that she learned about it “as it was announced to the world.” She publicly called him out again earlier this month after he sold her masters to a private equity company, Shamrock Holdings.
“Scooter’s team wanted me to sign an ironclad NDA stating I would never say another word about Scooter Braun unless it was positive, before we could even look at the financial records of [Big Machine] (which is always the first step in a purchase of this nature),” she tweeted on November 16. “So, I would have to sign a document that would silence me forever before I could even have a chance to bid on my own work.”
In the same statement, the “Shake It Off” songstress confirmed that she recently began rerecording her old albums and has “plenty of surprises in store” for her fans.
Braun has not publicly responded to Swift’s latest comments.
