Taylor Swift: ‘folklore’ Review
9.5
GENRE: Pop/Folk
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2020“This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp on to that kind of success,” a conformed Taylor Swift admits in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, which debuted earlier this year. She was referring to Lover, her seventh studio album that came out last August. Released after a two-year hiatus, the album was a total change of scenery compared to her previous extremely dark reputation phase: pastel-colored music videos, photoshoots with tye-dyed denim jackets, pink strands of hair, and interviews about cats. Lover was created to have more singles, more music videos, and a bigger tour than its predecessor—Lover Fest would be Swift’s own festival. But covid-19 has claimed lives, swiped businesses, jobs, and obviously, hopes of live concerts anytime soon. If plans to make the fan favorite “Cruel Summer” a single still existed, they have probably been scrapped for many unavoidable reasons, one of them being covid and another being she just surprised-released another album. folklore, Swift announced on Thursday, is her eighth studio album and would be released hours later, at midnight.
folklore changes every aspect of Swift’s usual rollouts: no first single released three months apart from the album, no Vogue photoshoot, no leaks, no thirteen TV performances. Instead, there is an Instagram post with a lengthy explanation of how folklore came about, including the names of collaborators that The National’s Aaron Dessner, long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, and Bon Iver’s founder Justin Vernon. On Twitter, Swift billed the album as “a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness,” resulting from “her imagination running wild during isolation.” Listening to the record, it’s noticeable that the changes are not limited to unusual promotion: Taylor Swift has gone indie, and her storytelling has shifted from autobiographical to fictional. The LP is the singer’s awakening to a world in which she no longer needs to speak about herself or her real-life relationships: she has earned the right and is skilled enough to tell other people’s stories—even if they’re fictional characters who live in a place where summer lasts the whole year but cardigans are never put away.
The premise of narrating tales fills folklore with cinematic songwriting—Swift’s specialty at this point. She starts the opening “the 1” with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” suggesting that she is veering away from her previous bubblegum pop towards a new type of sound. Lead single “cardigan” is a reckoning of Swift’s ability to create sticky poetry, tiptoeing the margins of pop currents while carrying a pocket book of metaphors and visual references. “I knew you’d linger like a tattoo kiss/I knew you’d haunt all of my what-ifs.” All these years, we thought Red’s “All Too Well” to be the epitome of Swift’s giftedness as a songwriter; eight years later, the post is about to be grasped with sharp nails by “cardigan.” If anything, folklore is the ultimate collection of “All Too Wells”: the scarf is now a battered cardigan under someone’s bed, the refrigerator light is now a mirrorball, autumn leaves have been blown by salt air and become rust on doors. Dessner’s haunting piano lays the pathway for Swift’s pictorial verses throughout the track.
There is a triptych of songs on folklore telling the story of a love triangle. Betty, James, and Inez are fictional characters directly mentioned on “betty,” a harmonica-instrumented folk/country song written from the perspective of James, who cheated on Betty and is now asking for forgiveness. Earlier track “cardigan” is the story told from Betty’s perspective 20 years after the betrayal happened. The two songs reference each other: on “betty,” there are mentions of cobblestones, a cardigan, and a streetlight, things Betty reminisces of on “cardigan.” The third of the bunch, “august” is the same story told by Inez—the girl whom James cheated on Betty with. Here, Antonoff’s guitar chords sound fresh out of Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, progressing smoothly with Swift’s dulcet vocals. The sets are so thoroughly established that it’s hard to wrap our heads around how fast (and secretly) Swift and her producers pulled out this album; three months went by from the moment they started writing together to the day of release. Songwriting, recording, touch-ups, and mixing were all done remotely through video calls. Then a photo shoot, a music video, and all the paperwork happened in this timeframe—I assume many NDAS were iClouded.
Though not directly linked to one another, the other songs on folklore are still cohesive. The standout “exile,” co-written by and performed with Justin Vernon, is a tear-inducing cut that lands like a punch in the neck. Its allusion to films makes as much sense here as it would make in a indie drama movie, in which it would produce the same effect as “The Blower’s Daughter” on Mike Nichols 2004’s movie Closer. “the last great american dynasty” tracks the story of Rebekah Harkness, a Rhode Island middle-class divorcée who got married to Standard Oil heir William Harkness. Why? Well, Swift bought a house that once belonged to Rebekah—there’s a personal connection right there. Then, there’s this: Rebekah’s nickname was Betty. Yep, there are no loose ends when it comes to Taylor Swift. The singer tells Harkness’s story over a dream-beat pulse in a very The Great Gatsby stylized setting (Swift is a fan of Fitzgerald's books). Her use of ‘gauche’ on this song is equivalent to Mariah Carey’s clever ‘rendezvous’ rhyme on “Touch My Body.” Are you even a serious songwriter if you’re not teaching children unusual vocabulary?
The mellow-synthed “my tears ricochet” is a lyrical metaphor for the old Taylor (yes, the one pre-reputation) being dead and her foes (Scott Borchetta?) showing up to her funeral. Appropriately, the song has goth rock undertones—Swift always knows what she’s doing. The melodic piano ballad “mad woman” is Swift’s social critique of sexism toward women, and a confrontation of the gaslighting that she herself has faced throughout the years (every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy/what about that?). Here, the artist shows that her songwriting can be satirical and serious at the same time. “mirrorball” reflects on the cancelation of her Lover Fest concerts due to the pandemic (“and they called off the circus, burned the disco down/when they sent home the horses and the rodeo clowns”), with Swift admitting that she’s still “trying everything” to keep us “looking at her.”
When Taylor Swift went full pop on 1989, her non-admirers stated that she was solely chasing paper (aren’t we all?). The truth is that Swift is doing exactly what we do: finding new routes to fulfillment, but she’s doing it in front of millions and not in an office. folklore is the pursuit of perfecting an already brilliant artist’s skills—many people are taking the time in lockdown to change their home decor, rearrange their books, separate clothes for donation, read new books, discover new tv shows, etc. Swift is looking new way to tell stories. When Radiohead reinvented their sound with Kid A and Amnesiac in 2000, they reshaped not only themselves but also a lot of other bands, as well as people’s perception of what rock and alternative music should sound like. Taylor Swift is doing the same with folklore: she’s resetting her sound, changing her poetic truths, reinventing the new-now-old Taylor that we have known since reputation. If Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia has been considered the absolute album of quarantine, folklore has entered the chat and said “hold my beer.”
Listen to folklore:
