5 Takeaways From Taylor Swift’s New Album, folklore
The way Taylor Swift tells it, folklore arrived in a rush of inspiration. “It started with imagery,” she wrote on Instagram. “Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.” Less than a year after 2019’s Lover, it marks a departure from the sharp, radio-friendly pop music that Swift spent the past decade-and-a-half building toward. It is a quiet, personal, and moody record that ranks among her most striking and affecting work. And if it sounds like a surprise, that’s because it was.
The 16-song album was announced with little fanfare just a day before its release. “Most of the things I had planned for the summer didn’t happen,” she wrote in a statement, “but there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.” Created in (relative) isolation, the credits include familiar names like Jack Antonoff and recording engineer Laura Sisk. But Swift also brings in new voices, with a focus on the indie world. Among her new collaborators are three members of The National: drummer Bryan Devendorf and multi-instrumentalists Bryce and Aaron Dessner, with the latter co-writing or producing 11 songs. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver also appears, co-writing and lending vocals to the ballad “exile.” The result is meditative, unlike anything Swift has done while highlighting her defining characteristics as a writer. Here are a few things that stand out.
Are We Out of the ’80s?
Before the release of 2014’s 1989, Taylor Swift mentioned that she was revisiting the pop music of her birth year for inspiration. This represented a few major shifts from her acoustic, country-leaning early work: a turn away from those intimate narratives toward more universal themes accompanied by glittery, arena-ready arrangements. These fascinations carried over into 2017’s reputation and 2019’s Lover, but folklore is subtle and intricately orchestrated, full of lyrics that feel newly refined. In “seven,” she sings about memories passed down “like a folk song,” and the comparison makes sense. Her tone is sparse and direct but untethered to what we’ve come to expect from Taylor’s quiet side.
Miss Americana
While folklore feels like a left turn from Swift, both in its haunted sound and its complete dismissal of her previous album rollouts (no polarizing first single! no brand partnerships!), it also feels like a continuation of one side of her songwriting. From the slow-build ballads of Speak Now to last year’s Golden Globe-nominated Cats song “Beautiful Ghosts,” Swift has always been interested in capturing the explosive realizations from the heat of the moment as much as the lingering discomfort that arises in the aftermath. The music here is threadbare and nuanced, following her thoughts to these lonely corners and adding new depth: In “mirrorball,” a winding pop melody is paired with a pitter-pattering drumbeat, so hushed in the mix it sounds like a secret.
Teardrops on My Piano
Folklore is a long album—16 songs in just over an hour—but it is also deeply focused. Many of the songs are sung at the piano, with deep silences between each note. The instrument is occasionally played by the National’s Aaron Dessner, and the mood suggests that Swift is a fan of the band’s somber “Pink Rabbits” ballads more than their “Mr. November” singalongs. And while her previous piano ballad highlights—like, say, her performance of “All Too Well” at the 2014 Grammys—used the instrument for grand climaxes, she’s less interested in catharsis than mood here. In “peace,” which features one of her best-ever vocal performances, she sings over subtle ribbons of guitar and twinkling keys, asking for the “silence that comes when two people understand each other.” A similar sense of intuition guides these songs.
Sad, Beautiful, Tragic Love Affairs
While Reputation hinged on a healthy relationship that saved Taylor Swift from a public backlash, and Lover explored the comforts of long-term commitment, folklore is less specific in its portraits of couples. Songs arrive from multiple points of view, from the righteous anger at an ex and his new partner in “mad woman” (“Every time you call me crazy/I get more crazy”) to the secret, and likely doomed, lovers in “illicit affairs.” “It’s born from just one single glance,” she sings, “but it dies and it dies and it dies a million little times.” She has even mentioned a trilogy of songs on the record that explore the same story from each person’s perspective; she referred to it as the “Teenage Love Triangle,” a common theme of her early work, but her treatment of it now feels like a clear evolution.
The Stories of Taylor
“When I was young I knew everything,” Swift sings in the album’s first single “cardigan.” In some ways, her lyrics on folklore recall the narrator of early releases like Fearless and Speak Now. Back then, the objects of affection (and otherwise) were given names and backstories: your Dear Johns and Hey Stephens. The apparently autobiographical homeowner’s narrative of “the last great American dynasty” and the childhood retrospection of “betty” both feel cut from this cloth. In “invisible string,” she reflects on all the men who broke her heart and inspired songs: “Now I send their babies presents,” she laughs. “I created character arcs and recurring themes that map out who is singing about who,” Swift told her fans, and the album will likely rank among the most analyzed in her deep, self-referential, and constantly evolving songbook.
Lyrical Folklore:
“I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere/Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here” — “this is me trying”
“Does a scorpion sting when fighting back?/They strike to kill/And you know I will” — “mad woman”
“Leaving like a father/Running like water/When you are young they assume you don’t know anything” — “cardigan”
“Bold was the waitress on our three-year trip/Getting lunch down by the Lakes/She said I looked like an American singer”— “invisible string”
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
