Taylor Swift
folklore
Republic
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Something of a semi-career capstone, Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album Lover (2019) presented—in some form or another—all the various sounds she’d taken up across her previous six records. Usually when a recording artist arrives at a point of vocational reflection, a customary singles compilation is dutifully imparted. Not so for Swift—the decision to generate a new song cycle suggested that she still had artistic energy to burn off. And so, alongside any of the nostalgia that buzzed on Lover, an exploratory air could also be heard too.
In the wake of Lover’s initial rollout, Swift certainly kept busy: “The Man” (the final single from Lover) and the Miss Americana documentary debuted on January 27th and 31st respectively—each of them won critical acclaim. Not long after this double whammy of activity, the world found itself paralyzed by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, the touring reality for musicians, regardless of any pecking order, changed overnight. Many assumed that Swift—now unable to tour Lover as planned in the spring and summer of 2020—was going to embark on a minor break. They were wrong.
Swift was inspired to start scripting stock for her eighth studio affair folklore while in isolation. Enlisting a tight crew of collaborators that included an old friend (Jack Antonoff) and a new face (Aaron Dessner of The National), Swift and her colleagues managed to assemble the long player, albeit piecemeal, and observe social distancing guidelines—a masterful feat in and of itself. With an exception issued to “exile,” where she handsomely partners and writes with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the rest of folklore is penned (and partially produced) by Swift with co-writing-production support courtesy of Dessner and Antonoff.
The unexpected announcement of folklore’s imminent arrival only one day before its July 24th release was a power move à la Beyoncé. By late Friday afternoon, the raves for folkore were piling up and one question was repeating itself among devotees and pundits: what was a comparable album to folklore in Swift’s established canon?
The only previous effort to come close would be Red (2012).
Swift’s fourth set was her last LP where she explicitly engaged with a guitar driven aesthetic while also prognosticating a much larger play for broader pop prominence. But if Red was an album defined by wide-eyed ambition, folklore brims with experience gained as a maturing woman. The groovy, piano-pop lilt of “the 1,” a radio ready number, opens Swift’s current offering as a lowkey flip on the vibe of “I Forgot That You Existed” from Lover. Yet with “cardigan,” an adult alternative stunner, following directly behind “the 1,” Swift evinces that folklore is in possession of treasures far richer sonically than what that introductory selection teases.
Across the remainder of its fifteen tracks—seventeen with “the lakes” if one procures the physical copy—folklore is an aural panorama of album oriented rock (“my tears ricochet”), chamber pop (“epiphany”) and acoustic country-folk (“invisible string”). All the content is beautifully outlined by Swift’s voice, an instrument that has always been pleasantly competent, but on folklore it displays a gracefulness and passion never heard before.
One can safely assume that this is owed to Swift paring down the production gloss wielded on 1989 (2014), Reputation (2017) and Lover—not that it drowned her out on those efforts. But, for the first time, it feels synchronal to Swift’s singing and she wisely retains enough of that production muscle to lend folklore a sense of widescreen majesty despite its obvious intimate slant. These creative choices demonstrate knowledge gained by Swift and she actions this expertise on four songs at the heart of the album: “mirrorball,” “seven,” “august,” and “this is me trying.” The quartet finds Swift moving even deeper into the cited chamber pop and country-folk atmospherics to winning effect; and this song strata additionally points to her true talent as a writer.
Although Swift’s embrace of social justice has been to her benefit topically, the politics of the personal remain her greatest asset and best form of communication with her public—“Hoax” is an undeniable highlight of this enduring skill to tell her own stories. However, where she once only skimmed the surface of touching on the tales of outsiders, Swift lets herself become a channel to share narratives that aren’t born of her. In an official statement, she describes the change in her writing mindset for folklore this way, “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t.”
Swift takes this approach to the next level with “the last great american dynasty,” a fascinating account of the long since deceased St. Louis heiress Rebekah West Harkness—a misunderstood figure and firebrand of her day. Harkness was the former owner of a Rhode Island coastal home Swift purchased in 2013. Swift ties herself into the end of “the last great american dynasty,” in first-person, to forge a connection between Harkness’ journey as a complex woman and her own multitudes. She does the same (again via the first-person method) on similarly absorbing entries like “illicit affairs” and “mad woman,” where the line between Swift’s reality and the task of being an interpreter is blurred.
As a complete body of work, folklore is Swift’s most compelling and challenging record since Reputation. No longer a former “country starlet gone pop,” Swift is a woman with a singular vision moving forward to blaze new paths and create art that will resonate for years to come.
Notable Tracks: “cardigan” | “hoax” | “the last great american dynasty” | “mirrorball”
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