Taylor Swift - folklore

July 24, 2020 - Republic

I grew up with Taylor Swift’s career. The fact that we are both about the same age coupled with her rise to mega-stardom during our formative years has always kept her work in my peripheral vision. As an artist, she is an excellent curator of musical styles, and her collections are well designed to maintain her commercial success. Each album release is different from the rest, so the masses of listeners are always on their toes waiting to see what Swift will do next. Her music is a mirror which reflects the status of the music industry at large as well as how it fits into our capitalist imagination of the American dream. I know the experimentation efforts of musical artists on the fringe of trends have arrived—and some would say have died—once Swift adopts them and folds them into her own oeuvre. She targets the sounds that will keep her spotlight, she finds and enlists collaborators to help her make those sounds, and then like a chameleon she writes a body of work that marries her own style and expertise with the new sound of the moment. She is at once a brilliant artist, a brilliant songwriter, and a brilliant businesswoman. A master of the calculated risk, especially the kind that is designed to appear spontaneous and raw. 

folklore is Swift’s 8th studio album, and it is a sad, nostalgic, cinematic journey into an indie folk singer-songwriter dreamland that was written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. She collaborated remotely with Aaron Dressner from The National, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and with her long-time producer Jack Antonoff. Songwriting happened virtually. The components were recorded separately from each other, then stitched together. As a result of this process, the songs on folklore are much more pared down than the work on her latest preceding albums, which are loud pop screams in comparison. Her voice soars over subtle minimal beats and textural piano and guitar riffs and an occasional quiet string section. The songs build swells from the small backpack of sounds they packed in, rather than bangs of new instruments and electronic synths they find and pick up along the way. These are leave-no-trace journeys, save but a memory of a feeling. Swift takes it back a few steps to the roots of her career in a more folk and country aesthetic, leaning into the desperate emotional energy those genres offer historically. I think the departure is a great thing and appropriate for this moment in both her professional development and this moment in our global consciousness. And I think sad indie folk is a smart move for someone wanting to continue success as a musician during a time of collective grief, especially when appealing to the Millenials and the Gen Z’s who are grieving the fact that their lives may never begin. Sad indie folk music is our breakfast cereal.

The lyrical themes on folklore demonstrate more of an outward awareness in Swift’s poetry, as opposed to inward awareness that previously bordered on a self-absorbed perspective. In pandemic isolation, she’s looking outside of herself to better understand the complexity of her personal human experience, looking at ties she has to characters in her past, to characters in history, to characters in her life now, even to characters she’s made up as metaphors. The vivid imagination that made her famous is now focused on other perspectives, on storytelling as a means to introspection. I’m pleased to admit that she is a great storyteller in this album’s exploration of narrative—her poetic imagery is specific and direct, easy to understand but still vivid enough to create a sensory experience of emotional space. An elixir that’s profound and digestible to the masses. 

At times on the album, Swift is guilty of drowning a little her influences. The single ‘cardigan’ sounds very much like a Lana Del Rey song, though its casual atmosphere doesn’t sit on Lana’s prickly throne of the male gaze. There are also moments that feel like swimming in the angsty holier-than-thou pools of 2000s alternative rock ballads. But for the most part, Swift holds her own throughout the body of work, flowing from one song to the next as a constant presence through shifting stories and song dynamics. Her duet ‘exile’ with Bon Iver is a breathtaking call-and-response between the moods of two lovers lost (I’ll admit, I like Justin Vernon with Taylor Swift here more than I liked the last Bon Iver album). The heavy piano, minimal instrumentation, layered vocals, and chord progressions are engineered to make you cry, and the massive bite goes down smoothly like an emotional patty melt. The bubbly ‘last great american dynasty’ tells Swift’s vision of the tale of Rebekah Harkness, heiress to the Standard Oil Fortune and previous owner of Swift’s mansion in Rhode Island. It rings of empowerment in living a life like Jay Gatsby as a woman in America, and the criticism that can come with that, something Swift clearly relates to as such a powerful example of female success. ‘seven’ is like pillowy sunshine through the trees in a forest of lost memory as Swift imagines her childhood friend and the inevitable loss of growing apart. My favorite track, ‘invisible string,’ is such because it’s a fatalistic love song, but it’s not trying too hard like Catherine and Heathcliff. The plucky underwires and cadence and decidedly non-love-song-like chords make it feel celestial, unexpected, satisfying, right. It’s casual like love is when it’s healthy. And last but not least to note, the internet has been devouring what Swift calls the “Teenage Love Triangle.” ‘cardigan,’ ‘august,’ and ‘betty’ (allegedly) together are about three people caught up in a love triangle, each song is sung from a different character’s perspective. 

All in all, folklore is an exercise in some welcome subtlety from Taylor Swift. At times, she has been an explosive and confusing presence in the attention economy, which has made it difficult for me to trust her perspective, even as a fellow woman and feminist. Swift has a tendency to hold onto the spotlight with claws, to fight for it at all costs, and not always with great self-awareness or the best of intentions. But I’m thankful that she didn’t promote this album in advance of its release, amid all of the racial injustice and pandemic pain that’s rightly—finally—occupying our attention. She released it quickly, casually and quietly, dropping her new work into the world for those who need to feel with her. It was still a signature Taylor Swift calculation, but the move again shows how far she has come maturity-wise. I do hope she continues the trajectory of looking outward, of using her influence for societal change rather than attention, because she is a powerful force in this world. How Swift and the rest of us piece ourselves back together after we progress through this time of upheaval, how we imagine a new future will require folklore’s magical realism, indeed. ☔

Listen to folklore on Spotify. Taylor Swift · Album · 2020 · 16 songs.