When pop superstar Taylor Swift released her eighth album, Folklore, in July of this year, it was a sign that everything had changed.
The album was released at midnight on July 24, only 16 hours after Swift announced its existence to the world in a statement on social media. It was a complete deviation from her usual strategic album releases, which for years were meticulously planned to the tiniest detail in order to maximise sales, build hype, and ensure her music’s eligibility for all major awards ceremonies. With Folklore, Swift completely turned the tables on her fans, who had become so attuned to the pattern of her behaviour leading up to a new album release that they predicted her seventh was coming six months in advance based on a single Instagram photo and some palm tree emojis.
More important, though, was the music. Made largely in collaboration with the National’s Aaron Dessner, and featuring a cameo from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Folklore signified yet another sonic reinvention for Swift: It was worlds away from the synth-pop of 1989 and Reputation, softer and more experimental than the country of Fearless and Speak Now, and was categorised as “alternative” on iTunes. But perhaps most unexpectedly for those well versed in Swift’s discography was the fact that relatively few of the songs on Folklore seemed, at least on the surface, to actually be about her.
It was a decision, she explained in an interview with Apple Music this week, made consciously for the sake of her own mental wellbeing. “There was a point I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs, that I felt it was unsustainable for my future moving forward,” Swift told host Zane Lowe of her music pre-Folklore. “It felt like too hot of a microscope. On my bad days, I would feel like I was loading a cannon of clickbait, when that’s not what I want for my life.”
And so, Swift explained, she threw out her own self-written music-making rulebook and decided to embark on something completely different. She invented brand-new characters and mapped out the “mythological American town” where they lived; she took inspiration from her own experiences and emotions, but used them to create something detached from her personal life and public persona. In short, Swift allowed herself the freedom to become someone else, and it worked: Folklore became the first album of 2020 to sell more than a million copies in the US, has topped several Best of 2020 lists, and last month earned a nomination for Album of the Year at the Grammys.
If that newfound creative freedom was given an outlet in Folklore, Swift has somehow eclipsed it on Evermore. The music on Folklore’s “sister record” is not only a continuation of that artistic liberty, but the product of Swift realising that people wouldn’t be mad at her for exploring it. The worlds built on Evermore are even more fully formed and less expected — listening to it for the first time felt like riding an unfamiliar roller-coaster, one that makes you cry and laugh and gasp when Swift, whom you’ve known since she was 16, describes the protagonist of her own song as “fucked in the head.” When it ends, it’s the sudden recognition that you’ve just spent an hour with a masterful storyteller in a world where the feelings are familiar but still exist entirely, blessedly, separate from reality. It’s not only Swift’s freedom — it’s ours, too. It’s her best work yet.
When Swift first began writing and releasing music under Big Machine Records, she was a 16-year-old unknown singing about being overlooked in the hallways by her high school crushes and the irreplaceable magic of friendships made at 15. By the time she turned 20, however, her relative anonymity had evaporated. She won her first Grammy for Album of the Year at 19, and was topping charts and performing in arenas all over the world. She’d also experienced the whirlwind of her first public relationship — and subsequent public breakup — with Joe Jonas, one of the Disney Channel’s most beloved teen heartthrobs. Life, for Swift, had completely changed, and so she did what any teenager with a guitar and an ability to write songs as good as hers would do: She sang about it.
For the next decade, Swift poured her most personal and painful moments into her music. Yes, she wrote about romance and breakups, but also about her anxiety over growing older, the downfalls of fame, and, of course, a multitude of very public disputes with her fellow celebrities. While she never explicitly stated who or what her songs were about, theories were encouraged with coded messages hidden in the lyric booklets of her first five albums. It was a tradition she broke in 2017 with the release of Reputation, but speculation over the subject of her lyrics continued, perhaps as a natural consequence of her step back from public life in the year prior to its release. After all, everyone was dying to know what she had to say about Kimye.
While she made the conscious decision not to engage in such speculation, the intensely diaristic nature of her songwriting continued — literally, in the case of 2019’s Lover, which was released alongside four deluxe editions containing scans of her personal diary entries from the time she was 16. “I felt like fans needed to hear a stripped-from-the-headlines account of my life,” Swift said of her pre-Folklore catalog during a conversation with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner in her 2020 Disney Plus film, The Long Pond Studio Sessions. She admitted the cycle ended up being “a bit confining.”
Folklore, Swift explained during her Apple Music interview, felt like “a breakthrough moment.” She wrote less about herself and more about the experiences of others, both fictional (as in what she dubbed the Teenage Love Triangle of “Cardigan,” “Betty,” and “August”) and not (“The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Epiphany”). The album didn’t just symbolise a departure from her usual autobiographical songwriting style or a whole new world of creative freedom for a woman who’s been writing music for over half her life; it also came with the realisation that her audience was ready to embrace something completely different.
“I felt like there would be a point in my life where I could no longer [write such autobiographical songs] and still maintain a place of good mental and emotional health,” Swift said. “So, what I felt after we put out Folklore was like, ‘Oh, wow, people are into this too? This thing that feels really good for my life and feels really good for my creativity? It feels really good for them too? Oh my god!’”
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December 19, 2020 at 08:00PM
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“Evermore” Is Taylor Swift’s Least Autobiographical Album — Which Might Explain Why It’s Her Best - BuzzFeed
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