Taylor Swift – folklore (2020)

Less than a year ago, Lover was released. Less than two weeks ago, I ranked all of Taylor Swift’s albums. That ranking is now out-of-date. And I’m not mad about it.

This album is good. It’s really good. Creatively, it surpasses her previous work to a pretty significant degree. It’s cohesive – a proper album, not just a mixtape – and it’s a departure from pretty much everything she’s done in the past. Certainly, there are elements which harken back to previous songs or hooks, but the feel of this album is genuinely something different.

In a couple of ways, this feels like her Lemonade moment. In 2020, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about a huge artist dropping an album with essentially no marketing and no warning. But historically, Swift has released clues many months in advance: cryptic messages on her Instagram feed, pictures where every element could be significant (and should be counted), secret sessions with fans – and now, all of a sudden, she builds an entire marketing cycle into a single day?

And in terms of the album itself: this isn’t a slight, far from it, but there isn’t a single banger. It doesn’t follow normal formula, the rules established by Swift and essentially all her peers. It’s beautiful, but it feels cerebral almost, in a way that her albums have never done before. Just like Lemonade is an album which deserves a full, uninterrupted listen, so too is folklore.

In a way, I think the real story here, in a strange way, is the story of the collaborators. In the announcement post on Swift’s Facebook, a lot of the focus was shared with those who had contributed to the album (particularly Aaron Dessner, who co-wrote 11 of the 16 songs and whose influence on the album is profound). As well as the people who were directly involved in the album, it’s easy to hear a few other influences: compare the opening guitar of invisible string with Sufjan Stevens*’ Mystery of Love,* for example. cardigan also has a touch of Lana Del Ray, likely emphasised to some degree by the presence of Laura Sisk, who worked as an engineer on both albums.

The album really lends itself to being spoken about as a singular piece of work, but I do think it’s worth at least attempting to highlight some individual tracks and elements. It may seem an odd place to begin, but the number 13 holds a special significance in most of the things Swift does, and I think that holds true here: epiphany, the album’s 13th tracks, feels as though it tells the story of the record. She’s said that the album involved her telling stories that she’d imagined, rather than experienced – some real, some not – including that of her grandfather landing at Guadalcanal in 1942, seemingly referring to pieces of epiphany (though just as the song ebbs and flows sonically, it moves readily between its different lyrical vignettes). This track reflects the album in terms of the story it tells, then, but it also exemplifies the ethereal tone that’s present, to various degrees, in almost every song on the album.

I’ve already emphasised the extent of the difference between folklore and everything Swift’s done before, but it is possible to draw a couple of connections with the sound. Specifically, the separated vocals in my tears ricochet are extremely similar in tone to the chorus vocals in Dress, and the piano sound of hoax is almost indistinguishable from that of New Year’s Day, even down to the creaks of the key presses and the pedal. Beyond that, though, I’m not hearing any immediate echoes. The relatively sparse production throughout much of the record stands in stark contrast with much of her work, particularly Lover.

It’s a bit difficult to pick out any particular standout tracks, partly because the album is still so new to me, but also because the whole thing is so consistently good that any time I pick one, the others all look at me with their dejected puppy-dog eyes, begging me to reconsider. That said, there are a couple of tracks that do stand slightly above the rest in my mind. exile, with its Bon Iver feature, is excellent, and Justin Vernon’s voice complements hers exceptionally well. the last great american dynasty is also great: it’s one of the most high-energy tracks on the album, though it’s still very mellow, and its understated drum backing, plus the soft electric guitar and Swift’s deeply pleasant vocals, make it the song that, in my view, stands up most on its own.

There are also a couple of pieces of instrumentation that really stuck out to my on my first listen. peace has some excellent guitar harmonies, and the piano riff in seven is gorgeous. I also feel like I must mention illicit affairs: its layered, textural backdrop is so blended that the individual notes are almost indistinguishable, in one of the most un-Swift sounding songs of the album.

What does this mean for Swift? It’s hard to imagine her performing folklore in stadiums (though that’s not to say it won’t happen). But she’s released an album seemingly entirely on her own terms, inviting the world to respond to her, rather than the other way round. That’s an exciting prospect. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that these are uncharted waters within the music industry more broadly, or that no attention has been paid to the album’s commercial prospects, but it seems that in focusing on creating something with a greater focus on originality and creativity, and in eschewing (at least to a degree) the commercial elements of the album, Swift has hit a home run. She’s finding her footing as a post-pop artist, and she’s taking us all along for the ride.