I’m willing to bet that there’s less than a hundred people in the entire United States that don’t know who Taylor Swift is. She’s become the biggest name in music for the last decade, up there with Adele, Beyonce, and Drake. She’s sold over a million copies in the first week four different times, the only artist ever in history to do so. Her hits span and define the 2010s, from the country infused “Love Story”, to the pop anthems of “Shake it Off” and “Blank Space”, and the angsty Right Said Fred sampled, “Look What You Made Me Do”.
Taylor has never been someone who I put much attention towards. Is “Love Story” a song that immediately brings me back to being a nine year old, absolutely. But have I gone out of my way to fully digest a Taylor Swift album outside of one listen, no. So when I saw she was going to surprise release a new, folk inspired album with a Bon Iver feature, I knew I had to give it a true digestion.
Overall, this project holds many firsts for Taylor. This is the first time she’s abandoned the traditional album roll out, opting for a surprise release where she only notified her fans 16 hours before the album came out. Sonically, this project is a new style for her, with her delving into the intricacies of indie folk. She brought on some of the biggest names in the genre to help her, including the aforementioned Bon Iver, but also had help from The National’s Aaron Dessner on eleven songs, and then her trusty producer Jack Antonoff on the rest.
Folklore is perfectly encapsulated in its cover; a black and white picture of Taylor standing in the dewey woods. She appears alone, symbolic of the album being written in isolation due to COVID-19, but yet, she’s also very much not alone. The surrounding woods become the focal point of the cover, with the seemingly ever growing trees and the thin layer of mist that surrounds the ground. The picture is in black and white, which makes the picture come across ominous, even though there’s nothing wrong about someone standing in the woods. It just creates the feeling that something is off with the picture, similar to how something is off with most of us during the most stressful year in a generation. These songs also just sound like they belong here, in a black and white picture of the woods. Hearing these songs blasted throughout Soldier Field would feel weird, but they’d sound perfect in the woods.
Much of the album follows the same pattern. The songs all start fairly minimal, but then become these grand endings with strings, guitars, drums, pianos, and more. The song structure is still typical of pop music, which revolves around these huge choruses and refrains and smaller verses to provide context for the choruses. Staying in a similar style with her older work, the main subject matter still revolves around love for over half of the songs. There are a couple exceptions to these patterns throughout the tracklist, but over an hour of songs with this makeup and not much variation is too much for my ears.
But, the songs on here that hit, hit very hard. “Exile” with Bon Iver is a beautiful duet about a breakup with Bon Iver and Taylor singing back and forth to each other. Besides Bon Iver’s deep vocal performance, you can clearly hear his influence on the way the vocals are composed and layered on the last couple minutes of the song. “The last great american dynasty,” is the other standout track from the album, with Taylor changing styles and doing some storytelling about Rebekah Harkness, a woman who was often criticized for her relationships with men. Taylor had bought her old house, and she draws parallels between the two in how they were treated and talked about by others.
Even though those two songs are the big standouts, there’s still some other quality songs. “Seven” has a great groove, along with some fantastic guitars and pianos. It reminds me almost of a song that could’ve been on Kacey Musgraves’s newest album. Although, I really wish they left out the synthetic handclaps and drums towards the end of the song, as it took away from the authentic feeling the rest of the song had. The hymnal that is “epiphany” provides a connection between her grandfather who served in the military to healthcare workers currently working to help quell the COVID pandemic. “Betty” features a Bob Dylan inspired harmonica performance, contains as close to an anthemic chorus as there is on folklore, and a story about high school love.
Although there are quite a few highlights and quality songs, there is still a good amount that just didn’t work for me. The vengeful “mad woman” feels off-putting with the folk inspired backdrop. While the last two songs don’t have the big builds at the end, so they were welcome sonically, more relationship woes feel useless after ten songs about relationships earlier in the tracklist.
Which brings me to my problem with this album, which is that her love centric songs just aren’t for my demographic. While most of the songs are still objectively good songs, they just have no appeal to me. But even if they did, the fact that all the songs still have the same structure and overall sound for an over an hour long project doesn’t help. Though this all sounds negative, this project contains quite a few of my favorite Taylor songs I’ve heard.
Overall, I’m still glad that I listened to this project and sat with it for this amount of time, because now I’m actually curious to see where she goes from here. While I’m sure making the extreme pop songs is fun, this direction is a lot more interesting in my opinion. It’s still not anything groundbreaking in the grand scheme of music, but it’s a natural progression from her country inspired roots. Folklore isn’t her masterpiece, but it’s a step in the right direction.
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