When asked why she’ll never be a true Madonna type despite the arena tours, the barrage of number one hits and a juggernaut empire, Taylor Swift responded it’s because she’ll always fundamentally be the girl who writes songs in her bedroom. Thanks to coronavirus, that assessment has never held truer, with Swift having plenty of time to hole up in her boudoir like the rest of us (granted, her room is undeniably more cush than ours). Having intended to go on tour with Lover Fest in support of the Lover album, Swift seemed instead to opt for remedying her foiled summer plans by pulling a Beyoncé meets Ariana Grande move with this combination surprise release paired with doing it so soon after she had already lavished fans with new material (though Ari still holds the crown for most expedient, with barely six months lapsing in between the time of Sweetener and thank u, next’s release). And it’s a surprise made all the sweeter to fans by the fact that after she announced it, her sworn enemy, Kanye West, for myriad personal reasons, didn’t come through with the anticipated album drop of his much hyped DONDA on the same day.
Blending the elements of what Swift considers “indie” (complete with production by The National’s Aaron Dessner) and her best imitation of early 00s Dixie Chicks (RIP, as they’re now The Chicks), she even takes that former category of commercial indieism to an apex in collaborating with Bon Iver. So we can feel just like we’re in 2010s-era Brooklyn, listening to some would-be pithy song on a jukebox at a hipster bar being stylized as a honky tonk. Indeed, many of the tracks can be characterized as such. But that doesn’t mean Folklore isn’t, by Swiftian standards, her, as Cher Horowitz would phrase it, most “way existential” record yet.
And it all commences with “the 1”–for just because Taylor proved to us all that the end is nigh by dispensing with her meticulousness in adhering to the conventional album rollout, it doesn’t mean she’s not still very literal with numbers. In the same way that Ellie Goulding’s “Flux,” from her latest, Brightest Blue, explores all that might have been if the lamenting narrator in question had remained with her great love instead of sidelined by the circumstances of cruel fate, Swift reflects, “I persist and resist the temptation to ask you/If one thing had been different/Would everything be different today?” Probably. But such questions can drive a girl insane if asked too many times, with Swift elsewhere adding, “We were something, don’t you think so?/And it would’ve been sweet/If it could’ve been me/In my defense, I have none/For digging up the grave another time/But it would’ve been fun If you would’ve been the one.” Her shrugging resignation by the end of it seems to connote that thirty has made Swift “mature.” A.k.a. prone to letting go of wistful, “childish” fantasies… except in the case of “cardigan.”
As the first single from the record, “cardigan” (which came with a video Swift assured was filmed with all the necessary coronaV precautions), establishes the first in a “collection of three songs [Swift] refer(s) to as The Teenage Love Triangle. These three songs explore a love triangle from all three people’s perspectives at different times in their lives.” Hence the lyrics, “A friend to all is a friend to none/Chase two girls, lose the one/When you are young, they assume you know nothing.” No one knows about that last line better than Swift, written off many times in her career for being a frivolous little girl with her adolescent love songs and according lack of depth, heightened in people’s minds by the fact that it took her until 2018 to find her political voice, when she spoke out against a Republican senator from her home state of Tennessee.
That sudden “freedom fighter” emblem has found its way into her music since, starting with Lover (most notably on “The Man“) and continuing here, particularly on “the last great american dynasty,” which bears thematic similarities to “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince.” Despite what the title might indicate, it’s not about living in a post-Empire U.S. filled with decay and stupidity, but rather, Rebekah Harkness, a woman who was born into and then married into wealth, which led her to become a patron of the arts (art being, after all, forever a rich person’s “hobby”).
That Swift bought the house Harkness once inhabited in Rhode Island accounts for the inspiration, along with feeling a connection to a woman destroyed by tabloid gossip despite her good deeds and noble intentions (it’s a bit self-martyring on Swift’s part, but you know). As one of the prime examples of Swift’s storytelling ability in song, she recounts Rebekah’s fall from grace after her husband dies, with neighbors whispering, “There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen/She had a marvelous time ruining everything.” Swift then continues, “Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever/Flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city/Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names/And blew through the money on the boys and the ballet/And losing on card game bets with Dalí.” Very romantic indeed–and all in line with Swift’s ruminations on the inevitable atrophy of lavish grandiosity throughout this album.
As Swift’s answer to Postal Service’s “Nothing Better, “exile” featuring Bon Iver offers two perspectives on the end of a relationship, with Iver accusing, “And it took you five whole minutes/To pack us up and leave me with it” as Swift retorts, “So many signs, so many signs/You didn’t even see the signs.” Both can only seem to agree on the following: “I think I’ve seen this film before/And I didn’t like the ending.” Oh, and that it’s over. Like, we are never ever ever getting back together over.
So it is that “my tears ricochet” appropriately succeeds such a melancholic breakup song. It also holds a special place in Swift’s heart in terms of creating the album because she “wrote [it] alone and it was the first one I wrote for this album. [It’s about] an embittered tormentor showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of affection.” Sounds like some sexual assaulter/domestic abuser fuckery–which makes it one of the most shining instances of Swift’s return to her country roots, for never has a narrative been so entrenched in the stylings of Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton… though Swift doesn’t lend it quite such a twang as she sings, “I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace/And you’re the hero flying around, saving face/And if I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?/Cursing my name, wishing I stayed/Look at how my tears ricochet.”
Showcasing what a Sag she is with “mirrorball,” Swift likens herself to the refracting light of the disco ball, constantly absorbing and reflecting moods, personalities and emotions back to those around her. Designed to entertain and offer a good time for others who have little consideration for her (white) fragility, Swift asserts, “I want you to know I’m a mirrorball/I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight I’ll get you out on the floor/Shimmering beautiful/And when I break, it’s in a million pieces.” Can it be any wonder that, with the disco ball being her “spirit inanimate object,” she chose to dress as one in her Balmain attire for the 2018 American Music Awards (back when awards shows were still clinging to relevance before COVID knocked them out… maybe Swift could have been spared some emotional trauma had 2009’s H1N1 pandemic managed to cancel the MTV VMAs that year in order to spare her Kanye West’s antics).
Just as “the 1” was numerically specific, so, too, is track seven on Folklore, called “seven.” Written about a girl Swift knew from her hometown, the song is a bittersweet exploration of the loss of innocence once childhood gets left behind. Of course, the age of childhood is more and more subjective, with naivety being more impossible to cling to as the world grows evermore callous and unreliable. So it is that Swift croons, “I hit my peak at seven/Feet in the swing over the creek/I was too scared to jump in/But I, I was high in the sky/With Pennsylvania under me/Are there still beautiful things?” For Swift, the idea that we can have nice things (despite the song title saying the opposite on 2017’s Reputation) is more important to her than ever, which is why Folklore was released to prove a point that “good things are still happening in 2020.” Eh. Debatable.
The roving “august” gives Lana Del Rey a run for her money in terms of songs that detail the sadness of summer. Swift describes the ephemerality not only of the season, but of a whirlwind fling set against the backdrop of all the pleasant entities one associates with the hottest time of the year. But that which burns brightest always goes up in flames too quickly, which is why Swift sings, “But I can see us lost in the memory/August slipped away into a moment in time/’Cause it was never mine/And I can see us twisted in bedsheets/August sipped away like a bottle of wine/’Cause you were never mine.”
As one of the most sonically divergent tracks on the album (perhaps because it’s one of the few produced by Jack Antonoff instead of Dessner), “this is me trying” is laden with regret as Swift comments on getting as wasted as her potential (as if) in order to cope with the pain. Pondering as usual on her tendency to live too much in her head and to veer toward a vindictive streak when provoked, she broods, “They told me all of my cages were mental/And my words shoot to kill when I’m mad”–that last line having plenty of Sagittarian/“The Archer” cachet. The Lana parallels also continue when Swift begins a line with, “I just wanted you to know” as though she might finish the sentence with, “Baby, you the best.”
A title like “illicit affairs” doesn’t bode well for Joe Alwyn, for Swift rarely explores the topic in her work, favoring instead the twentieth century tragedy of failed monogamy not because of unfaithfulness but because of youthful whimsy. Being that Swift’s own youth is starting to slip away, perhaps she’s angling for a more Jacqueline Susann approach in her storytelling. Or, in Swift’s mind, maybe it’s more like a sad French movie of the 50s or 60s, for that’s what the chorus borrows from thanks to 1958’s Les Amants as she cautions, “And that’s the thing about illicit affairs/And clandestine meetings and longing stares/It’s born from just one single glance/But it dies and it dies and it dies/A million little times.” Carrie Bradshaw certainly thought so after her trainwreck affair with Big.
The simple arrangement of chords on “illicit affairs” persists on “invisible string,” a song that sounds much more favorable for Alwyn as Swift posits that destiny had tied them together all along by an invisible string–“a string that pulled me out of all the wrong arms, right into that dive bar/Something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire/Chains around my demons/Wool to brave the seasons/One single thread of gold tied me to you.” After all, how else could a girl from bumfuck Pennsylvania end up in the arms of a posh London boy? (answer: maybe because they’re both rich and famous).
The subsequent “mad woman” ties back loosely to “the last great american dynasty” as it discusses the topic of a widow gone “mad”–better known as: painted that way by the judgmental, tongue-wagging town that ends up genuinely making her as such with their gossip. Swift comes to the defense of this anti-heroine with the lyrics, “And there’s nothing like a mad woman/What a shame she went mad/No one likes a mad woman/You made her like that/And you’ll poke that bear ’til her claws come out/And you find something to wrap your noose around.” Where the hell was such a song when Bertha Mason was locked away in Rochester’s attic? In other aspects of the song, the usual speculation about Swift throwing undercutting shade at Kim and Kanye materializes in the form of: “And women like hunting witches too/Doing your dirtiest work for you/It’s obvious that wanting me dead/Has really brought you two together.”
Swift loses all sense of a “mad woman’s” contempt on “epiphany”–which basically defies its listeners not to get misty-eyed as Swift makes the case for being able to find peace in one’s dreams amid the turmoil of reality, with direct reference made to the COVID-19 crisis affecting medical professionals as she bemoans, “Only twenty minutes to sleep/But you dream of some epiphany/Just one single glimpse of relief/To make some sense of what you’ve seen.”
To assure she puts the folk in Folklore for this record, “betty” goes heavy on the harmonica as Swift adopts the perspective of the boy, James, who has done Betty wrong. He’s the same little asshole from “august,” and “betty” rounds out the trilogy that began with “cardigan.” In Swift’s positivity-centric mind, she writes the internal monologue of James as being contrite rather than cold, remorseful rather than radically indifferent–as most men come across in their ill treatment of women. Thus, the James with Taylor as his Cyrano de Bergerac says, “If I told you it was just a summer thing? I’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything/But I know I miss you…/I was walking home on broken cobblestones/Just thinking of you/When she pulled up like/A figment of my worst intentions/She said, ‘James, get in, let’s drive’/Those days turned into nights/Slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long.” Even with Swift’s feminist slant (billed instead as being sapphic by many speculators) on his personality and perception, he still sounds like a dick.
The simply named “peace” addresses the complexity of being in a relationship with someone as famous as Swift–so yeah, a missed opportunity to talk politics with a title like that. In the spirit of another one of Swift’s famous friends, Lorde, who addresses the same subject on Melodrama’s “Liability,” she warns her lover (Alwyn, of course), “I’d give you my sunshine, give you my best/But the rain is always gonna come if you’re standin’ with me,” elsewhere asking, “Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?” If it ain’t, Lord(e) knows, at the very least, Alwyn could provide the fodder for Swift’s most epic breakup record yet.
The slowest, sleepiest track of all is the piano-driven “hoax,” which perpetuates a Swiftian tradition of deifying “great love,” imbuing it with the same idolatry that is deemed a sin in Christianity. Still, she admits, “Your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in/Don’t want no other shade of blue but you/No other sadness in the world would do.” This dissection of doomed love is another seemingly botched emulation of Lana Del Rey, even going so far as to wield the latter’s favorite shade (of cool) by insisting, “Don’t want no other shade of blue but you/No other sadness in the world would do.”
While Swift’s gift for rich songwriting is at its finest on Folklore, without the pop melodies to make her songs burst to life, the record feels as melba toast as any would-be indie rock aspirant on SoundCloud. Nonetheless, she’s maintained the business acumen of a pop star by releasing eight versions of the album on three different platforms (cassette, CD and vinyl), collectible “while supplies last” through July 30th, with these being the only versions that feature the bonus track “The Lakes.” So yes, Swift still knows how to turn a profit even during an economic decline. Giving joy and getting it in return during this time of especial sadness she reflects like that aforementioned mirrorball, but in the most upbeat Swiftian way possible even in spite of all these slow jams. Leaving the full-tilt “sad girl” pop singer-songwriter responsibility to Del Rey.
