Taylor Swift’s folklore
I’ve loved every one of Taylor Swift’s musical incarnations over the years, but I’ve thought for years that I can’t wait for the album where Taylor transforms into a piano singer/songwriter, and every song is like the incomparable All Too Well. Every album since Red has had one “All Too Well.” One day, I want them all to be.
That album will probably still be amazing if it ever drops. But turns out I was waiting for the wrong thing. Because stripped back, indie Taylor Swift, with lots of piano and narrative storytelling in every song, is perfection.
folklore has a dreamy, magical quality to it, a soft "hedgewitch in the woods” aura that present the isolation and struggles of 2020 in the softest possible way. You can hear lockdown in this album, I think, not just because it’s less produced than many of Taylor’s recent efforts, but also because of that ethereal sound that captures that sense of slowing down, of facing isolation, of reflection, framed not through the anxiety that I’m sure we’ve all felt, but the softer quieter feeling of walking alone through the woods, no traffic on the roads, no airplanes in the sky, breathing in the fresh air, and reminding yourself that even if our world is falling apart, nature is carrying on.
And of course Taylor combines that dreamy, magical quality with her ability as a songwriter to capture whole stories in single, simple lines. “I thought I saw you at the bus-stop. I didn’t, though,” she sings in The 1, and although the line is incredibly simple, incredibly straightforward, it has a pang to it, and an entire history behind it, that you instantly feel in your heart.
folklore is also an album about stories. Sometimes it is telling stories, like The Last Great American Dynasty. Sometimes, it is looking at life through the lens of a story, like Exile. I think my favorite line in the whole album is from that song, with: “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.” And sometimes, it runs with the theme of the “mad woman” in stories, conjuring a “vengeful ghost of Mrs Rochester” aesthetic and celebrating the “madness” that everyone else seems to judge. “If I’m on fire,” she sings in My Tears Ricochet, “you’ll be made of ashes too,” and yes, soft gothic, ghost-of-the-witch-in-the-woods Taylor Swift was never something I thought to want, but it is perfection and I cannot stop listening to it now that it’s here.
This album could not have come at a more perfect time for me. When writing A Wicked Thing, I listened to Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars’ Safe and Sound on repeat, and now we have an entire album of that sound, just as I’m getting started working on a modern-day Gothic in the woods type novel that this is perfect for. And as the pandemic goes on and on, with little end in sight, it’s inspiring and comforting to get a wonderful new album to listen to that absolutely would not have existed without it. Most things in 2020 are terrible, but some things — a few, rare, wonderful, magical things — are good, and folklore is definitely one of them.
