folklore

What Folklore ultimately achieves in its narrative of escapism is reinforcing the notion that Swift isn’t one of the greatest twenty-first century artists because her work is autobiographical, or because she leaves cleverly crafted clues leading up to her albums (although these are all interesting elements) but rather because she is, first and foremost, a storyteller. Folklore is sad, beautiful, somewhat tragic, a little bit off the wall, but most of all it feels free.

These are beautifully turned songs filled with empathy for downtrodden characters battered by life but always ready to fight back, bridging social distance with langorous melodies and deep emotion. The lockdown may have been a terrible moment for music and musicians, but it has resulted in Taylor’s Swift’s most powerful and mature album to date.

This strange summer of arrested development is steadily ending. Folklore will endure long beyond it: as fragmented as Swift is across her eighth album – and much as you hope it doesn’t mark the end of her pop ambitions – her emotional acuity has never been more assured.

A fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation.

On folklore, Swift has come of age, emotionally and sonically, and proven herself — not that she needed to — as not only an exceptionally autonomous auteur but a nimble collaborator with an ever-broadening palate.

It's a sharp turn to the left for Swift and a fine reminder that she is more than just a gleaming pop phenomenon, but a remarkable songwriter too. [Oct 2020, p.36]

A modern-folk masterpiece which finds her moving from her previous pop bangers into stunningly simple yet sharp melodies, ‘folklore’ will be going down in Swiftie history as one of her most unexpected, and undoubtedly one of her best.

Taylor Swift’s quiet, exquisite album.

What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction.

Song for song, “Folklore” does not quite rise to the heady level of albums like “Red” (2012), “Reputation” (2017) and “Lover” (2019). There are no dance floor bangers, no irrefutable earworms, no songs likely to stampede to the upper reaches of the Hot 100. As a collection of songs, though, it stands alone in Swift’s discography. It’s her most album-y album, a creation of and for life in the summer of 2020, ideally experienced alone, late at night, in a single sitting, through noise-canceling headphones.

This is an album of Swift at her most knowing, pushing away the tabloid fodder that has often surrounded her artistry and magnifying the talent she's been honing her entire life. The melodies are full of warmth and round-edges, moving and twinkling on her whim as she indulges in one of the most most human and timeless past-times we have.

But the real surprise is the music itself — the most head-spinning, heart-breaking, emotionally ambitious songs of her life.

One of her best, most perfectly-produced projects ever. In folklore, she wrote a quieter, more thought-provoking chapter in her constantly shapeshifting story.

In the end, folklore may or may not reflect a permanent musical shift for Taylor Swift. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be a grand step forward—that it’s a whimsical and intriguing album offering new insights into Swift’s work is completely enough.

It is both her most cohesive release and freshest shift in aesthetics since her transition to pop superstardom. Whether as a quarantine-induced folk detour along Swift’s pop trajectory or as a hint at a new direction for her music, Folklore is an unexpected work of genuine emotion.

The 16 tunes comprising her latest song cycle oscillate gracefully around piano keyboards and introduce a series of portraits of fictional and real-life characters (from a terrified child with a traumatized best friend to a ghost scrutinizing her enemies at her funeral) to complement her reflections on the social distancing of quarantine time.

None of these are precisely new tricks for Swift but her writing from the explicit vantage of other characters, as on the epic story-song "the last great american dynasty," is. Combined, the moodier, contemplative tone and the emphasis on songs that can't be parsed as autobiography make folklore feel not like a momentary diversion inspired by isolation but rather the first chapter of Swift's mature second act.

At its best, folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions.

While the album tends to lull around its middle, folklore is far less concerned with its individual tracks than the greater, twisting conversation — the sort of hours-long, sanity-affirming chats that have become vital over these last four months.

‘Folklore’ feels fresh, forward-thinking and, most of all, honest. The glossy production she’s lent on for the past half-decade is cast aside for simpler, softer melodies and wistful instrumentation. It’s the sound of an artist who’s bored of calculated releases and wanted to try something different.

There are no pop bangers here, just exquisite, piano-based poetry. There are characters Swift has never introduced before. Some are fictional, it seems; some are inspired by family members; some are people Swift wishes she hadn’t met. Folklore’s songs care less for those showstopping one-liners and more about the small details.

Even with the palpable style of The National all over the album, it does feel like Swift has finally found the authenticity she’s been chasing with each respective release ever since Red. But still, Swift’s vocal delivery lacks the emotional depth of the artists this album pays homage to.

Swift is still unquestionably a pop artist, and folklore is unquestionably a pop album, albeit a quiet one — and as is the case with most recent pop albums, it's about four songs too long. It's hard not to wish that Swift would apply her written concision to her tracklisting, to do away with the stream-grabbing bloat and deliver something more thoughtfully tailored. Still, it's hard to complain about too much of a good thing.

As with Lover, folklore wears out its welcome by containing too many tracks. A tighter song list would have done a world of good.

These 16 tracks (17 on the deluxe version) play out quite pleasurably in their entirety, the joins between Swift, Dessner and Antonoff ultimately only of niche interest. But Swift’s powerful songs reach their climaxes with bittersweet orchestrations, rather than blows to the solar plexus or a ringing in the ears. Everything hovers; little truly lands.