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Nobody, absolutely nobody, complained that Taylor Swift didn’t inflict enough emotional brutality on us this year. But here she is and here we are. Taylor is celebrating her birthday this weekend and decided to turn 31 in typical Swift style, dropping her second surprise masterpiece of the year, Increasingly. It’s only five months later Folklore, and just weeks after redefining those songs in his Long Pond Studio sessions, with National collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. But she’s on the roll of her life never exactly laid back. She just wrote “Happiness” last week. At this rate, he will have another album on New Years Day. Who else spends the first year of their 30s producing more than 30 new songs?
Considering how the world is still recovering Folklore, topping it off with this album is cruel and unusual: the last “You know you won, what’s the point of keeping score?” move. Like its sister album, Increasingly it’s all cathartic beauty, an album full of ghost stories and haunted houses. But the most heartbreaking moment is “Marjorie”, his tribute to his late grandmother. It is not just the centerpiece of an impressive album. It is a song that unites all your favorite obsessions in a story of love, death and pain. It is one of the best things he has done in his life. It is a new peak for her as a storyteller, with the key line: “What died did not stay dead.” What a way for Taylor Swift to cap off her amazing year. And what a way to start your new one.
Related: 173 Of Taylor Swift’s Songs Ranked By Rob Sheffield
She wrote “Marjorie” with Dessner, as a tribute to her real-life grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, an opera singer who passed away in 2003. When she announced the album this week, Swift called it “one starring my grandmother, Marjorie, who still he visits me sometimes … if only in my dreams. ” She brings Finlay’s voice at the end, when she confesses: “If I didn’t know better / I would think you were singing to me now,” we hear Marjorie’s soprano voice singing along with her.
Such as Increasingly is a sister album of Folklore, this is a sister song to “Epiphany”, the crude ballad of his grandfather Dean and his WWII combat experience at Guadalcanal. Like “Epiphany”, “Marjorie” is placed on track 13, a number close to the heart of songwriters. (Are Track 13 the new Track 5?) Dean was his father’s father, Finlay his mother’s mother. But they both inspire their granddaughter to visit some scary places in creative ways. Both are songs about living with the dead as you age and feeling their spirit in your bones.
Swift made a video for “Marjorie”, full of familiar images. Let’s say the lady feels right at home in front of a camera – she’s the essence of grandma’s reality, glamorously adorned in her carding and lipstick. In one scene, he shares a piano bench with his granddaughter; Taylor is just a little girl, but Marjorie is already showing her where to put her hands on the keys. Such a powerful image, especially when you consider all the songs Taylor would write with these hands.
Finlay was a classically trained virtuoso who grew up singing in her high school choir in Mexico, Missouri. She majored in music in college and in 1950 she won a talent show for the radio show “Music With the Girls.” Her career took off in Puerto Rico, where she lived with her husband after a time in Havana. He sang with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and San Juan dinner clubs, such as Club La Concha in Condado. He also hosted his own television show. In a news clipping from her hometown newspaper, as seen in the video, she says: “My Spanish was bad enough to be fun, and the public loved it. I became kind of a straight man for the MC of the show. “
It makes you imagine the conversations she would have with her granddaughter while making a living in music, the kind of life that Marjorie could only dream of. But she didn’t live long enough to see her become a star. As Taylor sings, she died with “All your backdrops / And how you left them all for me.”
The power of the song comes from Taylor’s quiet voice over the seething electronic pulse, a nod to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” (It says a lot about the year we had that the idea of Taylor Swift entering her Steve Reich / Terry Riley phase doesn’t even generate the weirdest thousand surprises of 2020.) Bryce Dessner orchestrated it, with vintage synths and strings. , with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon as backing vocals. “I should have asked you questions,” Taylor sings. “I should have asked you how to be / I asked you to write it down for me / I should have kept all the receipts from the grocery store / Because they would take every piece of you from me.” (The way he drops the word “receipt” is a truly Swiftian move: his clever flashback to Reputation It was, when “receipt” only meant a small reckoning on social media. She is looking for bigger emotional stakes now.)
When you come back to Folklore after listening to “Marjorie”, it’s a whole new album, because you can hear echoes of her in the stories, like the scandalous old ladies in “Mad Woman” and “The Last Great American Dynasty.” Right now, somewhere in the universe, Marjorie and Rebekah are arguing about who got a better song. (Sorry Rebekah, I’m Marjorie.) Taylor turns her grandmother, the small town diva, into the star she always wanted to be.
But “Marjorie” also feels like a sister song to “Mirrorball,” tapping into one of Swift’s favorite themes: the pressure on women to be smiling, super-trouper, people-pleasing in ways they have to. fight hard to unlearn. The story of how Finlay made his TV show, clowning around to make his male co-star look better, gives “Mirrorball” a new resonance, especially the line: “I’ve never been a natural / All I do is try, Try try. ” (Another news clipping from the local newspaper: “Her parents had always discouraged her from doing dinner club work, and she accepted the engagement only after assuring them that ‘this will be very dignified’”).
The night that Taylor fell Increasingly, wrote to a fan on YouTube: “I have about 50 favorite lyrics, but right now it’s … ‘Never be so nice that you forget to be smart. Never be so smart that you forget to be nice. “That’s the advice your grandmother gives you in this song. He wishes his adult self could have learned even more from this wise old woman. But that’s part of the pain: the work is never done and there is never a resolution to the story. (I love how this album has a song called “Closure”, the least swiftian concept imaginable).
Like so many songs in Folklore and Increasingly, “Marjorie” is about living with those memories, learning from the dead, continuing the hard work of pain. When he announced the album last week, he explained, “I wanted to surprise you with this the week of my 31st birthday. I also know that this holiday season will be lonely for most of us and if any of you turn to music to deal with the disappearance of loved ones like me, this is for you. “
And for most of us, pain is built into this time of year; It’s the damn season, actually. “What died didn’t stay dead” reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song that sounds a little louder these days, “Atlantic City”: “Everything dies, darling, that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday came back”.
Elsewhere on the album, Swift sings, “My mind turned your life into folklore / I can’t dream of you anymore.” But in Folklore and Increasinglyturning the lives of our loved ones into folklore is the way we keep them alive, it is the way we make sure that, like a popular song, their love is passed on. “Marjorie” is about communicating with someone you’ve lost and trying to listen to the story they always wanted to tell you. It’s about the inspiring power of pain. It’s about holding onto memories so that they hold onto you. “Marjorie” goes so deep because it feels like a summary of all the new terrain Swift has explored in her peak year. But it is also a song that shows that he is always going to a new place.
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