The song that catapulted Taylor Swift from a phenomenon too cool for the country to the world’s pop supernova isn’t enough was “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the debut single from her fourth album, “Red.” in 2012. The first of her songs to headline the Billboard Hot 100, she displayed country references as a provocation on the road to a saccharin ecstasy, an unmistakable pop hook: a universal hymn to beat it.
Right after the joyous mockery of the song from a first chorus, Swift delved into the type of boy she was delighted to get rid of: “You’d Hide and Find Your Peace / With some independent album much cooler than mine.” “
Sick Burn Delivered with an eye roll literally on the song’s video, he announced that Swift understood the power and genius of his own music (which, at the time, was not widely accepted). And it tightly encapsulated the way the mopey’s insides have often been perceived as, by mistake, depth. It’s about men, of course, but certainly also songs. It is a trap on which entire genres are based.
Now, eight years later, Swift has made, well, one of those records herself, or at least something like that. Their alternately relaxing and cheerful, thoughtful and suffocating eighth album, “Folklore,” is a definite shake-up to the last decade or so of high-gloss, fluid, stylish and emotionally cunning big top marquee.
Made from scratch in the quarantine era, “Folklore” was recorded at his Los Angeles home, and written and produced in remote collaboration largely with Aaron Dessner (of the National) and his emotional extractor, Jack Antonoff.
Choosing this approach may be purely a function of circumstance, but Swift has been renamed for some time. “Folklore” marks a conclusion (temporary or not, it is not clear) to its long march in the teeth of contemporary mega-pop, which over the course of four albums: “Red”, “1989”, “Reputation” and “Lover “- has paid decreasing dividends, musical and social. Becoming a true centrist pop star is a battle that Swift never quite won, and a battle is no longer worth fighting.
“Folklore” is the first attempt at a post-pop Swift, and there are many things that Swift’s albums are generally not: rough-edged, oppressed, spatial. It’s a completely cunning pop album covered by Dessner in some places, the production of which can be like the wet clothes that pull Swift, slows her down, and mine. Swift is not an especially powerful singer, although she does a lot with naturally edgy tone and enthusiasm. But both firms wither here as often as not. The sour edge he specializes in, the one that is brutally effective at mocking or sighing, is covered in layers of chiffon strings (there’s a lot of cello), austere piano, throbbing Mellotron, stained saxophone, atmospheres that thicken the air.
As Swift has long shown, contemplation and exuberance are not mutually exclusive, and neither are brightness and reflection. And so, the songs in “Folklore” fall into roughly two fields: great fast-writing songs that are sturdy enough to withstand production, and others that end up obscured by darkness.
Some of the best songs on the album are moderately moderate versions of the familiar Swift modes. In “Betty,” she offers adolescent romantic repentance with the icy, wise vocal chill that unfolds in her most heartfelt moments, with faint echoes of the melancholic “Tim McGraw”, her 2006 debut single. The Airy, Earthy “Invisible String” , about trusting fate, is the only song that sounds really hopeful on the album (and the only one about a happy and fulfilling relationship), and features some of Swift’s most vivid lyrics: “Cold was the steel of my ax for grind / For the children who broke my heart / Now I send gifts to their babies. “
More interesting are the tracks where experimentation with a tonal approach is successful. “Seven” begins with an ethereally lustrous voice, with Swift sighing her lyrics, landing the rhymes in unexpected places. In “Illicit Matters,” she whispers her words as long-resentful secrets: “Tell your friends you’re going to run / You’ll blush when you return,” dotted with syllables of sunlight designed to freeze the perpetrators.
And then there is “Exile”, the most unusual song on the album. A charming and distressed duet with Justin Vernon (credited as Bon Iver), he is stark and haunting of recriminations. Fast telegraph distance and skepticism: “I can see you looking at you, darling / As if I were just your substitute / As if you had dirtied my knuckles.” But it’s the end of the song, when Swift and a husky Vernon go line by line in a combination of hard whiskey country, desperate R&B, and black box theater dialogue, that you feel the complete emotional rust. Around her, the pianos sound like grandfather clocks, severe and fatalistic.
However, much more frequently, production dictates Swift’s limits. The smoked “Cardigan” has a number of moving parts, which distracts Swift’s breathy voice. The hymnbook “Epiphany” feels claustrophobic, like Enya without fluttering. “Mirrorball” borders on shoegaze, and “Mad Woman” has the mix of sulkiness and irony that is a trademark of Lana Del Rey.
Dessner’s specialty, here and at the National, the rowdy and grim band that has been one of the most acclaimed indie rock acts of the 2000s, is making music that chases. Swift has shown a weakness for this aesthetic before; See their 2012 adventure with the Civil Wars nebulous and mealy duo. He also featured National in a 2017 “Songs Taylor Loves” playlist for Spotify.
But the joy of Swift’s music has always been in contrast to this type of studied heaviness. Only on “Reputation,” her lackluster hip-hop album from 2017, did she seek to trade the credibility of an unknown genre. But those sounds illuminated Swift’s joy and bite, which she draws on here often disagree directly with her gifts as a melodist and lyricist. In fact, they are practically designed to hide them. If this is a ruse to be covered up, and enhanced by, the alleged seriousness of indie rock, it only underscores how fragile and irreversible that seriousness is.
That’s clearer in “The Last Great American Dynasty,” a music biography of Rebekah Harkness, an heir with a wildlife story who owned Swift’s home in Rhode Island. Harkness is a classic Swift heroine: determined, disturbing, and misunderstood: “Here goes the craziest woman this city has ever seen / She had a wonderful time ruining everything.” On a different Swift album, a song like this would have delighted in disaster, but this version is controlled, almost sad. Inside, there’s a cheeky version of this song that yearns for air.
The autobiography has always been included in Swift’s value proposition, both in the way he loaded his songs with Easter eggs about his own life, and in how his artistic boom was echoed in the tabloid hysteria. But in the “Folklore” notes, he emphasizes that the album encompasses multiple characters and points of view. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is a feint: after all, all writing is autobiography. But either way, stating it directly is intended to demarcate the new Taylor from the old, and states that it should not be examined.
That’s just one of his retreats here. “Folklore” is also a complete retreat to whiteness after dancing to black music on “Reputation”. (It’s also, perhaps, as close to a backdoor country album as Swift will likely venture; see the harmonica and the steel pedal in “Betty”). And given its general toughness, it’s a retreat from conventional pop language, which is I mean, it can be a retreat from the radio. Not that that matters much to Swift, who has spent more than a decade winning over her fans, and might well be approaching Beyoncé’s stage of her career, where cultural authority doesn’t depend on a constant bump. Anyway, that’s the new nature of pop stardom: large-scale cult figures who outnumber their most ardent followers by the millions.
Viewed in that way, perhaps sound experimentation in “Folklore” is not really about embracing a new genre, but abandoning any sense of duty towards those upon whom it has been built. Country, pop, 80s rock, hip-hop – they’ve just been glasses, weapons that she knows how to activate to advance the core principles of Swiftiness.
However, the bleak, stubborn, overcomposed indie rock of “Folklore” is a tough thicket to tame. Sometimes she triumphs, fighting until she loosens. But when it suffocates it, it deserves all the eyes it puts on.
Taylor Swift
“Folklore”
(Republic)
