Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ ponders fate and free will
When you pull up Taylor Swift’s new record Folklore on Apple Music, the first thing you’ll notice is its listed genre: alternative. While a hilarious example of the meaninglessness of such categorizations — that one of the most decorated artists in American pop history can also be pop’s “alternative” — it acts as a sign that Folklore is not the big budget, glossy pop Swift’s been building upon her entire career, nor the country of her first few releases.
Teaming up with Bon Iver and The National’s Aaron Dessner, Swift takes on “indie” music on Folklore, another genre contradiction. Despite the back-to-basics aesthetic — namely, picking up an acoustic guitar and retreating into the woods — Folklore is not that record. This feels like one of the biggest leaps in Swift’s career, as many of these songs are unlike anything else in her catalog. First of all, it’s her first album with a clean version. But what’s more striking is the intimacy of these tracks. Having postponed what would’ve been this summer’s LoverFest until an unknown date that seems to be moving farther and farther away, these songs weren’t designed for sold-out crowds or consistent radio play. Still, this sound doesn’t feel particularly risky. Folklore doesn’t provide the ambitious spectacle of her most compelling work to date, 2017’s electro-pop experiment Reputation, because layering her evocative songwriting over atmospheric folk signifiers was among the surest bets Swift’s ever made. While it may seem Swift is just looking to the reference points of current indie singer-songwriters, considering the through lines of songs like “Dear John” and “Motion Sickness,” or “All Too Well” and “Night Shift,” she’s really building on a genre subset she probably had a hand in influencing.
That’s not to say her pop days are over. Along with Dessner’s, pop savant Jack Antonoff’s production is here, as it’s been on all of her records since her wholehearted embrace of stadium pop on 2014’s 1989. Despite her “indie” branding and forest-y minimalism, her corporate savvy is present, as well. Foregoing a traditional, heavily promoted album rollout prolonged over many months, Swift still launched Folklore as an event album with a surprise announcement hours before its release. A look at her website finds eight deluxe editions of the record, all featuring the same bonus track but special cover art and photo prints, emphasizing words like “collectible” and “unique” to not-so-subtly encourage fans to purchase multiple copies. These are signs that a return to pop is likely, even if her last couple releases didn’t have the smash hits of the blockbuster 1989.
Made remotely over the course of just a few months, Folklore finds Swift turning inward, but not in the sense that this record is more introspective than her past work. In isolation, she had to look to the characters and stories of her imagination, rather than document the world around her. “I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t,” she said in a statement. This is most obvious in what she dubbed the “Teenage Love Triangle,” a story of romantic tension told over three songs, “Cardigan,” “August” and “Betty,” all from the different points of view of the characters involved. Clues are sprinkled throughout the songs to create a universal continuity — detective-work fodder for her eagle-eyed fans, but also a clever framework to explore how a choice like getting in another woman’s car can permeate beyond that split-second.
As a result, Folklore is an intricate latticework of the ripple effects of decisive moments. It’s a bulletin board with thumbtacks and thread connecting the dots between fate and free will, mapping out how we all end up where we are and wondering what could’ve been. In the bouncy opener “The 1,” she ponders the one that got away, acknowledging everything still worked out for these two people separately, but the question of “what if?” lingers. “I persist and resist the temptation to ask you / If one thing had been different / Would everything be different today?” she muses, making “The 1” a song more about curiosity than longing.
On the record’s sweetest song, “Invisible String,” Swift narrates two eventual lovers who don’t know yet that destiny links them together, with a soft coo over finger-picked acoustic. She flips this on the song’s narrative opposite “Exile,” in which she presents that close proximity between two people can’t negate the distance between them. Dueted with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who sings in a luscious deep register seldom heard from him, “Exile” is a standout heartbreaker that builds to a hypnotic bridge. “You never gave a warning sign,” Vernon accuses — Swift refutes, “I gave so many signs,” with a sigh, like this back-and-forth’s gone in these circles before.
What makes these stories come to life, though, are their rich details, and that’s where Swift really flexes her songwriting muscles. She sets the vivid scene in “Illicit Affairs,” a song empathetic of the other woman: “Tell your friends you’re out for a run / You’ll be flushed when you return.” “The Last Great American Dynasty,” a tribute to the eccentric woman who once owned Swift’s Rhode Island mansion, is filled with lavish champagne-filled pools and green-dyed dogs. On “Invisible String,” she uses the colors of Nashville’s Centennial Park to bookend the tale of fate.
Of course, among all these interweaving plots and characters is Swift herself, in some of her most vulnerable work yet. The highlight “Peace” finds her preemptively conceding that she may come up short when giving a lover all she has, against a simple guitar drone. She offers sacrifice, parenthood, mutual understanding, but “the rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me,” she admits. Perhaps the most confessional moment comes on the lush “This is Me Trying,” her most apologetic song since 2010’s “Back to December.” “They told me all of my cages were mental / So I got wasted like all my potential,” she sings with humility. “And my words shoot to kill when I’m mad / I have a lot of regrets about that.”
While 2019’s Lover was often enjoyable, it was scattered and bloated. Though still lengthy, Folklore is a much tighter record, contained from the Dylan-esque jangle of “Betty,” to Antonoff’s moody synths — there’s no “ME!” here, thankfully. And Swift, not an especially gifted singer, uses her expressive voice to further deepen these sounds. Hear her quiver as she claims, “Some things you just can’t speak about,” on “Epiphany,” or her vengeful bite on “Mad Woman.” Folklore’s toolset is small and simple, but overwhelmingly effective.
Even when Folklore sounds most distinct from the rest of Swift’s oeuvre, especially on the Dessner cuts, it never feels like a whole new Taylor Swift. The songwriting was always there, and this type of intimate fare was a shoo-in to let her strengths shine. This record does lack the thrilling dare of Red and Reputation, but builds a playground of Swiftian one-liners like, “I’m still trying everything to keep you looking at me,” and, “It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.” Hopefully that dare does return — Swift’s desire to disprove is just as essential to her ethos as her music — but in the meantime she crafted an exquisite record she always had in her.
