We, The Folklorian Woods, Beg Taylor Swift To Leave Us In Peace
Stop digging for songs—our forest has nothing left to give!
“To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs. To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in.”
— Taylor Swift, on issuing her second surprise album in five months, evermore (December 10, 2020)
Hi Taylor,
It’s us, the trees of the Folklorian Woods. We’re taking a break from producing oxygen, storing carbon, cleaning the air, etc., to ask you to stop — please, just stop — plundering our sacred sylvan for song material. Leave the Folklorian Woods in peace.
Or should we say: what’s left of the Folklorian Woods. To put it plainly, your relentless mining has reduced our once bountiful forest of ideas to a wasteland. To try and put it more poetically, Homer couldn’t unearth a simile with a backhoe right now
Honestly, when you showed up last spring, we didn’t expect you to reap much from your time in the Folklorian Woods. Your work is typically, well, all about you.
But you reaped. Oh boy, did you reap, uprooting acres of characters and third-person perspectives, digging up seeds of stories, plucking fistfuls of images (also: tons of ivy). Then you called the result folklore [sic] when you know we capitalize in this forest.
Eventually, our remarkable ecosystem might have repaired itself. But then you came back. You came back stronger than a 90's trend — or a really bad case of bark beetles.
This time, you “wandered deeper” into the Folklorian Woods. Sorry, but when you and “William Bowery” (a sloth cracked that alias in three seconds) scramble over a fence at 2 a.m. wearing nighties and headlamps in full view of “NO WANDERING DEEPER” signage, that’s called trespassing.
You have also:
· Introduced an invasive species in the form of Jack Antonoff
· Tied an invisible string from the Folklorian Woods to your recording studio so that you could find your way back to the most fertile areas
· French braided delicate grasslands, bent willows to your wind, stole stars to draw around scars (which left scars on said stars), traumatized wildlife (i.e. “poked that bear till the claws come out”) and leaked acid rain from your eyes, which was truly terrifying to the entire woodland community.
In less than five months, your rampage has yielded 30+ songs, accompanying music videos, a documentary and “merch” including very sad cable-knit cardigans — all chock full of precious flora and fauna. We haven’t seen such a shameless violation of the Leave No Trace policy since Bob Dylan took a chainsaw to this place back in ’64-’65.
You say you “just couldn’t stop writing songs.” Well, you must. Your output is not sustainable. Our branches are bare and broken. The fields are fallow. The lakes are dry. The birds left. The fish left. Cardi B left. She went to Yaddo.
Please, we beg, cease your unholy harvest. Stop releasing mixes, remixes and “willow moonlit witch” remixes. Return the material to the Folklorian Woods and help restore our lost paradise. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Drake’s great-great-grandchildren will never find any metaphors here.
Signed,
The Trees of the Folklorian Woods
