folklore and evermore revisit the Lake District of first-generation Romantic English authors William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Swift is also influenced by American…
Archive for December, 2020
folklore 2: folklore harder with a vengeance
If I were granted a retrospective COVID time travel wish, I would have hibernated through 2020, emerging every couple of months to stock up on snacks and the new Taylor…
Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck
Until evermore, there hadn’t been a truck in a Taylor Swift song since her eponymous debut. On Taylor Swift, she spends a lot of time in trucks. The lost love…
Zelda, Daisy, Taylor: Beautiful Fools?
That Taylor Swift makes two references to The Great Gatsby on her new album is perhaps the least surprising element of this surprise release. F. Scott Fitzgerald is Swift’s favorite…
Spirit Photography
Earlier this year, my partner and I took a day trip to Brighton. It rained the entire time, the storm striping the sky black and grey like a mackerel’s back….
History as Metaphor
In her October Rolling Stone interview with Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift said, “when I was making folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I…
Some New Shit
evermore is Taylor Swift’s most explicit album to date.1 To use my favorite euphemism for profanity, there is a lot of language: six out of the fifteen tracks display the “explicit”…
Slow, Swift Grief
I seek the company of women through my year of magical thinking.1 Friends who walk, friends who swim, friends who sip coffee outside in any weather. Swift takes her “insurmountable…
When She Was Seven
In the 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor Swift says that “[I was] frozen at the age I became famous.” Signed as a songwriter at fourteen, and achieving her first Billboard…
Taylor’s Sweet Escapes
2020 is the year Taylor Swift decided to take on William Wordsworth. She does so on the standout bonus track to folklore, “the lakes.”1 In a documentary about the album,…