folklore 2: folklore harder with a vengeance

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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 Swift album. In this ass wipe of a year, folklore and evermore were beacons of light, extended arguments for creativity, cleverness, and doing stuff with friends, even over Zoom. As Henry James knew, and Taylor and that guy from The National demonstrate, art makes life, makes interest, makes importance. In 2020 Taylor made music that was not just good but necessary. Of course, she is lushly rich, young, thin, and insanely talented, with a hidden boyfriend, British and presumed handsome, who appears to be a pretty good songwriter too. Granted, her lockdown was bound to be better than yours or mine, but she really made the most of it. Listening to these two albums was listening to someone discovering freedom, complexity, and transcendence amid a suddenly quiet time, a time without stadium tours.

It took me a few listens to find my groove with evermore, a few more than folklore, which hooked me instantly from its meta first line, "I'm doing good, I'm on some new shit." There is nothing as instantly unforgettable as "the one" on evermore; rather the album is a slow burn, still simmering.1 I'm going to focus on a few songs here. Bear with me, hear me out, write this down. It's scattered thoughts.

Song two, the minimal "champagne problems" (written with William Bowery / Joe Alwyn / Taylor's squeeze) sounds for its first few seconds like it is going to go big and turn into "Let it Be,"2 but instead it's a short story from the perspective of a young woman, a jilter, set (in my mind at least) among the college-age children of the wealthy Rhode Island set Swift disses so expertly on folklore in "the last great american dynasty."3 The singer in "champagne problems" feels a little bit bad about hurting her rich white boyfriend, but also a little bit powerful. The line, "your heart was glass, I dropped it," is so flat and so double-edged it recalls Debbie Harry's deadpan delivery on Blondie's "Heart of Glass." The song's narrator claims she couldn't give a reason, she just didn't want to marry this guy, but the reason's in the ending when she patiently explains to him how and why he'll be okay. She's sorry she hurt him but he never could have kept up with her.

The wry Christmas heartbreaker, "'tis the damn season" is my favorite song on evermore. It's "Midnight Train to Georgia" with a twist; the hometown boy with the truck sure as hell isn't going to derail her career.4 The Taylor-esque star who voices it is in the process of making it big in LA but comes back to her average American hometown each holiday season to stay at her parents' house and hook up with the guy she left behind, the road not taken. Sure he's special but not special enough. And that's why the song is so complex and absorbing; he's okay with it and she is too, even when she's not ("And the heart I know I'm breaking is my own / To leave the warmest bed I've ever known"). "'tis the damn season" milks that plonking National guitar sound for all its minimalist melancholic potential. Taylor's voice is perfect: "we can call it even, you can call me 'babe' for the weekend, write this down." Who is doing the writing here? Is it a contract between them? Is the song itself what gets written down? What I hear in "'tis the damn season" is Taylor's Christmas (or lockdown) romance with country music itself. The contract is set now; her heart may be there, she'll never really leave, but she is also long gone (and always has been. See "Tim McGraw").

I love the catchy "no body, no crime," which with its plot twists is a straight-up awesome 80s made-for-TV thriller. The chorus "I think he did it but I just can't prove it" reverberates with those Phil Collins mid-80s movie soundtracks which were all "You know I love you but I just can't take this" and then someone gets pushed off a luxury yacht. I also love it when the Haim sister says "she was with me, dude." I'm all for friendship revenge killings. Not enough of those in today's song landscapes.

Song eight, "dorothea," is, despite the promise of the title, not about Dorothea Brooke's unfortunate marriage to Casaubon. Rather it is from the perspective of the warm bed guy in "tis the damn season." It is the voice of country music calling Taylor back and reminding her that her not very authentic roots are still more authentic than her LA life. These unspooling linked songs ("cardigan," "august," and "betty" on folklore and these two on evermore) are my new favorite Taylor thing. Song cycles let her spin out the circumstances and feelings of all her earlier songs like "Tim McGraw"; we hear the other side. It is genuinely like the moment in Middlemarch when Eliot says "but why always Dorothea?" and attempts, not entirely successfully, to switch over to Casaubon's perspective on the marriage.5 But who cares whether or not Taylor has read Middlemarch? As this song says "hey Dorothea, we all want to be ya." It seems unlikely that anyone ever sang that to Dorothea Brooke, even after all those unhistoric acts, but they should have.

Taylor wanted it all and now, at least as far as I'm concerned, has it all: country, folk, indie, pop; Nashville, LA, Rhode Island, New York. She covers America like a colossus. If you watch the Long Pond Sessions you can see both the genuine joy that she and her indie interlocutors had working together, and confusion about who should genuflect to whom. Aaron Dessner, the indie guy with boy cred (who seems genuinely lovely) is really chuffed to be writing songs with the ruler of the pop world (Beyoncé's been quiet this year), while Taylor expresses her excitement about working with him and the Bon Iver guy. This is a nice moment of cultural capital exchange, but I also really hope that Taylor is currently using her rolodex to call some women for her next brace of albums. Imagine what Taylor could do with Lucinda Williams, Liz Phair, Brittany Howard, Billie Eilish, or the supergroup I'm craving: Lorde and Taylor? In the gorgeous, poignant "seven" from folklore, Taylor asks, "Are there still beautiful things?" The answer given emphatically by folklore and evermore is yes. Thanks, Taylor.

Pamela Thurschwell (@pamthur) is head of the department of English at the University of Sussex and the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2009). She recently co-edited a cluster for Post45 on Bojack Horseman with Jack Belloli (@giacbelloli), and talked about Bob Dylan on the podcast Is It Rolling, Bob?

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