When She Was Seven

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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 hit at sixteen, Swift's precocity made her an adult when she was still a teenager, her childhood becoming integral to her success yet effectively stripped from her. Written in a climate of isolation, folklore and evermore make childhood and adolescence points to return to. After an oeuvre that narrates her rising fame, Swift reverses herself by writing back, returning to childhood to secure her otherwise hyperfamous self.

In folklore's "seven," Swift imagines her world at that age, playing with a childhood friend in Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Together they climb trees and play in a creek, they tell secrets and pretend to be pirates. Swift sings: "And though I can't recall your face / I still got love for you."1 These lines dreamily hold within them the haziness of an outline. What if that outline, though, isn't a childhood friend, but the child Swift, whom the adult addresses?

The song's opening verse addresses us, adult Swift's listening audience, asking us to "Please picture" her "in the trees" where she hit her peak at "seven / feet," the enjambment playing on her age then, and how high she could climb. When she turns in the chorus to address a child, we might easily imagine she's addressing herself as a child. Twice in "seven," Swift repeats the first-person pronoun: "I, I." This stutter exposes the faultline between childhood and adulthood. In the fracture between the double "I," a space is built for loss. This division enables Swift to speak back to her childhood self, recuperated with fantasies of pirates and haunted houses. In the song's bridge, she again asks us to picture her — just her — now as feral, not yet having "learned civility," still screaming "ferociously" anytime she wants. The bridge closes with the standalone line of "I, I." This doubling is a point of meeting, the adult Swift singing back to and inhabiting her younger self. It is in this doubling that the pain of growing up is held. The self is reduced to sound, loosening itself, in its elongation and repetition, from the voice that sings it. The wail of the "I" becomes the ferocious uncivilized child remembered only in folk songs, this folk song.2

In "marjorie," the thirteenth track on evermore, written to and for her late grandmother, Swift explores the lasting effects of grief: for Marjorie, and for her own childhood. Swift's affinity for the number thirteen takes on resonance here, marking her age when Marjorie died.3 The song expresses her desire to keep knowing her grandmother via the refrain, "what died didn't stay dead." And then Swift resurrects her. Marjorie provides backing vocals, sings back to Swift. The song features actual recordings of Marjorie singing opera, dissolving into a palimpsest, the two women meeting each other in the present of the lyrics. There is something overwhelmingly tender as Swift sings, "And if I didn't know better / I'd think you were singing to me now," to a woman she is still learning how to know, whose voice is singing back. This duet is a fusion of genres, intermingling the album's folk and indie with her grandmother's operatic intonations, collapsing Swift's present with a time before she became famous, when she was a child.

In folklore and evermore, Taylor Swift engages in a process of remembering and grieving, the songs registering loss even as they speak impossible things into existence. Swift comes back to herself through the liberating process of remembering herself and her ancestors through song.

Eira Murphy (@Ambientrumbling) is a second-year English undergraduate student at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

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