folklore

Taylor Swift’s an enigma: to the sneering public, she’s a plastic manufactured ex-country turned pop star, cold and calculated, her career bought by her father. To her most adoring fans, she’s a woman who can do no wrong, her pen writing the catchiest songs of the summer – and the most heart-wrenching ballads if you dig beyond the pop gloss.

Folklore is Taylor Swift dropping everything people knew about her, and emerging as a new artist altogether. She reclaims her narrative lyricism wholeheartedly now, once common in her country albums but has grown harder to find recently, piecing together words that paint an elaborate picture for the listener, planting them right into the story she weaves. But unlike past albums, where she shares her own heartbreaks in cutting detail, Folklore is a combination of dreamed-up stories, fantastical scenarios told through song: 

In “Epiphany”, a soldier bleeds out on a shore, a woman’s vitals come crashing down, and the doctors don’t know what to do. (“Something med school did not cover /  someone’s daughter, someone’s mother / holds your hand through plastic now) 

In “Seven”, a child hopes to escape to India with her best friend, running from an abusive father and a haunted household. (I’ve been meaning to tell you / I think your house is haunted / Your dad is always mad and that must be why / And I think you should come live with me / And we can be pirates / Then you won’t have to cry / Or hide in the closet)

Semblances of truth still lie in fables however. In “Folklore”, there’s no “moral of the story”,  no clear lessons learned – instead,  the truth is found through the way the fantasies transform into allegories of her own life. “Mad Woman” details a witch hunt, people chasing down a woman until she goes insane and violently gets revenge. (Does she smile? / Or does she mouth fuck you forever?) But while listening to it, it’s impossible to not draw a connection to the Kanye/Taylor fiasco of 2016 where she was dragged through the mud –  only recently has her name been cleared.

Her connection to some songs are much clearer, such as in “The Last Great American Dynasty”. Taylor’s narrative songwriting is at its strongest here as she paints the story of Rebekah Harkness in all its Great-Gatsby bourgeois glory (“Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever / Flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city / Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names). But just like F. Scott Fitzgerald has Daisy ruin everything, Taylor calls out Rebekah for being “the death of the last great American dynasty”, the “most shameless woman this town has ever seen”. However, Taylor soon brings herself into the narrative, revealing in a sudden twist that she took in Rebekah’s Rhode Island estate, along with Rebekah’s legacy for destruction and “un-American” values. (“Holiday House sat quietly on that beach / Freed of women with madness, their men and bad habits / And then it was bought by me”). What was once Taylor criticizing Rebekah for her hedonism and shamelessness turns into Taylor self-reflecting and breaking out of her internalized misogyny as she realizes that maybe it isn’t Rebekah or herself that needs to change – maybe it’s values of the “American Dynasty” that need to change, that need to be destroyed. (“There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen I had a marvelous time ruining everything / A marvelous time”)

Throughout all 16 stellar tracks, “mirrorball” shines the brightest in all it’s shoe-gaze dream-pop glory. Drenched in soft harmonies lies Taylor at her most vulnerable – questioning whether she’s a worthy celebrity (I’ve never been a natural / All I do is try, try try), criticizing herself for trying too hard at the same time (“I’m a mirrorball / I change everything about myself to fit in), and breaking apart in the process while the world watches (“The masquerade revelers / Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten”).

Taylor builds a mystical world from her imagination in her eighth studio album, combining her truth and stranger’s fictions into folklore: fables to be passed on, myths to learn from. Maybe Taylor Swift’s a little too ambitious, maybe she’ll be forgotten in a hundred years, her songs lost and buried in the past – but this is her trying.