![]() ![]() At the opposite end of the scale, This Is Me Trying subtly grows into its wracked orchestral grandeur, sounding more unsettling still for how Swift’s voice, processed at a ghostly, vast remove, seems to encompass the whole song with her desperation. More than one song evokes the intimate celestial tenderness of Sufjan Stevens circa Carrie and Lowell. Swift’s most coherent record since her staunchly country days, it’s nonetheless her most experimental, developing on Lover’s stranger, more minimalist end. Folklore is largely built around the soft cascades of piano, burbling guitar and fractured, glitchy electronica that will be familiar to fans of the National’s post-2010 output – at least part of the album came about from Swift writing to Dessner’s musical sketches. With concerts off the table for the foreseeable future, no longer needing to reach four sides of a stadium may have proven liberating.Įlements of her fanbase have long wanted her to revisit the Nashville songcraft of her youth through an adult lens, but this isn’t that album. Bombastic pop makes way for more muted songwriting, and a singular vision compared to the joyful but spread-betting Lover. Moreover, Swift conveys the sense that her tendency to desire the last word, in public and private, has been her undoing: “I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere / Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here,” she sings on This Is Me Trying.įolklore proves that she can thrive away from the noise: if you interpret “classmates” as pop peers, Swift is no longer competing. Despite the last 12 months bringing a new, high-profile disagreement with her former label and enduring disputes with Kanye West, thankfully Folklore features none of that, beyond inadvertently arriving the same day as West said he was releasing a new album. Recent albums, too, have been consumed with the various dramas that have plagued her since the country ingenue became a pop superstar with 2012’s Red. By the time that arrives, a weariness has descended: the sense that one of pop’s all-time greatest songwriters is overcompensating despite her clear talent. The often unpopular lead single seldom sounds like the rest of the album. There are sometimes baffling brand endorsements. It’s a smart promotional strategy-by-proxy for an artist who has done little press in the past five years, and a good way of making your actions seem as if they were written in the stars. ![]() Then there are teasers for lyric videos that beget actual blockbuster videos, strewn with self-mythologising references for Swifties and journalists to unpick. It usually starts with her sharing coded hints that her well trained fans understand immediately. Swift pioneered the art of the all-consuming album rollout. If she was surprised to have emerged from lockdown with Folklore – a 16-track album largely produced (remotely) by the National’s Aaron Dessner – her fans were even more stunned by the fact that Swift would release a record with zero fanfare. ![]() T aylor Swift announced the existence of her eighth album an uncharacteristic 17 hours prior to its release: “Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening,” she said – among them, a headline slot at Glastonbury – “But there is something I hadn’t planned on that DID happen.” Swift only released her last album, Lover, last August. ![]()
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