Taylor Swift-Folklore

Music

Taylor Swift Reveals How Social Distance Served Her Well

by Isaac Gideon JULY-26-2020•10:05

This artist’s every creative pursuit has been run through strategic models, orchestrated like a multistage military campaign, and positioned to pick up on the prevailing pop winds, arguably to gradually diminishing effect. This summer, she was slated to continue touring internationally around last August’s release, Lover. Now, like every other musician, from superstar to sideperson, she’s had all that yanked out from under her. What is one utterly unaccustomed to idleness to do?

The answer came Thursday morning, when Swift announced she started writing and recording an entire new album in April and was ready to release it at midnight. At first I was skeptical one of pop’s leading control freaks could be so spontaneous—perhaps preparations secretly had been underway earlier? But Swift was backed up by her main collaborator here, Aaron Dessner, who posted that he too was startled by the, well, swiftness of the process. Yet even with that turnaround, the 16-song cycle that makes up Swift’s eighth studio album, Folklore, seems to arise from a more concentrated, contemplative mood than ever before. It’s nearly free of the striving and stress apparent in even her best work. Lover, for instance, saw some of her loveliest compositions broken up by frantic pop anthems several sizes too immature for an artist about to turn 30, as Swift did in December. Perhaps she could have used a season in lockdown long ago, if it could have come without a ghastly global pandemic.

Even more auspiciously, Folklore breaks with both the current pop discourse and Swift’s own worst tendencies by disentangling itself considerably from the public narrative of her own life. That whole pattern in her work began innocently enough when she was a teenage country songwriter pulling her subjects from the pages of her journals, but as she rose in fame—and pop culture became more fixated on social media self-representation and intra-celebrity feuds—Swift’s songs started collapsing in on themselves, pandering to stan-culture voyeurism and too often doing her critics’ work for them. The nadir came on 2017’s Reputation, which tried to reckon with the fallout of her high-profile war with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian but couldn’t seem to help reenacting the battles and trying to score points. Lover made more of an effort to wriggle free but carried on dropping location pins in its lyrical maps, prompting fans to treat her music less as stand-alone works of art and feeling than as biographical messages to be decrypted. Don’t mistake me for an aesthetic puritan here—gossipy fun is a diversion that the lives and works of artists have always offered audiences, but in extremis it becomes a black hole that swallows all of the work’s other values. And in our era, we’re flooded with so much raw information, regardless of its worth or meaning, that it’s a challenge ever to disconnect from it and engage in any other mode.

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