Other songs tell both sides of a story: “The 1” and “Peace,” or “Invisible String” and “The Lakes.”įolklore hits overdrive halfway through, when it reaches a trilogy of heavy hitters. Three of the highlights - “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” - depict the same love triangle, from all three different perspectives. A ghost watching her enemies at the funeral. A scared seven-year-old girl with a traumatized best friend. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories: A scandalous old widow, hated by her whole town. It’s amusing, in retrospect, how people actually worried that being happy in love might mean Swift would run out of things to write songs about. Here’s a Swift progress report on her quarantine: “I’ve been having a hard time adjusting/I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting/I didn’t know if you’d care if I came back/I have a lot of regrets about that.” The power of her mind. Yet you can still hear that this is the same songwriter who dropped “Last Kiss” on the world 10 July-9ths ago. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”įolklore really feels like the debut album of a whole new Swift - her narrative scope has opened up, with a wide-ranging cast of characters for 17 songs, without a dud. As she explains in her Prologue, “In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Her sonic chemistry with Dessner is right in every detail she also teams up with her longtime wingman Jack Antonoff, and duets with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on “Exile.” The vibe is close to “Safe and Sound,” the rootsy gem she did with the Civil Wars for The Hunger Games soundtrack in 2013. You can picture the candle on her piano flickering as the wax melts over her copy of Wuthering Heights and another song rolls out. She just made some coffee, sat at the piano, and let her mind wander into some dark places. It sounds like she figured she wasn’t going to be touring these songs live anyway, so she gave up on doing anything for the radio, anything rah-rah or stadium-friendly. But on Folklore, she leaves her comfort zones behind. Lover self-consciously summed up the first 30 years of her life, bringing all her musical passions together.

Best of taylor swift cd