My words shoot to kill when I’m mad
I have a lot of regrets about that
I’ve always been a more-or-less fan of Taylor Swift or maybe it would be more accurate to say that her success hasn’t felt unearned in an artistic way. She doesn’t have a great voice with a great range and she’s given to some rather annoying vocal tics, but as a songwriter, she’s surprised me a few times over the years with real talent and as she’s evolved through genre after genre over the years, she’s found success in some unexpected places. So when she released this surprise album, produced by Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner of The National, which supposedly showcased some songwriting growth, I was excited. I was also somewhat trepidatious. I mean, the critics fell all over themselves fawning over it and that might mean it’s actually good; or it might just mean that, you know, it’s a surprise album, produced by Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner of The National, which supposedly showcased songwriting growth. If you know what I mean. It fits a narrative: the pop princess collaborates with a couple of indie darlings during a pandemic and turns out a melancholy masterpiece.
And it’s not entirely wrong. I was about to sign off on the whole thing by the time I was four songs in. Those first four songs, The 1, Cardigan, The Last Great American Dynasty and Exile, just really knocked me out and I was like, “Oh, here it is; this is the masterpiece I’ve been waiting for from her.” And, spoilers, but not quite because the album never quite manages another run of songs that great. But let’s talk about the good stuff first. The songwriting really is incredibly sophisticated, just bar none the best she’s ever done. Cardigan and The Last Great American Dynasty are really beautifully structured, telling small-scale stories in a elliptical, but still sharp, way and the way those songs come back around at the end is really perfect. Cardigan is a great example of how to loop back around and tie-up a song. It seems to be telling the story of a sad love affair in a really poetic way, but then it keeps returning to this hook, “When you are young, they assume you know nothing,” and it feels really disconnected from the rest of the song, but then at the end, she brings it back around and loops it into the larger story of the song in a way that really worked for me. She does something similar on The Last Great American Dynasty, but I won’t spoil that one. Other songs on the record, outside of those first four, that I’d call great are Illicit Affairs, Betty (which has a hilariously, but wonderfully so, out of place Dylan-esque intro) and This is Me Trying.
This record also has some of the best singing Swift’s ever done. As I said before, she has neither a particularly strong voice nor a particularly big range. There’s a plenty a singer can do without those things and, over the years, she’s developed some tics, a sort of sing-songy seesaw delivery and a kind of up-talking delivery as well. But she underplays a lot of emotion here. This is Me Trying is a really devastating song, about a recovering alcoholic, but she sings it in a very simple and understated way, not despairing or weary, just the quiet forthrightness of someone seeing themselves very clearly. The musical settings work well too, as you’d expect; they create actual sonic space for Swift to be in and they’re constantly surprising you with something you didn’t quite expect, like the incredibly distant drums in Mirrorball or the high keening sounds of My Tears Ricochet.
So, why isn’t this a masterpiece? Well, this album is ultimately just too long; seventeen songs is a lot, especially when, by design, there’s not an up-tempo banger in the bunch. And some of the songs just don’t work. Epiphany is one of the most experimental tracks here, a song that tries to take in World War II and the 2020 Pandemic and weave them together into an ethereal dirge that just seems to go on forever without ever quite connecting the dots it seems like it wants to connect. That one also features some of Swift’s worst singing on the album, including a few signature yelps that feel out of place. The Lakes is the other one here that’s a real stinker and, unfortunately, it’s the album closer, so it kind of sends things out on a sour note as Swift muses on a rose blooming “with no one to tweet it.” She also riffs on Wordsworth and her “words’ worth.” I mean, you’re thirty, Taylor, not in college; this level of writing is unacceptable.
Those are the only two tracks I just really disliked, I think; a lot of the others are just pretty middle of the road. If I was “fixing” this album, I’d cut a solid seven songs. Get this thing down to a super-tight, all-killer-no-filler ten track album and I think I could unequivocally say that it’s a masterpiece. But I’m prepared to be kind of forgiving in general. I mean, this feels like the kind of record where every song is someone’s favorite, if you know what I mean, so it would probably be a fight to the death figuring out where to make the cuts. And then Swift just apparently had a massively creative pandemic period, to the degree that she ended up revealing that, even after putting a whopping seventeen songs on this album, she still had an entire other album’s worth of songs on the shelf. Evermore, the follow-up, has fifteen songs on it; some people are whispering there’s a third album out there with more from her 2020 pandemic experiments. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me. So, I get it; it’s hard to put out a really tight ten-song album when you’ve got thirty-two songs ready to go.
Still, there are too many dead patches here that need pruning for me to able to call the album a masterpiece. But if you’re making a list of her top-whatever songs, this album is probably going to dominate that list, at least if you’re me. It really does feature some of her best work to date and a lot of it is genuinely great. Swift is still growing as an artist; that’s evident. Folklore’s really excellent, taken as a somewhat flawed whole, and as someone who has felt that she’s been on a downward slide since 1989 (the album, not the year, though there’s a joke in there somewhere), I’m thrilled to see her back on the up-swing. I’d need to give 1989 a revisit before I could say whether this one’s melancholy sophistication is better than that one’s pop exuberance, but really they’re apples and oranges, so why pick? Folklore’s a unique album in Swift’s discography and a really excellent one at that. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – album is overlong and features a few mediocre tunes, but on the whole it demonstrates exciting growth for Swift as a writer & performer; features some of her best work to date. 3 ½ stars.