For all of her career, Taylor Swift has put me on a pendulum of love and hate. It would regularly and consistently swing back and forth between the two emotions ~ for every ‘Out of the Woods’ there was some shot of her dancing in the audience of some awards show. I had whiplash from the extremes she inspired.
The past few years, and her last couple of albums, have made me more solidly on the love side, as she courted more dance-pop maneuvers and took some brave political stances against the Republican awfulness happening right now.
Then, in a surprise move paved by Beyonce, Swift released an entire album of new material without more than a day’s warning. Whimsically entitled ‘folklore’ I didn’t expect much in this collection of songs created during the COVID isolation we have all been going through. Quite frankly, I was ready to be rather annoyed by some tortured isolationist bullshit by another super-rich celebrity who was finding it difficult to quarantine in their three mansions by the sea.
I was wrong.
This album is quite possibly the best Taylor Swift album I’ve heard. Hell, it’s the only Swift album I’ve heard in its entirety because it is just that good. It doesn’t have any instantly-boffo bops like ‘Shake It Off’, and it may be lacking the aural-candy of her recent pop hooks, but what she delivers in place of those popularity grabs is a cohesive soundscape of story songs. It emits a chilled-out vibe that has it uncharacteristically categorized as an alternative album ~ surely the first in her career ~ and may just be the antidote for a summer of discontent and horror.
(Lead single ‘Cardigan’ isn’t even the best of the bunch – try ‘Exile’ or ‘August’ or ‘This Is Me Trying’.) The collection of ‘folklore’ deserves to be heard in its entirety, on a somber summer day, or a sultry summer night, and this kind of artistry and power transcends genre, image, and reinvented musical glory.
