I bet you didn't think Episode 2 of The Taylor Swift Archives would be here so soon, did you? But I like to keep my darling readers on their toes, so consider this a surprise drop.
Which is not dissimilar to how Taylor Swift approached her pandemic babies, folklore and evermore. I went to bed one night, excited for the tenth anniversary of One Direction forming to await me the following morning. Little did I know I would wake up to entire new Taylor Swift album. Moreover, it would be a genre shift: this new indie record would mark the first time Taylor Swift took the backseat in her own narrative, thus finally achieving the very critical reception pop princesses had fought for for so long.
Selena Gomez once spoke about this -- that she might have fans singing "Who Says" back to her at concerts, but she felt discouraged by the constant disrespect she received from the industry critics and executives, who didn't believe she was an artist worthy of legitimate praise. There's a video of Harry Styles skipping across stage at one of his concerts, joking that "we are serious artists", obviously poking fun at the fact that nobody really thought that. But why not? I've written about this phenomenon on this very blog before -- these "teenage girl" artists were massively successful by all measurable standards (because teenage girls propel the consumer economy), but somehow only begrudgingly accepted by the high-brow elites. Taylor Swift, prior to folklore, very much fell into this category¹. Magazines that reviewed her albums praised her album with an asterisk; 'it's good for a silly little girl writing about her silly little girl things', which was partially why it was so easy for the media to weaponize her romanticism against her.
To further contextualize this, consider the album that preceded folklore -- Lover. After the mature reputation and the pop blockbuster 1989, the general public was awaiting an eagerly awaiting to see what the next pop masterpiece Swift produced would be -- introspective songwriting with louder-than-life production? Or neutered instrumentals to feature her grown-up, nuanced lyricism? Whatever we were expecting, when the lead single unironically contained the lyric, "you can't spell awesome without ME!", most were left disappointed.
The truth is, I think Lover has some of Taylor's best songs. False God is a foray into sultry jazz, with a saxophone backing track that is so incredibly innovative for a genre that usually limits itself to the same four chords. Cornelia Street and Cruel Summer have become fan favorites, and The Archer and Afterglow show Taylor growing from each past iteration of herself, and renouncing her usual role of victim. What Lover lacked, however, was direction and marketing. The lead singles chosen to promote the album are arguably the worst in the entire album, her choice to insist that this album was "political" when it was truly, deeply not led to a widespread misbrand. Even the album cover looks like it could've been made on Microsoft Paint. But regardless of the details, she was criticized for being too childish, and for not acting like the thirty-something grown adult she ought to be at this stage in her career.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Taylor has always written for her detractors. Each album is made to prove a point. Tracing her career is like watching a game of cat and mouse, watching her constantly responding to the critiques leveled at her in real time. folklore is no different -- from a brightly colored aesthetic of childish whimsy and schoolyard metaphors emerged a black-and-white, wool coat wearing, soft-spoken Taylor, one who used "clandestine" and "wisteria" casually in conversation and song. Where Lover was on-the-nose, folklore was out of focus. She even wrote in her announcement post that none of these songs are about her, but rather just a compilation of stories she made up whilst bored in lockdown. She brought Aaron Dessner from The National and Bon Iver on as collaborators (and even credited her boyfriend on betty), thus attracting a more mature, thoughtful audience. Don't worry, Aaron Dessner seemed to signal. You can listen without looking like a child. Taylor Swift now belonged to the intellectuals.
The album would go on to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, something which Taylor had gone on the record saying she didn't think would ever happen to her again. It was folklore that brought about the massive renaissance in popularity we see her enjoying today; while other artists genre-blend often, only a career-defining album like folklore holds the power to make someone queen of the pop, country, and indie kingdoms simultaneously. In August 2020, she gave the world exactly what it needed: "a good cry". And her reward? She was universally beloved once more, for the first time since 1989 had come out six years prior.
Further contributing to this almost instantaneous pedestalization of Taylor was that the media was stunned silent. None of their usual critiques worked. She always writes about ex-boyfriends? But this album was allegedly entirely fictional, an abandonment of her diaristic songwriting in favor of world-building and mood-boarding (more on this later). She's overexposed? Except...we were social distancing, so the paparazzi couldn't catch her throwing parties and taking model walks down Fifth Avenue. She was in a long-term, private relationship, refusing to do anything but engage directly with fans via social media, releasing music then retreating into her pod bubble². Taking notes from the Beyonce School of Public Relations, Taylor Swift was both the biggest thing in the world and impossible to criticize.
Honestly, I believe a lot of what Taylor said about the album was a lie. I think most songs on folklore (and evermore) were, in truth, written about herself. But because she told the public not to go searching for clues about her life in these lyrics, she had something she hadn't had since her debut album: unfettered freedom to write whatever she wanted. In many ways, freedom defines folklore. She said herself that this album was created on accident, without thought as to how she would tour or market the record. The rollout and advertising was practically nonexistent, since she only revealed the project's existence seventeen hours before its release. There was no pressure on her to do anything masterful, as she had no reputation to uphold in indie music yet. While her previous career high -- 1989 -- was almost entirely manufactured³, folklore showcased what Taylor could do with no external influences.
Which is to say -- for the first time, her talent wasn't mistakable for luck or the cultlike, obsessive fanaticism of children. It was hers to own and embrace. And so that's exactly what she did -- five months later, evermore, the sister-album to folklore, appeared on our doorsteps, wrapped up in a bow just in time for the holidays.
evermore is almost always forgotten, both by Taylor and the fans, but I've always thought it to be far better than folklore. Every track could be studied in a Socratic seminar, and maybe once I'm done with this series that's what I'll do next. But anyway, I digress -- even though evermore is forgotten, it marks the first time (arguably since her debut album) that Taylor didn't consider a previous album's criticisms when creating the next. Partially because, as I just mentioned, she didn't really have any critiques to address, she was able to break free of the chains of people-pleasing and simply release an album full of songs she would've otherwise shoved in the vault as folklore-rejects. And what did she find? The general public loved it.
To critics, evermore was masterful, edgy, sophisticated, and dark. Fans were ecstatic to receive two albums in such a short period of time. People joked about needing a dictionary to listen to the music, because Taylor was finally showing off just how smart she truly was. The effect of this on Taylor's career strategy cannot be understated. She used to wait two years between each album cycle, supposedly writing 100 songs and narrowing it down to the best 14 to release. Now, she releases three albums a year, retroactively adding songs to her musical eras and dropping additional tracks "just because". evermore taught her that she could become a far more prolific songwriter, be far less scrutinizing over what she leaves on the cutting room floor, and be just as successful⁴.
There's one more lesson that folklore and evermore taught our protagonist: that being the songwriter to create brilliant melodies and capture youth in a two-minute song meant nothing to the literary, argyle-wearing types. She realized that while she knew she was a fantastic songwriter, and her fans knew she was a fantastic songwriter, if she wanted her enemies to finally be forced to admit it, she'd have to prove she'd had this intellectual streak in her music all along. She'd have to rewrite history.
And what do you know? Since Scooter Braun had bought her masters, she was re-recording all her old music anyway. Six months after the intellectualization of Taylor Swift was complete, Fearless (Taylor's Version) -- complete with never-been-heard-before "Vault Tracks" that she "wrote at nineteen" -- dropped, forcing critics to re-evaluate her music era by era, now embellished and written over by the greatest songwriter of our generation.
But that's a story for another day...
¹ She actually even wrote about it on Suburban Legends, a vault track released yesterday as part of 1989 (Taylor's Version). In it, she writes that she was "born to be a suburban legend," forever immortalized as the music playing in soccer mom vans and in kitchens behind white picket fences.
² Perhaps in an effort to seem mature, Taylor generally embraced this maternal, cat-loving, homebody image. Unpretentious became her brand -- just look at the album cover! She's in the distant background, her name not even on the front. But this picture wasn't entirely truthful -- she still had her "Taylor Voodoo", her vindictive, petty streak she was strategically unleashing against Scooter Braun, and, as we'd later see with Midnights, clearly had no desire to abandon the life of media-circuits long-term. But because it was the middle of the pandemic and she had few other options, Taylor leaned into this image (and used her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn) to rebuild her reputation from the ground up, proving to the misogynistic public that she wasn't a gorgeous young heartbreaker, but a serious songwriter. (Because like it or not, the media subliminally saw those two as mutually exclusive.)
³ And I don't say this in a bad way. She spent a lot of Lover attempting to dispute the media's portrayal of her as "calculated", but with Midnights, she finally embraced it -- she's a business mastermind, and considers the strategic optics of each move before she makes it.
⁴ This, while mostly a good thing for us overeager fans, has decidedly weakened the quality of her recent albums, whether it be Midnights or her re-releases.
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