Taylor had been a fan of Aaron Dessner’s long-running indie-rock band, The National, and she contacted him out of the blue as the pandemic shutdown was beginning. “One night I was just sitting at dinner,” Dessner recalled, “and I got a text saying, ‘This is Taylor. Would you ever be up for collaborating remotely with me?’ I was flattered and said, ‘Sure.’ She said, ‘Just send anything, even the weirdest random sketch that you have,’ and I sent her a folder of stuff I’d been working on. And then a few hours later, she sent that song, ‘
cardigan.’”
While the rest of the world was busy baking banana bread and on endless
Zoom quizzes, Taylor was secretly working on the record, teaming up with Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon, alongside trusted collaborator Jack Antonoff and partner at the time,
Joe Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery). Made from scratch in the first quarantine era,
folklore was recorded at Taylor’s home in Los Angeles, and written and produced in remote collaboration. Choosing this approach may have been purely a function of circumstance, but Taylor had been due for a rebaptism for some time. Therefore,
folklore is not only significant in terms of artistry, but also in terms of Taylor’s career. She was 30 years old. She had been a superstar since she was a teenager. She had done the pop thing to the absolute ultimate. And she had been trying to figure out how to continue what had been a remarkable and in some ways almost unprecedented run — eight albums with arguably no dip in popularity. Yes,
reputation (2017), some people had issues with it, but it was still a massive seller and subject of conversation. And here she was at a place where very few pop artists ever get. So how does she make a turn, become more innovative, maybe, and explore different aspects of herself?
In releasing
folklore, Taylor was clear and direct about her intent and her work. The album marked a conclusion (temporary or not was unclear) to her long march into the teeth of contemporary mega-pop. It was what a lot of fans had been waiting for all along: a lengthy, emotionally-wrought indie album. Its heart is folk storytelling. Its vision is a grey-blue soundscape: an autumnal album dropped in the heat of summer, the first full project of this kind from Taylor, inhabiting a truly melancholy space she had mainly hinted at in past ballads. Her new direction was clear: alternative folk. She told
Entertainment Weekly in December 2020: