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folklore & evermore Era

2020–2021

If there’s one thing we know about Taylor, it’s that she works hard. In her documentary released in January 2020, Miss Americana, the intense pace of her life, and the similarly intense pressures of the scrutiny she finds herself under, was laid bare for all to analyze. But then the Covid-19 pandemic swept in and, presumably, cleared her pop star slate. Taylor was supposed to spend the summer of 2020 touring her “Lover Fest” shows. Instead, she was left with her privacy, as lockdowns shuttered us all into our homes. On social media, she was neither cryptically silent nor strategically active: she seemed, for the first time in a long time, like she was just living her life and drinking wine on her couch like many of us, big plans on hold.

But even in her downtime, curtains drawn on her celebrity, Taylor was creating. The isolation seemed to have sparked her creativity, leading her to write and record an entirely new record in collaboration with producers Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner. It’s hard to overstate the number of surprises involved here: Taylor was usually extremely deliberate in how she scheduled her music, but no one saw folklore coming. The album was announced less than 24 hours before its release on July 23, 2020, only 11 months after Lover. It was the first time she had put out a project on less than a two-year schedule. Taylor didn’t bother with the extensive teasing release of past albums; she announced her work on Thursday, rolled it out on Friday and then sat back over the weekend and enjoyed the warm response. And then there was the music itself, which set words sung from a new range of perspectives against lush acoustic arrangements that evoked folk music and chamber pop. folklore was a big left turn in style and subject matter; it also earned Taylor some of the best reviews of her career.

Becoming an Alternative Artist

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:

«Songwriting on this album is exactly the way that I would write if I considered nothing else other than, 'What words do I want to write? What stories do I want to tell? What melodies do I want to sing? What production is essential to tell those stories?' It was a very do-it-yourself experience. My management team, we created absolutely everything in advance — every lyric video, every individual album package. And then we called our label a week in advance and said, 'Here's what we have.'»

Taylor Swift

Supporting Independent Record Stores

Taylor gifted signed CD copies of folklore across the US, including to Nashville’s Grimey’s, where she had also covered three months of salary and healthcare for employees at the start of the pandemic. Reckless Records told Rolling Stone: “We sold them like normal CDs, so we were able to make some money.” The idea was to partner up with Record Store Day to give something cool for indie stores to sell to drive some foot traffic into stores to help those affected by the pandemic. The copies sold out nationwide in a matter of hours, so Taylor sent a second batch out to stores a few weeks later.

The Long Pond Studio Sessions

After the release week in July and the announcements of numerous records broken a few days later, Taylor disappeared again. She only popped up here and there to virutally accepts awards, usually filmed in front of a white wall in one of her homes. But on November 24, 2020, she surprised her fans with an early Christmas present: a new concert film due out the following night on Disney+, called folklore: the long pond studio sessions:

«Well, it’s 11/24 and 24-11=13 so I’ve got an announcement! You haven’t seen this film before. folklore: the long pond studio sessions will be out tonight at midnight!»

Taylor Swift

The acoustic concert was filmed at Aaron Dessner’s rustic Long Pond Studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. “There’s something about the complete and total uncertainty of life… if we’re going to have to recalibrate everything, we should state with what we love the most,” Taylor said in the trailer. A live album consisting of the performances were released on digital services alongside the film.

Earlier that week, Taylor had won the “Artist of the Year” trophy at the 2020 American Music Awards. In her pre-taped acceptance speech, Taylor announced that she was now in the middle of re-recording her older albums (Taylor Swift through reputation), following a prolonged legal battle with Scooter Braun and Big Machine Records over the ownership of her masters. In the short video, Taylor wore an intricate braid, which turned out to be an easter egg for her soon to be released ninth studio album (but fans didn’t know that yet).

folklore: the long pond studio sessions

folklore: the long pond studio sessions Concert Film | November 25, 2020 This article is about the concert film. For the live album, see folklore: the long pond studio sessions (2020).folklore: the long pond studio sessions is a documentary and concert film

The Quintessential Quarantine Album

In quarantine, any album release found new resonance. But Taylor, being Taylor, was always destined to conjure up a powerful reaction. folklore went down in history as the definitive quarantine album, and not just because of the record’s homespun, folksy presentation. Without the pressure of having to write radio hits or build up her usual prolonged album-release schedule — full of music videos, Easter eggs, and Good Morning America performances — Taylor shed the über-pop trappings of her previous album, Lover, for a project that put her once-in-a-generation songwriting talent front and center. folklore’s 17 tales of lost love, coming-of-age, and redemption provided the world with solace and catharsis just when it needed it most. Songs like “august” and “mirrorball” persevered long after the pandemic was over — and so, evidently, would Taylor Swift.

At the end of the year it was announced by Billboard that folklore is officially the biggest album of 2020. It pulled in close to 2,3 million album-equivalent units and saw the biggest sales week of 2020 — the biggest, in fact, since her own 2019 album, Lover — and topped the Billboard Hot 200 chart for eight weeks. Beyond its 1,1 billion on-demand audio streams, folklore was the highest-selling album of the year, with over 1,2 million sales.

evermore

Taylor always commemorates her December 13 birthday by doing something special: having a gigantic party, announcing a Netflix tour special, or appearing at the high-profile Jingle Ball at Madison Square Garden. In 2020, however, she celebrated turning 31 with an even bigger surprise: Roughly four and a half months after releasing the critically acclaimed folklore Taylor announced its “sister record,” her ninth studio album called evermore.

The tale of how evermore came to be is the stuff of first loves, holiday rom-coms, and Taylor Swift songs. Crafting the woodsy surprise album folklore in isolation, Taylor felt the spark of something exciting and new, and knowing all things must pass, wanted to make it linger just a little longer. If the periods of hibernation between Taylor’s records once felt crucial to the drama of her returns, her music now was filled with these momentary silences and breakthroughs. After a career spent striving for the next level of stardom, she discovered a more sustainable path for evolution. On evermore, she seems at peace with her past, in a suspended moment of transition, letting the world follow along as she learned: Don’t just get settled, she told us through this bounty of material. Get stronger.

As Taylor entered 2022, she once again had the chance to make history: evermore was nominated for the “Album of the Year” at the 2022 Grammy Awards – a victory at the ceremony would have made her the most celebrated artist in the 64-year history of the category. While other popular artists were rightfully celebrating award nominations and chart achievements, Taylor could do both, while also credibly changing the way artists could approach creative ownership and sonic shifts. If Taylor changed the game in the mid-2010s when pivoting from country to pop, playing it Top 40’s way and earning the splashiest commercial wins of her career, folklore and evermore found her rejecting the game entirely and drawing up her own rules. Now, she had the power to pull any sound she wanted into her mainstream orbit, or make any industry institution reckon with her impact.

Grammy's Album of the Year

At the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in March, folklore took home the top prize — the third of Taylor’s career, following wins for Fearless at the 2010 ceremony and 1989 in 2016. She achieved this feat in three different genres as well: country, pop and alternative. Not only did the win help Taylor enter the record books, as the fourth artist overall and only woman with three album of the year wins (following Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon), the accomplishment was also a bit of personal validation after her two previous albums, 2017’s reputation and 2019’s Lover, were not nominated in the top category. Taylor thanked the fans for embracing the artistic swerve of her 2020 output: “You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created,” she said in her acceptance speech, “and we can’t tell you how honored we are forever by this.”