Home » Album Eras » folklore & evermore Era

folklore & evermore Era

2020–2021

If there is one thing we know about Taylor, it’s that she works hard. Her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, offered a rare, unfiltered look at the intense pace of her life and the equally relentless public scrutiny that comes with it. At the beginning of the year, she seemed poised to headline her much-anticipated “Lover Fest” shows over the summer months. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, abruptly pressing pause on her pop star schedule. What remained was something far more unusual for her: silence and stillness. Like the rest of us, Taylor found herself grounded and at home. For the first time in a long while, she appeared to be off the clock, curled up on the couch with a glass of white wine and no big plans.

But even with the curtains drawn on her celebrity, Taylor was creating. Isolation didn’t stall her momentum but rather sparked a new kind of artistic freedom. It was a career pivot at a pivotal moment. She was 30 years old, had conquered country, pop, and the art of the reinvention itself. Yet even for an artist of her stature, the question loomed: What’s next? How do you evolve without losing the essence of who you are?

Collaborating remotely with her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner, she wrote and recorded what would become one of the most unexpected and defining works of her career: folklore. It set a new bar for what a Taylor Swift album could be. With hushed vocals, textured arrangements, and a literary sensibility, it represented a bold shift. Narratives unfolded through fictional characters, shifting perspectives, and unreliable narrators, a deliberate step away from the autobiographical lens that had defined much of her earlier work. Drawing influence from indie folk, chamber pop, and alternative rock, folklore marked a profound evolution in Taylor’s artistry.

Lockdown in Los Angeles

The first song written for folklore was “my tears ricochet,” and it predated even the earliest stages of lockdown—Taylor worked on it with her close friend Jack Antonoff, before she had initiated contact with Aaron Dessner. In a December 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she revealed that the song was born in the aftermath of the sale of her master recordings in June 2019. The transaction—and the broader narrative of betrayal surrounding it—left her emotionally devastated, and she found herself increasingly affected by stories of divorce and broken trust. Taylor and Jack wrote another song together, “august,” which also hints at a form of betrayal. “It kind of explores the idea of the undefined relationship. […] How do you mourn the loss of something once it ends, if you’re being made to believe that it never happened at all?” Once these songs existed, folklore began to take shape.

When lockdown struck in March 2020, Taylor happened to be in Los Angeles and found herself quarantining with her partner at the time, Joe Alwyn, in her Beverly Hills mansion. She hadn’t set out to make an album. But as she recounted to fans during “The Eras Tour,” the creative process began just two days into lockdown—driven partly by instinct, and partly by a deep need to escape reality. She made an interesting confession during the tour stop in Melbourne:

«[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing folklore. That is not what I looked like... So that’s all that matters—the delusion.»

Taylor Swift

Though born out of personal and global uncertainty, folklore came together with remarkable speed and clarity. Taylor spent four months in lockdown at her Los Angeles home, immersed in a quiet rhythm of creativity and introspection. She read novels steeped in times and worlds past, including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and watched films like Pan’s Labyrinth that blended fantasy with historical undertones. “I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time,” she told Paul McCartney in a joint Rolling Stone interview in November 2020. “Needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago.”

During that time, her creativity took many forms beyond songwriting. She took up crafting, sewing silk baby blankets with embroidery and stuffed animals for friends who had recently become parents. She also returned to painting, favoring acrylics and oils for landscapes, though she confessed that watercolors often led her back to delicate florals. “I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill,” she said—a striking image that echoes the pastoral solitude that would come to define folklore’s sonic and lyrical world.

No Rules Anymore: Taylor’s Indie Reinvention

During the spring and early summer months of 2020, Taylor wrote, recorded, and released folklore in its entirety—a creative feat that not only redefined her sound but also challenged expectations of what pop stars could achieve in isolation. One of the key figures in this transformation was Aaron Dessner of the indie-rock band The National, a group Taylor had long admired. She first met Dessner backstage at one of the band’s concerts in 2019, where they had a brief but memorable conversation. “It’s my favorite thing to ask people I’m a fan of: ‘How do you write?’” she later said. Dessner’s answer stuck with her. “All the band members live in different parts of the world,” he explained. “So I make tracks and send them to Matt [Berninger], our lead singer, and he writes the top line.” Taylor was struck by the simplicity and potential of that remote collaboration model. “I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project… ‘Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.’”

That idea resurfaced at exactly the right time. As the pandemic lockdowns began, Taylor reached out to Aaron via email. “I said, ‘Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something—even if we’re just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen with.’” For Aaron, the message arrived unexpectedly when he was sitting at the dinner table one night. “She said, ‘Just send anything—even the weirdest, most random sketch you have.’”

He did exactly that. Aaron sent Taylor a folder of instrumental pieces he’d been working on to stay creatively afloat during lockdown. Within hours, she responded with a fully written song: “cardigan.” The creative spark was immediate. “The first instrumental I opened ended up being ‘cardigan,’” she later told Paul McCartney. “It really happened rapid-fire like that.” From there, the album began to take shape with astonishing momentum. Taylor knew exactly what kind of music she wanted to make next—introspective, lyrical, and textured with the quiet sadness of a world paused in stillness:

«There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on. Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way—like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.»

Taylor Swift

While much of the world was busy baking banana bread and navigating endless Zoom quizzes, Taylor was quietly crafting the album in secret. Collaborating remotely with Aaron, their process unfolded organically and intuitively. “He’d make new tracks and add them to the folder,” Taylor explained. What began as a low-pressure exchange quickly evolved into a full-scale passion project, bringing in key contributors: Aaron’s good friend Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver), Taylor’s longtime creative partners Jack Antonoff and Laura Sisk, as well as Joe Alwyn, writing under the pseudonym William Bowery. Aside from her collaborators, her family and later on her management team, no one knew what was happening. Not even her close friends or record label:

«Well, it felt like it was only my thing. It felt like such an inner world I was escaping to every day that it almost didn't feel like an album. Because I wasn't making a song and finishing it and going, 'Oh my God, that is catchy.' I wasn't making these things with any purpose in mind. And so it was almost like having it just be mine was this really sweet, nice, pure part of the world as everything else in the world was burning and crashing and feeling this sickness and sadness. I almost didn't process it as an album. This was just my daydream space.»

Taylor Swift

The surprises were layered. Taylor, known for her intricate album campaigns and carefully timed reveals, threw out the rulebook entirely. folklore was announced less than 24 hours before its release on July 24, 2020—just eleven months after Lover, marking the first time she had released a new studio album in under two years. “I had originally thought, ‘Maybe I’ll make an album in the next year and put it out in January or something,’” she later recalled. But as the songs kept coming, that plan changed. What unfolded was, in her words, “a very do-it-yourself experience.” Working closely with her management team, she oversaw every detail of the rollout in-house: each lyric video, each custom album edition, each piece of packaging. Then, just one week before release, she called her label and simply said, “Here’s what we have.” She explained:

«I just thought there are no rules anymore. I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, ‘How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?’ If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is folklore.»

Taylor Swift

Gone were the extensive Easter eggs, countdowns, and pre-released lead singles. Instead, Taylor simply posted the announcement on a Thursday, dropped the album on Friday, and then sat back over the weekend and enjoyed the warm response. She had once again shifted genres. After mastering country and redefining pop, she now found herself at the center of the conversation in the alternative space.

Kindness in the Quiet

After the release of folklore, the album became a source of solace for many, helping listeners process the complex emotions stirred by months of isolation. Grief and loss were at the forefront of this period, but Taylor sought to be a light in people’s lives through meaningful acts of support. She used her platform and resources not only to create but also to actively provide help, offering personal, targeted assistance with little fanfare.

In the early months of the pandemic, Taylor quietly began sending $3,000 payments to fans who had lost income due to Covid-19. Using platforms like PayPal and Venmo, these donations were often prompted by heartfelt posts from fans on Twitter and Tumblr. It was a simple, profound gesture that proved she wasn’t just watching from a distance—she was listening.

In a move to support both local businesses and the music community, Taylor also contributed to struggling indie record stores, including Nashville’s Grimey’s, where she sent thousands of signed copies of folklore. The albums sold out nationwide within hours, prompting her to send a second wave of signed CDs to stores. At Grimey’s, the gesture extended beyond just the albums; Taylor had also covered three months of salary and healthcare costs for the store’s employees during the early days of the pandemic.

Her support wasn’t limited to individual fans or indie businesses. Taylor made substantial donations to global and national relief efforts, including the World Health Organization and Feeding America, addressing both the international and domestic crises caused by the pandemic. She also contributed to MusiCares’ Covid-19 Relief Fund, which provided financial assistance to musicians and crew members whose livelihoods were disrupted by the lockdown. As the year progressed and social justice movements gained momentum, Taylor’s activism expanded. She openly supported Black Lives Matter, making significant donations to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Using her platform, she encouraged her fans to contribute as well, sharing resources and links to support the cause.

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

Deeper Into the Folklorian Woods

After folklore’s record-breaking release week in July, Taylor largely retreated from the spotlight. She resurfaced only occasionally—to virtually accept awards, usually filmed against a plain white wall in one of her homes. Behind the scenes, though, her creative momentum hadn’t slowed. She and Aaron Dessner had kept exchanging ideas, not intending to make another album so soon. But before long, they had written eight or nine new songs—an unexpected overflow of inspiration that would become the foundation for evermore, folklore’s sister record. Once again, most of the collaboration took place remotely. Even Taylor was caught off guard by how naturally it unfolded:

«I have this weird thing that I do when I create something where in order to create the next thing I kind of, in my head, attack the previous thing. I don't love that I do that but it is the thing that has kept me pivoting to another world every time I make an album. But with this one, I just still love it. I'm so proud of it. And so that feels very foreign to me. That doesn't feel like a normal experience that I've had with releasing albums.»

Taylor Swift

In early September 2020, Taylor, Aaron Dessner, and Jack Antonoff quarantined for two weeks before meeting at Aaron’s storied Long Pond Studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. The original plan was simple: to film a live performance of the entire folklore album. But as often happens with Taylor and her collaborators, creativity took the lead. “She stayed after we were done filming and then we recorded a lot,” Aaron recalled. “It was crazy because we were getting ready to make that film, but at the same time, these songs were accumulating. And so we thought, ‘Hmm, I guess we should just stay and work.’”

That autumn, Taylor and Joe returned to the UK, where they had already been living together before the lockdown began. In the English countryside outside of London, she recorded another significant portion of her vocals for songs that would appear on evermore at Marcus Mumford’s secluded studio. Mumford himself contributed uncredited background vocals to “cowboy like me.” While those brief in-person moments added a sense of grounding to the process, evermore—like its predecessor—was largely shaped through remote collaboration. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon returned as both a featured artist and co-writer, deepening his role in Taylor’s evolving alternative sound. Yet remarkably, the two had still never met in person. “I still haven’t been in the same room with Justin Vernon, who has now collaborated on two albums heavily,” Taylor said. “We’ve talked, but we’ve just never been in the same space together. It’s pretty wild.”

The Long Pond Studio Sessions

Unable to tour or connect with fans in person, the performance that Taylor, Aaron, and Jack filmed in September was officially released on November 25, 2020. Much like the album itself, folklore: the long pond studio sessions arrived as a surprise, announced just hours before its premiere on Disney+. Alongside the film, a live album featuring all the performances was released on digital platforms.

Taylor conceived the long pond studio sessions as a way to share folklore in the most honest, direct way possible—through stripped-back live performances and quiet conversations about each song’s origin. It was her way of offering intimacy during isolation, a bridge between the deeply personal world she had created and the listeners who had found refuge in it:

«Obviously everybody's lives have different complexities and whatnot, but I think most of us were feeling really shaken up and really out of place and confused and in need of something comforting all at the same time. And for me, that thing that was comforting was making music that felt sort of like I was trying to hug my fans through the speakers. That was truly my intent. Just trying to hug them when I can't hug them.»

Taylor Swift

Songwriter of the Year

Taylor had always marked her December 13th birthday with something special—whether it’s throwing a massive party, announcing a tour special on Netflix, or making a high-profile appearance at Madison Square Garden’s Jingle Ball. However, in 2020, she celebrated her 31st birthday with an even bigger surprise: just four and a half months after the release of the critically acclaimed folklore, she finally unveiled its “sister record,” her ninth studio album, evermore. “You’ve all been so caring, supportive and thoughtful on my birthdays and so this time I thought I would give you something! I also know this holiday season will be a lonely one for most of us and if there are any of you out there who turn to music to cope with missing loved ones the way I do, this is for you.” Like folklore, evermore was announced less than 24 hours before its release on December 11.

Also that month, Taylor was named “Songwriter of the Year” by Apple Music, which led to a revealing interview about the year that solidified her place among the greatest musicians of all time. In an hour-long virtual conversation with music journalist Zane Lowe recorded on the release day of evermore, she reflected:

«I feel differently today than I felt the day after releasing folklore because, even the day after releasing folklore, Aaron and I were still bouncing ideas back and forth and we just knew we were gonna keep writing music. With this one I have this feeling of sort of quiet conclusion and sort of this weird serenity of we did what we set out to do and we’re all really proud of it, and that feels really really nice.»

Taylor Swift

The Quintessential Quarantine Album

In a year defined by isolation, uncertainty, and collective grief, any album release carried added emotional weight. But folklore and evermore—both conceived and created during the pandemic—resonated on an entirely different level. The songs, filled with tales of lost love, coming-of-age, and redemption, provided solace and catharsis when the world needed it most. Both albums felt like an escape during a time when overwhelming feelings of sadness were shared globally.

folklore especially became the definitive quarantine album. It spent eight weeks atop the Billboard 200, earning nearly 2.3 million album-equivalent units by the end of 2020. By March 2021, folklore was crowned “Album of the Year” at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards—Taylor’s third win in the category, following Fearless in 2010 and 1989 in 2016. This achievement marked a historic moment, making her the first woman and the fourth artist in history to win the coveted prize three times, following Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon. For Taylor, the win was also a personal validation after years of reinvention. In her acceptance speech, she acknowledged her fans with gratitude, saying: “You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created, and we can’t tell you how honored we are forever by this.” Reflecting on a year that marked a pivotal shift in both her artistry and her place in music history, a transformation fueled by her prolific output, she remarked:

«I think that maybe me wanting to make as much music as possible during this time was a way for me to feel like I could reach out my hand and touch my fans, even if I couldn't physically reach out or take a picture with them.»

Taylor Swift

As the world began to open up again in the spring of 2021, Taylor shifted her focus to her next major project: re-recording her first six studio albums, starting with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which was released in April. Much of the year was still spent in relative isolation, with Taylor setting up a home studio in the UK. She accompanied Joe on his filming locations, spending significant time in Northern Ireland and Croatia, where she was also working on new music. The remnants of the pandemic era lingered in the new friendships she forged along the way, particularly her close collaboration with Aaron Dessner. Their partnership blossomed, and Aaron became one of her most trusted producers, igniting a creative spark in Taylor that would continue to influence her work, even as she made her triumphant return to the pop world with her next full studio album.