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Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’: Album Review

It’s hard to remember any contemporary pop superstar that has indulged in a more serious, or successful, act of sonic palette cleansing than Swift has with her eighth album, a highly subdued but rich affair written and recorded in quarantine conditions.

While most of us spent the last four months putting on some variation of “the quarantine 15,” Taylor Swift has been secretly working on the “Folklore” 16. Sprung Thursday night with less than a day’s notice, her eighth album is a fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation. Mind you, the words “pandemic hero” should probably be reserved for actual frontline workers and not topline artistes. But there’s a bit of Rosie the Riveter spirit in how Swift has become the first major pop artist to deliver a first-rank album that went from germination to being completely locked down in the midst of a national lockdown.

The themes and tone of “Folklore,” though, are a little less “We can do it!” and a little more “Can we do it?” Because this new collection is Swift’s most overtly contemplative — as opposed to covertly reflective — album since the fan favorite “Red.” Actually, that’s an understatement. “Red” seems like a Chainsmokers album compared to the wholly banger-free “Folklore,” which lives up to the first half of its title by divesting itself of any lingering traces of Max Martin-ized dance-pop and presenting Swift, afresh, as your favorite new indie-electro-folk/chamber-pop balladeer. For fans that relished these undertones of Swift’s in the past, it will come as a side of her they know and love all too well. For anyone who still has last year’s “You Need to Calm Down” primarily in mind, it will come as a jolting act of manual downshifting into actually calming down. At least this one won’t require an album-length Ryan Adams remake to convince anyone that there’s songwriting there. The best comparison might be to take “Clean,” the unrepresentative denouement of “1989,” and… imagine a whole album of that. Really, it’s hard to remember any pop star in our lifetimes that has indulged in a more serious act of sonic palette cleansing.

The tone of this release won’t come as a midnight shock to anyone who took spoilers from the announcement earlier in the day that a majority of the tracks were co-written with and produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, or that the man replacing Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie as this album’s lone duet partner is Bon Iver. No matter how much credit you may have given Swift in the past for thinking and working outside of her box, a startled laugh may have been in order for just how unexpected these names felt on the bingo card of musical dignitaries you expected to find the woman who just put out “Me!” working with next. But her creative intuition hasn’t led her into an oil-and-water collaboration yet. Dessner turns out to be an ideal partner, with as much virtuosic, multi-instrumental know-how (particularly useful in a pandemic) as the most favored writer-producer on last year’s “Lover” album, Jack Antonoff.

He, too, is present and accounted for on “Folklore,” to a slightly lesser extent, and together Antonoff and Dessner make for a surprisingly well-matched support-staff tag team. Swift’s collabs with the National’s MVP clearly set the tone for the project, with a lot of fingerpicking, real strings, mellow drum programming and Mellotrons. You can sense Antonoff, in the songs he did with Swift, working to meet the mood and style of what Dessner had done or would be doing with her, and bringing out his own lesser-known acoustic and lightly orchestrated side. As good of a mesh as the album is, though, it’s usually not too hard to figure out who worked on which song — Dessner’s contributions often feel like nearly neo-classical piano or guitar riffs that Swift toplined over, while Antonoff works a little more toward buttressing slightly more familiar sounding pop melodies of Swift’s, dressed up or down to meet the more somber-sounding occasion.

For some fans, it might take a couple of spins around the block with this very different model to become re-accustomed to how there’s still the same power under the hood here. And that’s really all Swift, whose genius for conversational melodies and knack for giving every chorus a telling new twist every time around remain unmistakable trademarks. Thematically, it’s a bit more of a hodgepodge than more clearly autobiographical albums like “Lover” and “Reputation” before it have been. Swift has always described her albums as being like diaries of a certain period of time, and a few songs here obviously fit that bill, as continuations of the newfound contentment she explored in the last album and a half. But there’s also a higher degree of fictionalization than perhaps she’s gone for in the past, including what she’s described as a trilogy of songs revolving around a high school love triangle. The fact that she refers to herself, by name, as “James” in the song “Betty” is a good indicator that not everything here is ripped from today’s headlines or diary entries.

But, hell, some of it sure is. Anyone looking for lyrical Easter eggs to confirm that Swift still draws from her own life will be particularly pleased by the song “Invisible String,” a sort of “bless the broken roads that led me to you” type song that finds fulfillment in a current partner who once wore a teal shirt while working as a young man in a yogurt shop, even as Swift was dreaming of the perfect romance hanging out in Nashville’s Centennial Park. (A quick Google search reveals that, yes, Joe Alwyn was once an essential worker in London’s fro-yo industry.) There’s also a sly bit of self-referencing as Swift follows this golden thread that fatefully linked them: “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to L.A.,” she sings. The “dive bar” that was first established as the scene of a meet-cute two albums ago makes a reappearance in this song, too.

As for actual bad blood? It barely features into “Folklore,” in any substantial, true-life-details way, counter to her reputation for writing lyrics that are better than revenge. But when it does, woe unto he who has crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s on a contract that Swift feels was a double-cross. At least, we can strongly suspect what or who the actual subject is of “Mad Woman,” this album’s one real moment of vituperation. “What did you think I’d say to that?” Swift sings in the opening lines. “Does a scorpion sting when fighting back? / They strike to kill / And you know I will.” Soon, she’s adding gas to the fire: “Now I breathe flames each time I talk / My cannons all firing at your yacht / They say ‘move on’ / But you know I won’t / … women like hunting witches, too.” A coup de gras is delivered: “It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.” It’s a message song, and the message is: Swift still really wants her masters back, in 2020. And is really still going to want them back in 2021, 2022 and 2023, too. Whether or not the neighbors of the exec or execs she is imagining really mouth the words “f— you” when these nemeses pull up in their respective driveways may be a matter of projection, but if Swift has a good time imagining it, many of her fans will too.

(A second such reference may be found in the bonus track, “The Lakes,” which will only be found on deluxe CD and vinyl editions not set to arrive for several weeks. There, she sings, “What should be over burrowed under my skin / In heart-stopping waves of hurt / I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze / Tell me what are my words worth.” The rest of “The Lakes” is a fantasy of a halcyon semi-retirement in the mountains — in which “I want to watch wisteria grow right over my bare feet / Because I haven’t moved in years” — “and not without my muse.” She even imagines red roses growing out of a tundra, “with no one around to tweet it”; fantasies of a social media-free utopia are really pandemic-rampant.)

The other most overtly “confessional” song here is also the most third-person one, up to a telling point. In “The Last Great American Dynasty,” Swift explores the rich history of her seaside manse in Rhode Island, once famous for being home to the heir to the Standard Oil fortune and, after he died, his eccentric widow. Swift has a grand old time identifying with the women who decades before her made fellow coast-dwellers go “there goes the neighborhood”: “There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen / She had a marvelous time ruining everything,” she sings of the long-gone widow, Rebekah. “Fifty years is a long time / Holiday House sat quietly on that beach / Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits / Then it was bought by me… the loudest woman this town has ever seen.” (A fine madness among proud women is another recurring theme.)

But, these examples aside, the album is ultimately less obviously self-referential than most of Swift’s. The single “Cardigan,” which has a bit of a Lana Del Rey feel (even though it’s produced by Dessner, not Del Rey’s partner Antonoff) is part of Swift’s fictional high school trilogy, along with “August” and “Betty.” That sweater shows up again in the latter song, in which Swift takes on the role of a 17-year boy publicly apologizing for doing a girl wrong — and which kicks into a triumphant key change at the end that’s right out of “Love Story,” in case anyone imagines Swift has completely moved on from the spirit of early triumphs.

“Exile,” the duet with Bon Iver, recalls another early Swift song, “The Last Time,” which had her trading verses with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. Then, as now, she gives the guy the first word, and verse, if not the last; it has her agreeing with her partner on some aspects of their dissolution (“I couldn’t turn things around”/”You never turned things around”) and not completely on others (“Cause you never gave a warning sign,” he sings; “I gave so many signs,” she protests).

Picking two standouts — one from the contented pile, one from the tormented — leads to two choices: “Illicit Affairs” is the best cheating song since, well, “Reputation’s” hard-to-top “Getaway Car.” There’s less catharsis in this one, but just as much pungent wisdom, as Swift describes the more mundane details of maintaining an affair (“Tell your friends you’re out for a run / You’ll be flushed when you return”) with the soul-destroying ones of how “what started in beautiful rooms ends with meetings in parking lots,” as “a drug that only worked the first few hundred times” wears off in clandestine bitterness.

But does Swift have a corker of a love song to tip the scales of the album back toward sweetness. It’s not “Invisible String,” though that’s a contender. The champion romance song here is “Peace,” the title of which is slightly deceptive, as Swift promises her beau, or life partner, that that quality of tranquility is the only thing she can’t promise him. If you like your love ballads realistic, it’s a bit of candor that renders all the compensatory vows of fidelity and courage all the more credible and deeply lovely. “All these people think love’s for show / But I would die for you in secret.”

That promise of privacy to her intended is a reminder that Swift is actually quite good at keeping things close to the vest, when she’s not spilling all — qualities that she seems to value and uphold in about ironically equal measure. Perhaps it’s in deference to the sanctity of whatever she’s holding dear right now that there are more outside narratives than before in this album — including a song referring to her grandfather storming the beaches in World War II — even as she goes outside for fresh collaborators and sounds, too. But what keeps you locked in, as always, is the notion of Swift as truth-teller, barred or unbarred, in a world of pop spin. She’s celebrating the masked era by taking hers off again.

Taylor Swift “Folklore” Republic Records

[nellpire]

[140404] Nell - IZE Korea interview (translation)

Q: You've appeared a lot on TV recently. Even on music programs where lots of idols appear. Jongwan: We're not used to it yet. So we're still searching for a way to play by ourselves in the waiting rooms. (laughter)

Q: Even so, it must be important to make sure your song is known. Jongwan: Once the album is out we have to, to some extent. Promotions can't be overlooked, so we compromised (with our agency) on the schedules. We always used to say that we never compromised on anything, but I think we do need to at least come out and tell people our new album is out. It takes almost two years to make a full album, so if you're not a fan, you won't even know we released one.

Q: Is there a reason why you've changed your minds? Jongwan: If there isn't a circulation of people who listen to our albums and come to our concerts, then we can't attempt the things we want. If we want our next album making to go smoothly then we have to go out on TV programs and promote. It's something I have to do if I'm planning on actually doing what I dream of. We put so much time and effort into our albums, but if we don't promote it feels like people will only hear the title track while the rest gets buried. 

Q: Are you more willing to compromise when it comes to music these days? Jongwan: We have confidence now. On the contrary, I think the burden to make music with mass appeal is even smaller now. Since we have the trust that there are fans out there waiting for us, we are more likely to do things our way. For example, many people think music should be recorded or mixed with the purpose of being played through computers or headphones since lots of people listen to music this way. That could also have an effect on our mass appeal. But we think it's better to mix our songs to match the people who listen through proper speakers. Because we've also realized that we too have to listen to other people's music with the proper settings in order to receive the emotions they intended. We can't tell people to listen through good speakers, but we work with the thought that there are definitely people out there who do. 

Q: I think your sound is becoming more and more focused with every album. The starting sound of the first song of Newton's Apple, Decompose, changes completely depending on if you listen to it through headphones or speakers. You can feel the position and texture of the sound very accurately when you listen through speakers. Jaekyung: Because that's the part we spend so much time and effort on. One fan said that they only recently heard what our Let it Rain album truly sounds like, and I feel really good when I hear things like that. And Jongwan says he wants to do mixing engineering only. (laughter) Jongwan: Mixing is very similar to math. There's a limited frequency to each sound, an above, below, left and right. We arrange the sound within that range, and if you put a lot of sounds in one album, then it can surpass two hundred separately recorded sounds. And you have to calculate each and every single one of those sounds. There are times when the process of making music is hard, and there are times when you face yourself and overcome things that you don't want to acknowledge. But mixing is fun. 

Q: How did you end up hanging off of every single sound like that? Not all musicians do that. Jongwan: In our indie days, we didn't know what recording or mixing was. We thought that if we played something in the studio, it would come out sounding exactly like that. (laughter) We were so distressed back then that we started frantically studying sounds. Jaekyung: I get inspired by certain sounds, and I'm so happy when people hear our albums the way we intended. And since music is something that can't be seen, a lot of work goes into it. That's what's the most fun. The process of being inspired and working on a clear idea is so much fun. 

Q: I can hear how clearly you want to convey your message through your music. As for Newton's Apple, with every song there's a variety of different spaces, from wide to small, that you set up and sang through. Was there something in particular you wanted to achieve with this? Jongwan: There are certain emotions you can't express through lyrics alone. I felt that a lot especially with this album, and so I wanted to express the spaces those emotions were in. 

Q: Why spaces? With Slip Away you painted a finely detailed painting by arranging sounds in a very precise manner, but this time you conveyed a three-dimensional space. Jongwan: I think it's because of the lyrics. Until Slip Away, I wanted to convey my personal stories. I thought a lot about people and their relationships. But this time, songs like Night of Rebirth and Burn were built with my emotions as a basis, but it centers around imaginary characters. So rather than telling a story straight-forwardly, I approached it like a movie. Since this album is built from different characters in various states of mind, I wanted to convey the spaces they were in through sound. So I hope you find it abstract and that listening to it triggers your imagination. 

Q: What were the triggers for your individual changes? Junghoon: I haven't exactly gone through any big changes, but I think I've become calmer over the past two years. I think Holding Onto Gravity and Escaping Gravity fits very well with how my personality changed through the process of creating them. We all started this album comfortably, and I think I too started off with a calmer heart than I used to. Jongwan: I felt that I had already told all my stories with Slip Away. I think the way I see the world hasn't changed much as I went through the stormy times of my teens and twenties, and entered my thirties. As we made and released our first and second album I had many intense emotional ups and downs, but now I've stopped changing. Jaekyung: But ten years from now you might not say that. (laughter) I've thought about and studied music a lot. For example, when you work up your driving skills to a certain point, you don't just go back to where you've been before, but you drive to places farther away. I always have ideas in my head, and I like that I can use those ideas when Jongwan comes to me with a song. 

Q: What do you think has changed now that you've said all you've wanted to say and are writing from your imagination? Jongwan: Escaping Gravity was a very important turning point for me. Before that, I wrote lyrics and felt the picture I wanted to paint through the song, and it was important to me to express what kind of person I am. The things I felt and the kind of person I am was the starting point. But with Escaping Gravity, I could draw the things I had dreamt of. I think the sound naturally became wider as we expressed that imagination. I used to think that our music should express the emotions of the moment and so I had to stop and stay in that time, and the sound had to reflect that. But starting with Escaping Gravity, I think we were able to go a little bit further as we talked about those things we had imagined. 

Q: It sounds like you worked out a lot of things while releasing Holding Onto Gravity and Escaping Gravity very quickly. And Newton's Apple is the product of that. Jongwan: It's true. There are always songs that we can't include in our full albums, and now we could gather and release those as an EP. We wouldn't usually include them as to not break the harmony of the album, but this time we could include them comfortably in the different parts (of the series). Newton's Apple is the final result of that. 

Q: In that sense, I find it interesting that the sound of Newton's Apple is a lot more empty than your previous work. What you took out must have been more important than what you put in. Jongwan: We talked a lot more about what we should focus on rather than what we could do for this album. We tried string music and electronic sounds with Holding Onto Gravity, and Escaping Gravity was somewhat provocative. But with Newton's Apple, the first thing we wanted to do was to start from a four-member band sound. There were many times in the past when we would finish the song arrangements first and then add the instruments, but this time we started off by working on the arrangement between the four of us and then adding the other sounds like seasoning.

Q: What made you decide to work in this manner? Jongwan: We chose what was important. If a hundred spaces can hold five sounds, then each sound takes up twenty percent. If one sound takes up more, then the other sounds have to be smaller. For example, the drums and piano plays a big part in the song History of Silence. Also the bass, the vocals and the guitar was important. So since those sounds become less important the more sounds we add, we ended up adding nothing else. We used to add all the ideas we had for a song, but this time I think we just chose one and scrapped the rest. We want to only add sounds with a meaning. Jaekyung: We thought a string arrangement for History of Silence would be good so we tried it, but ended up removing all of it. It just didn't convey the feeling we set out for, so. 

Q: So the basic band sound became more important. In Memories of a Stranger, History of Silence and Four Times Around the Sun especially, the drums alone set the atmosphere of the song and the bass becomes the songs' center. Jaewon: That's why we started by finding the right drum sound. We've always thought the drum sound is important in finding the tone of the song, so we pay a lot of attention to it. Jaekyung: Finding the right drum sound alone took us about eight to nine hours. Not even recording it, just finding the sound. Jongwan: When recording and mixing this album, we paid the most attention to the drums. The same drum can sound completely different depending on what mic you use, so we tested all of them. We imagined a very small space for History of Silence so we went to a recording studio that was like a dead room, where the sound wouldn't reflect, and used four mics. We wanted to make it sound like somebody was standing right next to you telling their story. Junghoon: It's easy playing a bassline that people can easily hear. Oppositely, it's difficult to make one that is more hidden. I think it's right for the bass to support the guitar in songs where the guitar is flashy. All the instruments had to be lively for History of Silence, and since we had to express the feeling of each individual instrument we thought we had to create something that matched the song and made it feel like the instruments were all living and moving as one. 

Q: Your sound is becoming more elaborate as you go along, but you must need inspiration to express so much. Where do you receive that? Jongwan: From things I feel. The weather was cloudy this morning, and as we got in the car it was so cloudy that I had the thought 'Seoul is grey', and there are times when thoughts like that bite each other's tails and you fall into a weird headspace. Things like that become inspiration to me. Of course I get inspired by bad or good things happening in my life too, but you can receive a lot of things if your perspective on the situation around you is different. Junghoon: I get inspired by the first drafts of Jongwan's songs. They're different from the emotions you hear on a normal day. If Jongwan is sure from the start then I get inspired at once too, if he's unsure then I receive it late, too. Other times I receive things from movies, dramas or songs. Jaewon: I think I get most things from other people. I'm not interested in many things, so I like meeting and talking to other people. I meet the members often so I get inspired as we share our individual thoughts, outlook on our lives or just talk about meaningless things.

Q: How do you change things like that into music? Jongwan: Nowadays we find the feeling of each song very quickly. I think that ability is something a band gathers if they stay together for a long time, whether they know it or not. We know what the others are thinking even if we don't talk about it.

Q: It seems Nell are going in a different direction than before as you go through these processes. You've become a team who makes something not just out of the emotions in the melody and lyrics, but out of every single sound. What kind of band is Nell right now? Jaekyung: We probably all have different types of music we want to make, and it's interesting even to us what comes out of that. One of our fans said that if you want to describe or define Nell's style, then you should wait until we are dead, and I really like that. Junghoon: We're a band that makes honest music, the music we want to make. I didn't know anything ten years ago and I was slightly pretentious. Now we're a band who creates what we like, and I wish to become a team that many people empathize with. Jaewon: I think we're a band who studies music, practices and tries hard just like we always have. I want us to be a team who works hard. Jongwan: We haven't changed much. Every time we release an album people say we've changed, and some people like it while other people don't. I think that's what we are. And this might sound selfish, but I want to take only the good points of the underground and the mainstream world and do our own thing. I want to take the support we get from the mainstream world (laughter) and keep the music and mindset from our underground days. I want us to go on doing the things we want. Our way.

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