Taylor Swift - Folklore

That’s exactly what they want you to think.

"I am a big blank space / upon which I have not / projected any thoughts" is one of my favorite National lyrics

I'm glad to know I can score some extra coin this way.

very funny to me this is prob her best album art ever

anyway i bought a copy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDkLfpyqbm0

Wow, this fan-soaking is so Garth-level I'm expecting her to roll out SwifTunes in 2021. https://t.co/34b6x1hlWq

— Keith Harris (@useful_noise) July 23, 2020

fan-soaking

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVftr8XUEAEIcnT?format=jpg&name=medium

Wow, this fan-soaking is so Garth-level I'm expecting her to roll out SwifTunes in 2021.

What?

welcome back, Aja

Keith was Ajakitty??

Taylor was.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0798/9273/products/vs_louise_front_2048x2048.png?v=1437941174

that Dessner note makes me even more excited about this, and i was already pretty excited.

the 8 different vinyl covers and 8 different CD covers is ridiculous, though. i feel bad for obsessives who feel like they have to buy them all.

i mean they can spend their money however they want, but still

now THAT'S how you rig the Billboard 200 chart, LOL (paging Dyl)

are they shipping immediately? they have to if it's to game the charts with the recent rule changes

the lps won't be shipping for 16 weeks

cds go out in a month iirc

There were 4 Deluxe Editions of Lover; each one had a different set of er.. diary entries.

it's not really like taylor needs to game the charts anyway i guess

I was in a Target last night, and they still had a ton of Deluxe copies of Lover.

Yeah, I’m just kidding around (this topic was discussed in the rolling pop thread recently)

That album art is very Midsommar

currently imagining the alternate universe where Taylor sticks it to the big streaming services she's tangled with in the past and made the album a Bandcamp exclusive for a week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a8s8OLBSE

oh my god OH MY GOD

starting this. you can sure hear the Dessnerness of it all right away.

completely fucking blown away by "the 1"

this is it!!!!!!

"cardigan" is an exact Swift/LDR synthesis (the vocal phrasing!) and I like it

my brain went straight to tori

which i guess automatically makes it her best ldr synthesis

when
you
are
young
they
assume
you
know
nothing

Such an amazing song

Also lol @ "the wedding was charming if a little gauche"

wow the bridge in "exile" is great

and then it comes back again!

So she broke up with Joe, huh?

Kinda her mid/late 90s lingering-impact-of-trip-hop album to a degree, isn't it? (This is very much not a complaint.) Also given the recent Hit Parade episode on Lilith Fair I'm feeling a hair of McLachlan from around then too, and similarly not a complaint.

Listening to "The Last Great American Dynasty," and it's easy to imagine Matt Berninger singing the chorus.

"mirrorball" is soooo pretty

"A marvelous time ruining everything" is a great line that hits harder via the repetition and variation.

“august” is a cocteau twins song and it made me cry

this is the best taylor swift album and i’m not even done yet

I don't think what the Dessners and co. bring to the table really works for me tbh

yeah "august" is so much

Per jaymc, great thread re "Last Great American Dynasty"

obsessed with Taylor’s song about Watch Hill House and Rebekah Harkness.....yes queen give us a WASP history lesson, be the John Cheever you want you see in the world!!!!!!

— rachel syme (@rachsyme) July 24, 2020

It sounds very nice, but it's also hella mellow; seven tracks in, hope it picks up a bit.

(also - I'm hesitant to type this - but in "Mirrorball," when she starts to sing "You'll find me on my tallest tiptoes," it totally sounds like she's about to sing "You'll find me on my toilet...")

"Betty" is the best-sounding thing on here, figures it's the only Dessner-Antonoff-Swift co-production

I thought that too.
Which makes me wonder if its gonna be a another "lonely starbucks lovers" thing.

mellow is the dominant mood. the songcraft is out of this fucking world though

and i haven't been studying the lyrics intently but... she seems in top form here

I'm enjoying the mellowness. She's been on such a maximalist kick for so long. (Not that maximalism is absent here, it's just a gauzier variety.) I've always been a fan of mid-tempo and ballad Taylor.

but since I’ve been listening to the album twice a day of late, it may grow on me

I love the couplet “knew I’d curse you for the longest time / chasing shadows in the grocery line”, not sure if those two lines are supposed ti be ‘linked’ but yeah they convey that sense of ambiguity about how she feels about dude

also “I knew EVERYTHING when I was young” breaks my heart for some reason

Yeah I think it's more interestingly ambiguous/complicated than one of her more straightforward "we were made for each other" songs...

Yes, the key aspect of the "EVERYTHING" is not that she knew he would come back to her, but that she knew (or anticipated) that he would leave her (and leave her devastated) in the first place. The "they" in "When you are young they assume you know nothing" could be the world at large but it could also be anyone she dated including the "you" of the song. She was clear-eyed enough to know he would ultimately betray her sooner or later, but let it happen anyway because what are you supposed to do when you are in love?

The song I pair it with is not "All Too Well" or "Mary's Song" or "That's How You Get The Girl" or "Love Song" or "Invisible String"; it's "Fifteen". That song is about the illusions of youth: "When you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them."

But the narrator of "Cardigan" doesn't necessarily believe. Even the chorus is rife with ambiguity: "You put me on and said I was your favourite". Does she actually accept that she is his favourite? Or is it just something she allows herself to accept in the moment because it's comforting?

A key aspect of Taylor's best songwriting on Folkore and Evermore is the way she plays with this kind of ambiguity, and I wish it was talked about more (and that some interviewer would ask her about it, or really ask any intelligent question about her songwriting - but I've griped about that before). Almost all of her best songwriting in this era - "August", "Cowboy Like Me", "Ivy", "'Tis The Damn Season", "Tolerate It", etc. - occupies this space where choosing (or allowing oneself) to be emotionally dependent on another person is fraught with risk and/or sacrifices (variously: autonomy, security, a clear sense of independent self-worth) and even a song like "Cowboy Like Me", which from a distance sounds like a love song, becomes more complicated when viewed up close: "I'm waiting by the phone like I'm sitting in an airport bar", "We could be the way forward, and I know I'll pay for it", "forever is the sweetest con". There's an undercurrent at work which I suspect is a deliberate disavowal of the kind of fairy tale predestination her songwriting is typically associated with (but which she's been moving away from since at least her third album).

(even "Invisible String" is kind of the opposite of how it appears on the surface: "Isn't it just so pretty to think..." The narrator's saying it's a comforting fiction, she knows that in reality life just isn't that simple or straightforward, which is why she now sends presents to the babies of her ex-lovers, but imposing structured narratives is part of how make sense of a deal with the messiness of real life)

Also hard to hear “Isn’t it pretty to think…” and not be reminded of the final line of that Hemingway novel.

I've never really listened to much Taylor Swift on purpose (for starters, in this house I don't have a choice), but whenever I hear stuff from "Folklore" it clicks that this is the album I've always wanted Taylor to make. Really lovely songs, strong lyrics, really confident in its commitment to a mood minus a lot of the try-hard vibes that sometimes turn me off.