Review Summary: Taylor Swift is definitely trying.
Indie folk seems to be the right kind of genre to define the state of most North American lives right now. Put on Sufjan Steven’s Michigan or Illinois and they seem to capture the sadness of our isolation and disparity during these “unprecedented” times with the COVID19 pandemic - even though both albums were released years ago. The best indie folk has that airy aesthetic with minimal instruments and poignant but well-structured songwriting, allowing the thoughts of our collective experience to show through. Taylor Swift seems to know that and so her latest release, folklore, is an indie folk album, with all of its song titles in lower case, likely for the sake of aesthetic. This is how she interpreted the musical zeitgeist of North America and her experience in quarantine as one of the staples of music in our current time period. While the choice in genre seems to be a good decision, the question becomes: is folklore the groundbreaking masterpiece we want or need from America’s sweetheart? Yes, but only for Taylor Swift in particular - given her prior work. As far as Indie folk records about being a human in a specific time and place, in this case COVID stricken American, this one is hardly outstanding.
Let’s first get into specifics what this album does right. When a musician pares back the instrumentation, what must stand out are the vocals, song structure, and lyricism. Taylor Swift has done this just fine for many of her tracks. Her voice here isn’t really different from prior releases, but it sounds smoother against the backdrop of a crisp piano and guitar. It really is interesting how a simple change in genre can change how a voice sounds. The real gem in folklore though is the lyrics, which are even more appreciated if someone has earnestly heard a Taylor Swift record before. To illustrate, the song that stands out the most in this vein is “the last great american dynasty”, where she paints this picture of a woman who lived in her house before her and had this lifestyle of highs and lows. It pretty much exemplifies the American elite in all its glory. Her subject is Rebekah, a woman who married rich and lived in a luxurious house on the coast of California. When her husband passed away, Rebekah went wild. She “flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city / Filled the pool with champagne and swam with big names.” Lines like this really show that Rebekah lived extravagantly in this house. It’s truly a snapshot of someone’s life.
Taylor does not sing about her boyfriend staring at her in a dress like she did on 1989. Instead, she tells a story about someone else who she never met. We get similar songs taken from alternate perspectives in “betty”, a song taken from the viewpoint of a man who cheated on a girl and deeply regrets it, and “epiphany” which is about a war veteran suffering from PTSD. For someone who has sung a lot about her personal relationships and her clout much too often, this is refreshing. Folklore is not an exclusive album with this kind of songwriting, however. A lot of songs are still about her romantic relationships. Her collaboration with Bon Iver, “exile”, is a song about a relationship meeting its end. Though we have seen this subject matter from Taylor before, lines such as “you were my crown, now I’m in exile, seein’ you out / I think I’ve seen this film before / So I’m leaving out the side door” from folklore are much more mature than “we are never ever ever getting back together” from 2012’s Red. These are easily the showpieces of her album, indicating her capacity for growth as a musical artist and songwriter.
Still, let’s not completely commend her. Better songwriters have taken the mantle. After all, how much credit can we give someone who wrote a lyric like “or does she mouth, "*** you forever?” and made it sound like she was saying “Or does she mouth*** you forever?” It certainly grabs the attention of the listener, but not in a pleasant way. This mistake is a hindrance to immersion. The experience is similar to watching a movie and noticing a very jarring mistake in an edit. Now there’s the awareness that the movie is a fabrication that was bought for a while by the audience.
Even with clear growth in her songwriting and subject matter, structure-wise each song is still so obstinately basic and rudimentary and that does her no favors. Too many verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus songs - with few exceptions. If she was really going to experiment with a new genre for her quarantine-inspired music, she should go the full route and try out alternative song structures to make each song differ from one another. Or at the very least, she could have cut down on the song volume. As a result, we have a piecemeal of songs that run together, and sound similar -albeit with different lyrics and themes. This results in a sloggy listening experience and takes away from what worked well. The biggest criticism that minimalist albums like folklore receive is that they bore the audience with homogeneity, especially if the run time is excessive. All three elements of masterful poetry, variation in song structure and smooth vocals need to deliver otherwise the standard of the whole piece is lowered. This is because without varied instrumentation, there’s no other way indie folk albums maintain a listener’s focus even if they are poetic and insightful.
In conclusion, folklore had potential. It could have been an indie folk work of art that would have given us the timestamp we need, however it was undercut by its homogeneity combined with the album length. It dulls the impact of her songwriting. Taylor has improved her lyricism. However, without varying song structure alongside good lyricism, indie folk does little to captivate an audience even if it’s the right genre for someone’s subject matter in their songwriting. It needs structural variation to sound different from one song to the next. I guess that illustrates people’s current experience now that a lot of us have been laid off and are stuck at home with the days running together, but people have had enough of that already without listening to folklore.
