She thrills in small, surprising word choices, like when she writes of early love that “expires” rather than dies, or when she accuses a jealous lover of eyeing a rival “just like he’s your understudy.” “The Last Great American Dynasty,” a portrait of the mid-century widow who lived in the Rhode Island mansion that Swift now owns, is economical and vivid, welding brief anecdotes to big feminist themes. It’s not all Dessner. Swift pioneered the art of the all-consuming album rollout. Now, like every other musician, from superstar to sideperson, she’s had all that yanked out from under her. The hymnal “Epiphany” feels claustrophobic — Enya-like without the flutter. The currents of generational influence flow in mysterious ways. Swift has never been the type to turn blind corners, anyway. And then there’s “Exile,” the most atypical song on the album. And she’s very proud to say that she, too, has had “a marvelous time ruining everything.” Yes, the song takes up the question of her public image again, but using a much richer social tapestry than in any Swift composition before. What is one utterly unaccustomed to idleness to do? Don’t let the negligible duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver distract you, either. Thursday’s announcement could have encouraged those conjectures, given Folklore as a title, not to mention the grayscale cover photo of Swift dwarfed by the vastness of the California woods. And while that revelation sounds like a hard pivot on paper, “Folklore” remains a soft turn on the ears. But when it stifles her, it deserves all the eye rolls it gets. Swift has also said that three of the songs on the album form a trilogy about a teenage love triangle, but she left us to guess which. That’s especially the case during the album’s gemlike mid-section, which kicks off with a restorative gust of reverb called “Mirrorball.” Snowy with tambourine yet warm with sparkling guitar tones, the song swathes Swift as she sighs her most perceptive confession: “All I do is try, try, try.” The song compares the singer to a disco ball, spinning above a dance floor and reflecting the revelers back on themselves. A throaty Bon Iver sings some of his lines just as Swift must have sung them on guide vocal, emphasising every second syllable. Writing of child abuse with this lightness of touch is a feat. The music is calm and simple, and the lyrics are reflective and nostalgic, echoing the time in which it was written, amid the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Swift’s singing as someone else, too—a nurse attending to a faltering patient.

And Swift knows it.

A number of lyrics might be salvos in her feud with the music execs Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, but if that’s the case, she has successfully adapted a real-world contract dispute into flinty, moving noir. It usually starts with her sharing coded hints that her well trained fans understand immediately. It’s a smart promotional strategy-by-proxy for an artist who has done little press in the past five years, and a good way of making your actions seem as if they were written in the stars. “Seven” opens with an ethereally lustrous vocal, with Swift sighing her lyrics, landing the rhymes in unexpected places.

This could have been a truly startling left-field endeavour. With its woodsy black-and-white art, not to mention its title, Folklore advertises itself as an expected pop-star maneuver: the “back to basics” or “stripped down” revelation. Seen that way, perhaps the sonic experimentation on “Folklore” isn’t really about embracing a new genre so much as abandoning any sense of duty to the ones she’s been built upon. Yet even with that turnaround, the 16-song cycle that makes up Swift’s eighth studio album, Folklore, seems to arise from a more concentrated, contemplative mood than ever before. Last modified on Sat 25 Jul 2020 11.40 BST. This summer, she was slated to continue touring internationally around last August’s release, Lover.

On “Folklore,” she still falls back on her most reliable lyrical tactics: fairy-tale analogies, teenage memories and rom-com dialogue that give the formless confusion of love a nifty shape. The coronavirus pandemic has made a mess of the present and clouded any visions of the future, but at least—as artworks of our era keep insisting—the past is there to guide us. It’s a trap that whole genres are built on. "Most of the things I had planned this summer didn't end up happening, but there is something I had planned that DID happen," she wrote on social media. Gone are the trademark valedictory shouts at the end of her songs. But not with the presence of Dessner, a multi-instrumentalist from the veteran indie-rock band the National, as co-writer and producer on a preponderance of the album, aside from five tracks with her long-standing studio partner Jack Antonoff (all at safe removes, from separate studios in different cities). Later she recalls naive young love, “back when we were still changing for the better”, then, on Illicit Affairs, willingly entering into a deceitful relationship with someone who “showed me colours you know I can’t see with anyone else”. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Folklore proves that she can thrive away from the noise: if you interpret “classmates” as pop peers, Swift is no longer competing.

Best of all the Dessner collaborations is Seven, a moving song about a childhood friend (or, possibly, a little more) whose opening notes have a strangeness to them that could have been mined to far, far greater effect.

“I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted.” What conditioning beat out of her as a girl, it beat back in decades later: the tense, slippery Mad Woman traces the self-perpetuating cycle of women being angered by being labelled angry – both massively improve on Lover’s slightly facile gender inequality treatise, The Man, because they’re personal, not projections. Only on “Reputation,” her underloved 2017 hip-hop-inflected album, did she seek to trade on the credibility of an unfamiliar genre. The roving point of view does not mean that Swift has given up her old themes and intrigues. Folklore will endure long beyond it: as fragmented as Swift is across her eighth album – and much as you hope it doesn’t mark the end of her pop ambitions – her emotional acuity has never been more assured. Swift surprised fans by announcing its release just one day in advance — and less than one year after the release of her acclaimed seventh album "Lover." After all, Swift was the stadium-pop prima donna who spit lyrical venom in 2012 over an ex-beau’s predilection for “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” Now here she is in cahoots with not only some prime indie suspects but, through Dessner, a cohort of rock-and-new-music crossover instrumentalists you’d sooner expect to find gigging at New York experimental venue Le Poisson Rouge. That whole pattern in her work began innocently enough when she was a teenage country songwriter pulling her subjects from the pages of her journals, but as she rose in fame—and pop culture became more fixated on social media self-representation and intra-celebrity feuds—Swift’s songs started collapsing in on themselves, pandering to stan-culture voyeurism and too often doing her critics’ work for them. But the demands of pop processing mean her voice has never been heard as it is here: the acceptance that colours it on The 1, a bouncy reminiscence of a lost lover from her “roaring twenties”; how weatherworn yet at peace she sounds as she remembers the good parts of a treacherous relationship on Cardigan, a song as cavernous and shimmering as a rock pool in a cave. But Swift’s powerful songs reach their climaxes with bittersweet orchestrations, rather than blows to the solar plexus or a ringing in the ears. The airy, earthy “Invisible String,” about trusting fate, is the only truly hopeful-sounding song on the album (and the only one about a happy, fulfilled relationship), and it features some of Swift’s most vivid lyrics: “Cold was the steel of my ax to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.”. But the Chicks still sound like the truth. [ Read: Taylor Swift finds her faith on Lover ].

That’s the new nature of pop superstardom anyhow — mass-scale cult figures superserving their most ardent followers by the millions.

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