Sorta Talking about Taylor Swift's folklore

Taylor Swift, from what I have observed, has become a punchline. Merely saying "Taylor Swift" in conversation causes people to groan and eyes to roll. Everyone is somewhat aware of the fanaticism she can engender via her "Swifties", but from my own communications no one actually knows many of them. She is ubiquitous, and yet no one is sure what is the cause behind that popularity.

As a result, that same overused punchline has made a good number of people into Taylor Swift haters; I know more haters than fans, honestly. Anthony Fantano, of the theneedledrop, probably the most popular YouTube music reviewer, has a weird hate boner for her that makes me uncomfortable. To a certain extent I get it: Taylor is the - THE - biggest musician on the planet, I'm pretty sure. If we're talking about pop, the smartest thing Beyoncé did was to recede into private life, raise her kids, and release really lovingly-made albums every three years or so. Taylor, by the eye-popping numbers of her tours and her absurd cadence of album releases, continues to make headlines, and, oh, there's the obsession a views-hungry media has for a charming white girl. Everyone is oversaturated with Taylor Swift. I get that. No one wants to talk about her anymore, no one knows why we still need to talk about her, and yet we continue to talk about her.

Then there's the fact that Taylor is just kinda weird. I mean, should we talk about "Actually Romantic"? Even if it isn't about Charli XCX, it's still a really petty track that is almost entirely removed from the concept of art and is essentially a rant about some poor person published on the most visible platform in music. And, to be fair, Charli is also a weird person. Both women can be super weird and they can not click with one another because they're both super weird and that's okay because people are flawed. But this demonstrates my point: Taylor, throughout her career, has little obsessions, to the point she will not back down, she will not apologize, and she will burn any bridge on her quest for vengeance.

So how does someone like this, someone who is honestly kinda two-faced and paranoid and defensive and detached, become the greatest American musician of this century?

If you think about it, this question is ridiculous and is strangely asked in reversed order. Firstly, her being a great musician begs no question; she is. Secondly, the true question is: how do fans relate to the greatest American musician? The answer is a loop back to the beginning of this essay: she is deeply flawed and, in spite of her flaws, she does not back down. Her reclaiming her masters is an amazing victory, regardless of her fame and wealth.

People like her because Taylor sings, as in "Style", clunky lines like

You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye, and I got that red lip classic thing that you like,

and she didn't think, "Maybe 'James Dean daydream' is too many syllables and overuse of alliteration."

People like her kinda-fake rap in "Cruel Summer". People like the pettinesses of "reputation" (2017), "Midnights" (2022) and "Life of a Showgirl" (2025) (well, maybe they don't like the latter all that much). People like her mangled metaphor in "Tortured Poets Department":

I scratch your head, you fall asleep like a tattooed golden retriever

I understand the accusations that she's "fake" or "cold". I think Taylor's seeming detachment is just part of her personality. There are "active" people, and there are "reactive" people; I think she's the type of person who's always figuring out what's going on, and I know lots of people who are like this. There's a humanity and a selfishness running underneath all of her music; sure, she calculates and schemes as to which songs will be radio-friendly and she's always trying to be one step ahead of her fellow compatriots / foes in pop, but she strikes me as the first person who has to approve of an idea before work begins. There is no autopilot for Taylor Swift (except for maybe, again, "Life of a Showgirl").

Apologies for spending so much time in this essay on bizarre, rampant speculations on a person's life and psychology. This is all preamble to say: I am aware of all this, and I have thought and reasoned to myself all this, and "folklore" (2020) is still the strangest goddamn album ever, from the most public woman on the planet.

I have not heard anything like "folklore". It's not that it's in a genre of itself, and it's not that Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff comprise the rarest minds in music (though I quite like The National). It's not that the story and perspective of "folklore" are unusual.

"folklore" has 16 tracks; I'm not going to talk about all of them. I did not think now was the right time for a deep dive into the album anyway. The track that convinced me - as in, the track that began my rambling and did not end the rambling until I started jotting it down (and sharing it with you, my (poor) reader) - was "this is me trying", where the singer sings,

I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere, fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here, pouring out my heart to a stranger but I didn't pour the whiskey -

which has shades of the lyrics in "Cruel Summer":

I'm drunk in the back of the car, and I'm crying like a baby coming home from the bar,

but "Cruel Summer" has a different perspective than "this is me trying". Whenever I say "perspective", I am really talking about the "lens" of the singer / narrator, as in, what distance and intimacy the words are being spoken in. Because fiction isn't real. You can't confuse what a singer sings as what the singer thinks. Even if a singer literally puts their thoughts on a page, that's the thoughts they're willing to reveal to the audience. There will always be an inauthenticity to lyrics, but that does not mean we cannot empathize with the words or the perspective being communicated, because words alone have power.

In "Cruel Summer", is it Taylor singing, or is it a persona? If it's a persona, who is this persona? There are so many cinematic details in "Cruel Summer" that I'm quite sure it's not Taylor, but it's certainly someone Taylor would empathize with.

Who is Taylor singing about in "this is me trying"? Who is singing "I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting"? Who is singing "Pulled the car off the road to the lookout, / could've followed my fears all the way down"?

I don't fucking know.

To reiterate, this is music made by the most public woman in the world.

Again, I apologize for bringing up all these gripes about Taylor Swift; it makes me uncomfortable to talk about, honestly. To me, there's the music and only the music. And yet it feels like it's impossible to look at how special, how incredible, and how rare "folklore" is without understanding the facts of the person singing it. Lyrics of this intensity aren't being sung by Kacey Musgraves or Adele, both of whom have made material skirting around these themes; this is music made by the most radio-friendly artist ever made in America ever. This is very vulnerable music made by someone who has ironically described herself as a showgirl. And there's almost no cipher to it; I have no idea where the music came from.

I talked a bit about Taylor's personality because that seems like a crucial piece of the puzzle. You can name any slate of pop musicians in the last decade: Rihanna, Arianna Grande, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, most of their music, the lens is not far from them. When Rihanna sings about yellow diamonds in the light, that may be a grandiose, heightened version of Rihanna, but that's basically still Rihanna. In fact, most songwriters, people who aren't used to mainstream success, write in this lens; for example, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee. Even Phoebe Bridgers, whom Taylor vampirically latched onto for a time, writes songs in this lens. No one adjacent to Swift writes in any other lens. If an artist does sing about another person, they usually sing it in third-person, as in, they're observing what another person is doing rather than really inhabiting what that person is doing.

Something about the Pandemic and the cessation of her forever tour changed Taylor. She successfully detached and wrote these little character vignettes that may or may not be about her, and she knew the exact distance to frame these stories.

Like, how did she think of the lyric "Fell behind my classmates and I ended up here"? Did this happen to her? Why did she give this character this specific trait? And how do you look at the lyrics "Pulled the car off the road to the lookout, / could've followed my fears all the way down" and not think, "These are lines by someone who was suicidal at one point in time?" Again, why is the world's most prolific musician admitting this - or is she?

And, to be clear, these are incredible lyrics. "Could've followed my fears all the way down" is an excellent metaphor for despair. But the lyrics being great is not a surprise, this has always been the sharpest weapon in Taylor's arsenal. Yes, "Love Story" is annoying as all hell, BUT, it's a well-told story. Like, if you, for one very brief moment, put yourself in the mind of a teenaged girl, you get it, all the emotions the song wants to evoke are given a rational explanation by the song. I personally love the storytelling of "Cruel Summer", which I think is one of the great-great pop songs of all time. Her ability to develop stories and characters is not just a skill she honed and developed throughout her career, it's her natural talent, fueled by her personality; only, she never made them feel as real and as urgent as she did in "folklore".

If I have to make a final point, the lyrics "I didn't know if you'd care if I came back - / I have a lot of regrets about that" were written by one person. You just know this by staring at them. As I had said earlier, Taylor Swift is a vindictive, angry, and defensive person; she wrote this and she felt this and something in her situation evoked this in her. And yet the great mystery of the album is, how much of the album is about her and how much of the album is her invented fantasy?

Taylor's ability to create a character and setting and then express that character's, how should I say, what-ness, the significance of their existence, in words that lead the audience to see and relate to their situation in all vividness, can be described in one word: Art. It's Art. You know those paintings you see in museums, like the idlers in Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon"? Swift accomplishes the same effect as those paintings. She is an artist. Someone who is somewhat full of herself (see: "Tortured Poets Department" (thought I was going to say "Showgirl", didn't ya?)), but an artist all the same. It's an artistic choice that she decides not to rhyme "stranger" and "whiskey", opting to tell the story in full instead; it's her choice that the lines of the verses don't match in meter, almost as if the story is coming out of her without her control.

It's her choice too, in "mad woman", when she develops the chorus,

Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy; what about that?

rhyming "crazy" with ... "crazy". And, without shame, she then follows with,

and when you say I seem angry, I get more angry.

But that is an artistic choice, for she follows up later with "what a shame she went mad". "folklore" is an album made without shame. It's not about shamelessness, but it's about preventing shame from forcing you to be dishonest. There's an indignation to her singing, "And you poked that bear until the claws came out", and "Do you see my face in the neighbor's lawn? / Does she smile? / or does she mouth, Fuck you forever?", but what's important is that it's not a performative indignation, where she expects you the audience to cheer her on. She's just simply singing in the role of someone who has been beaten into her silence.

Alright. Are we going to talk about "my tears ricochet" or "august"?

How about...no. Detachment is also a trait critics need to practice, seeing the work in new eyes, putting it in a light that the work deserves, because it asks to live unto eternity. I'm a little too heated to get into the rest of the album, and I don't think it's a good idea to spend the next fifty billion hours talking about "my tears ricochet" or "the last great american dynasty".

I just wanted to talk about the album and ... how I, unironically, think it's one of the most underrated albums I've ever heard, from one of the most over/underrated artists ever. Really, I was motivated to write this after getting way too excited for my own good listening to "this is me trying" and "mad woman".

The fourteenth track of "folklore" is "betty", which is another incomprehensible song of "Why did Taylor write this?" It tells the story of a kid right in the middle of high school regretting his breaking the titular Betty's heart. It is such an evocative, emotional song, but the most telling thing about the song is what it reveals about Taylor's thinking. The protagonist, James, is essentially seduced by another girl in the summer, but he somehow spends that same summer in the arms of this girl thinking about Betty. This strikes me as irrational, being with another girl and yet somehow still doggedly devoted to Betty, and yet ... in Taylor's hands, it makes sense. The songs of "folklore" detail confusion, regret and self-loathing, and somewhere in this fog is innocence. "folklore" is a catalog of self-destructive behaviors and beliefs but Taylor consistently paints these traits as coming from the protagonists' naivete, as from a desperation to love, as from a desperation to belong, as from a desperation to live. And that describes "folklore" perfectly: no matter how miserable or hateful Taylor's characters are, there is, at their bottom, a humanity wanting to push up. And, not to psychoanalyze Taylor's own romances all too much, I think she longed (at the time of the writing of "folklore") to find someone as innocent as her, to take her out of her loneliness. (I know, I know, this is what she thinks, and for the sake of art what she thinks, for this essay at least, is the truth.)

This is my album of 2020. I can't imagine it ever being defeated. I think it's funny I have to choose between "folklore" and Fiona Apple's "Fetch the Bolt Cutters", because both writers achieve very different things in their songwriting. You could argue Apple's songwriting is journalistic; there's not much of a barrier between her thoughts and her verses. But so much of Apple's work goes behind finding the perfect artistic vessel for her thoughts, as putting female envy and loathing into the metaphor of a "Relay" or setting her emotional kinship with "Shameika" to a sonic storm. Taylor paints scenes; "folklore" has some of the greatest character portraits I've ever seen in music.

And yet both artists are, in my eyes, the models for songwriters. "folklore", "Fetch the Bolt Cutters", and "Idler Wheel" are poetry. These are writers who know the beauty of a line, understand that a line can convey an entire universe, and work effortlessly to cut - cut - cut until the line is perfect.

My other motivation for this essay is, I'm always annoyed by the discourse around Taylor Swift. I understand being annoyed by her celebrity (I know a person in advertising who dreads talking about her), but I can't stand any shade on her artistry. Telling me Taylor Swift is not a good artist is like telling Galileo the sun revolves around the Earth. I have the receipts, motherfucker.

I compare Taylor to Beyoncé frequently - as I did earlier in this essay - because both are women who are very famous and have made some of the greatest music I've ever heard; the only difference between Taylor and Bey is that, for whatever reason, Taylor frankly hasn't received her critical due. When Beyoncé's self-titled (2013) came out, she was seen, correctly, as forever changing the landscape of pop and furthermore creating a great album on the merits of its lyrics. When Beyoncé, again, changed the landscape of music via "Lemonade" (2016), she also received her dues. I don't see Taylor getting her dues for "folklore", but, to be fair to music critics, Beyoncé soars, she is not ignorable; Taylor mulls, "folklore" is depressing, and "folklore" is the document of a petty person (and these are largely the reasons why Taylor's subsequent albums have been largely-misses). When looked at in this light, Taylor, if we ignore her billions, is more comparable to Bowie or Dylan, someone who is prolific, tinkers around a bit, fails quite a lot, has awful decades, takes different swings at stardom (to reiterate, of them, Taylor is the one who entered the fucking stratosphere, but Dylan won the Nobel, so your pick), is strongest lyrically, and waiting for a future generation of critics to forgive their bad music and polish endlessly their good-great-perfect music.

I am an old man. I used to get upset by a person's celebrity, confusing it with their actual merit. I'm still a crabby curmudgeon, but (I think) I'm better at separating the two. Even then, I can look at Taylor Swift and say, "Yeah, she deserves to be the world's most famous musician", though she, hilariously, is a very awkward person for that role. Again: Taylor is just generally detached as part of her personality. She's not a witty interviewee and she's not very funny. But, again, the issue is circular: people like her because she's neither of those things. She's simply an incredible artist. While being a mess of a human being. Which we all are, messes of human beings, that is. I don't understand why we aren't embracing her flaws and her humanity and choosing, instead, to criticize them. Until she enters her "Hitler had a few good ideas" phase or whatever.

By the way, I still don't see myself as a Swiftie.