It just shows her versatility and her power as a songwriter, the sharpness of her writing. “the 1” and “hoax,” the first song and the last song, were the last songs we did. That’s both “peace” and “hoax” to me. To date, the album has reached over 1.2 million in album-equivalent sales. With production from Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, Folklore eschews the upbeat pop of Swift's previous albums for mellow ballads driven by piano and guitar. I think it’s just a breezy, sort of intoxicating feeling. Taylor obviously binds it all together. To me, it’s this Icelandic kind of feel, almost classical. I think that sometimes she would point it out entirely, but I would start to see these patterns. Folklore is the 8 th studio album from Taylor Swift. It created this giant stack of harmony, which is so giant that it was kind of hard to manage, sonically, but it was very beautiful to get lost in. © 2021 Vox Media, LLC. In her documentary released earlier this year, Miss Americana, the intense pace of Swift’s life — and the similarly intense pressures of the scrutiny she finds herself under — was laid bare for all to analyze. Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album, folklore, was recorded “in isolation” during the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t think that way. We thought it was complete, but Taylor then went back into the folder of ideas that I had shared. It’s passing down. It is one of my favorites. She knew that there was something coming because she said, “You know, I love this and I’m hearing something already.” And then she said, “This will change the story,” this beautiful and direct kind of recounting of a relationship in its origin. Natalie Morin. Just send anything, literally anything, it could be the weirdest thing you’ve ever done,” so I sent a folder of stuff I had done that I was really excited about recently. Maybe it’s subconsciously been an influence. Prior to that, she often drew tabloid scrutiny. It’s played on this rubber bridge that my friend put on [the guitar] and it deadens the strings so that it sounds old. Taylor Swift literally plays The Man in new video. When I think of folklore, I think of mythology, fantasy and fairytales. Just playing it on one guitar, it has this emotional locomotion in it, a meditative finger-picking pattern that I really gravitate to. There were different stages of the process. But “Betty” can also be read as vaguely autobiographical, which some fans are keen to do. I enjoy that about her writing. You can’t talk about it. (“A pretty wild ride,” he admits, sounding tired yet happy.) The local police have launched an official investigation. It’s connecting a lot of things. And when she sings “You drew stars around my scars” on the same song, close followers might flash back to the “guitar string scars” of “Lover.”. On her latest album “folklore,” Taylor Swift has captured these associations I … You\'ll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. It’s memorializing love, childhood, and memories. Bob Dylan’s second LP, released in 1963, features some of his most stripped-down acoustic folk songs, with plenty of harmonica. It’s clear that “the 1” is not written from her perspective. But then we kept going, and more and more songs happened. In quarantine, any album release finds new resonance. Swift didn’t bother with the extensive teasing release of past albums; she announced her work on Thursday, rolled it out on Friday and then will sit back over the weekend and enjoy the warm response. She was married to the heir of Standard Oil fortune, married into the Harkness family, and they bought this house in Rhode Island up on a cliff. There’s a reality, the gravity or an understanding of the human condition. Its heart is folk storytelling. It was a very organic process where [meaning] wasn’t something that we really discussed. But there’s something else incredibly soothing and comforting about this song. I think in a way, she didn’t realize she was writing for this album or a future something. I wrote that after we’d been working for a while. For Taylor Swift, it means writing and recording an entire album in just a few months and executing an out-of-nowhere record release, complete with cardigans. Despite her start as a Nashville darling in the country scene, Swift has always been a musical chameleon. I don’t think Jack … well, Jack might, but when I say the Cardigans or Mazzy Star, those aren’t Jack’s words about “mirrorball,” it’s just what calls to mind for me. It’s like an archipelago, and each song is an island, but it’s all related. When Swift chose to give no interviews around Folklore’s release, her fans were left to fill in the gaps, with many of them digging deep to uncover the stories that might have inspired each track. And she has never sounded better. It didn’t feel like getting a guest star or whatever. There are a few other little bits, but basically that was one of the very last things we did. We didn’t talk too much about it [laughs]. But over the years, the songstress has transformed herself in many ways. Its vision is a grey-blue soundscape: an autumnal album dropped on us in the heat of summer, the first full project of this kind from Swift, inhabiting a truly melancholy space she’s mainly hinted at in past ballads. We actually didn’t have a moodboard for the album at all. It just kind of would happen where she would dive back into the folder and find other things that were inspiring. 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