raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimised by taylor swift
i'm sorry for who i am

hello all and congratulations on escaping my opinions ™ for the last three months! unfortunately taylor swift came to my house five weeks ago and personally murdered me, buried me in the jewels i bought her, then resurrected me, so i’m back. (cf. that tweet that was like, ‘not so much “back on my bullshit” as “have built a home on my bullshit where i live year round”’)
so, hi. the thing is, the thing is, is that this album is so taylor, so obsessed with all the things she is always obsessed with – including reinvention and newness and not being the person you were 5 years / months / minutes ago. and it’s GOOD!!! which is always a fear with a new taylor album – there’s always that sense of like, ooh, this was a good concept but you kind of fucked the execution, babe; the album would be great if you’d just cut 3 tracks; this pop song is a banger but u probably should stop being weird about gay people and u definitely shouldn’t dye ur hair the colours of the bi pride flag for the video sweetie! (and honestly, i relate – i too am plagued with conflicting visions for all my creative endeavours and attempt to combine all of them into one thing and it always ends up not as good as if i had just, like, calmed down. cf. this newsletter LOL sorry bout it.)
i have always had an unexplainable affinity for taylor, even when she is being terrible – i have always felt thar her albums come along exactly when i need them, that my life maps onto her music, or vice versa. folklore might be the exception to this rule, as it’s by and large a breakup album – but, just because the break-up element does not (touch wood) apply, the rest of the subject matter is, like, spookily relevant. the album is characterised by some of taylor’s classic preoccupations – (mis)communication, youth, the colour blue, the derridean trace – but all dealt with in a more mature way than we’ve seen from her before, at least on this scale. and there’s a particular focus (which was hinted at on Lover, but really comes into its own on folklore) on taylor’s own flaws – sure, it’s an album about made-up people, okay, i believe u tay, i just think it’s funny that their neuroses are identical to yours!
honestly, though, i’m proud of her – she’s stepping out of her comfort zone a lot on this album (no 6 months of cryptic instagram teasers! society has moved past the need for 6 months of cryptic instagram teasers!) and it’s paid the fuck off. 1989 wishes it was as ~sonically cohesive as folklore. but – mercifully – even while she’s doing something new, she’s still the same old taylor, still working her little white socks off trying to surprise people at every turn.
to begin with, let’s talk about the album as a whole, its place in her oeuvre – sorry that i insist on using oeuvre to talk about taylor swift, but i’m also not sorry, bc i think her work is sophisticated and complicated and deserves to be discussed in sophisticated complicated ways (she says, mere minutes after announcing “time to drink precisely one (1) 89p tinned cocktail from lidl and sit on the balcony and attack all my subscribers in their own homes”). anyway. this album!!! i think it continues all of her work up to now in a lovely way, bringing disparate threads from the early country stuff and the more recent … stuff together – but i think it particularly resonates with 1989 and reputation, and i find that interesting. 1989 was the last Real Taylor Album, as in the last album before she got ~cancelled, and i think you can feel that wound in reputation and Lover – contrary to what some people on the internet theorise, i don’t think Lover is the album we would have got after 1989 if all had gone according to plan. i think Lover is a very post-reputation album, both in its subject matter and its sonic messiness; and i think folklore goes a long way to heal the wound that reputation marked. we’re not exactly back where we left off – folklore couldn’t exist without reputation either – but we’re somewhere near there, for the first time in six years.
(i will get more into comparisons with reputation specifically later, so hold your horses, but for now i’m still trying to be as big-picture about this as i can) in essence, folklore does what i was hoping taylor would do after 1989 – she proved, with that single album, that she could do pop, and do it better than anyone else on her level at the time. and although i liked it – 1989 is an incredible album and i hope my old therapist remembers everything i told her about it – i wanted her to do something else next, something quieter, something more personal than the glossily distant “How You Get the Girl”, something where her lyricism could shine, something that sounded like “Clean” and her cover of “Riptide” had a sad indie baby. and then she made reputation, and i was like, uh, i guess. and then Lover. and then, finally! folklore, which is so much more in her vocal range, which allows her to do new things and collaborate with different artists and also just put herself fully into her music without worrying about competing with katy perry, or feuding with the wests, or showing that she can do 15 different things at once with her hands tied behind her back while pretending she doesn’t even care and actually she’s over it and she never even thinks about you any more, okay, and she even wrote a song about how she doesn’t even think about you or care so that proves she’s over it, see.
folklore is interesting to me because it seems so Different, so out-there, so not-taylor to drop an album with no warning; the whole thing was made in three months, in secret, and that’s so off-brand for the queen of the cryptic-instagram-tease. but it’s not, not really. it’s kind of an in-joke at this point among her fans that taylor’s first singles are always shit – from “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (Red) via “Shake It Off” (1989), “Look What You Made Me Do” (reputation), through to the most recent “ME!” (Lover), they have all been … terrible, basically. and also, more importantly, really unrepresentative of each album. it’s like she wants people to underestimate her, the singles a kind of bait-and-switch that fool you into thinking Red will be a vacuous pop album or that reputation will be all about revenge. usually it’s the second or third single that rewards those of us who’ve stuck it out – last year it was “The Archer”, still one of the best tracks on Lover; from 1989 it was the impeccable “Out of the Woods”; etc. so the fact that that whole promotion cycle, the frantic scramble from critics and consumers to say “ooh she’s lost her edge hasn’t she”/“real fans know the first single is always bad”, etc etc, has been skipped is surprising. moreover, there aren’t any songs on the album that seem like they should be singles – none of them stands out in the way that many of the singles do on the old albums (if you live in south london u might be able to hear me screaming “sonically cohesive” from my balcony right now). (also worth noting that we should have seen this coming, given that “Christmas Tree Farm” and “Only The Young” were both written quickly and released without fanfare – a surprise album really shouldn’t have surprised any of us.)
also, speaking of track listing – there’s no title track. this is not uncharted territory for tay – her first album was self-titled, and there’s no track called “Taylor Swift” (although i would fucking love for her to do that some day, taylor if ur reading this u can have that one for free). aside from the debut though, the only other albums that don’t have title tracks are – can you guess? – 1989 and reputation. hrm. interesting. so – if we discount Taylor Swift, which i’m going to because i love it but it’s barely an album it’s just a collection of recordings of fetus taylor pretending she has a nashville accent – so, we’re left with these three title track-less albums. they’re the three albums that can reasonably be described as concept albums (i feel like taylor tried to argue that Lover was a concept album but it’s not, okay, also it should be 5 songs shorter than it is okay love u tay bye again). 1989 marked the point when she stopped writing so overtly about her own life – i mean, you don’t need to have more than 2 brain cells to rub together to figure out who “Style” is about, but it’s not the excoriating diaristic stuff of “Dear John” or “All Too Well” – and reputation was, obviously, the album on which she addressed her reputation (except she didn’t, because it’s secretly an album full of love songs, and all the reputation stuff is a fake-out). so it’s interesting that folklore is ranked with these two albums which both heralded a big change in her sound, and subject matter. you might think i’m reading too much into this but i’m in £70,000 of student debt so i’m just trying to get my money’s worth from those sweet sweet incredibly expensive critical thinking skills, baby. i also do think it’s interesting that folklore doesn’t have a title track, when it easily could – “seven” could have been called “folklore” and no-one would have batted an eye about it. so why isn’t it? what’s her game? (if you’re new to the world of taylor swift, i need you to know: she always has a game.)
the first line of folklore, literally the first line, announces that what we’re dealing with here is yet another New Taylor ™ – “i’m doing good, i’m on some new shit” – but this protestation feels maybe a little hollow – a little reminiscent of “I forgot that you existed”, the first track on Lover, which BY VIRTUE OF EXISTING AT ALL PROVES THAT SHE DIDN’T FORGET FOR VERY LONG, and which also proves that the New Taylor ™ of the reputation era isn’t dead, she’s just evolved from a snake into [checks notes] some butterflies, i guess? okay. anyway, the point is – the Old Taylor is never really dead, and the New Taylor is never really new. taylor, like the best of us (ahem) is obsessed with proving that she’s grown and changed and got better and moved on etc etc, but in being desperate about proving that all she does is show how much she’s still the same. line #3 of folklore starts off absolutely classic taylor: “i thought i saw you at the bus stop” – she’s always looking for ghosts everywhere she turns (“and i see your face in every crowd” / “you’ve got your demons and darling they all look like me”). interestingly, though, she undercuts this immediately: the full line is “i thought i saw you at the bus stop / i didn’t though.” the old taylor, the one who looks for the people she’s lost, isn’t going anywhere, but this is our first hint that she’s maybe not as interested on dwelling on those losses as she once was.
folklore, in large part, is about growth; and not only the saccharine growth of “Fifteen”, the ability to look back at your past self and smile and tell her, “in your life you’ll do things / greater than dating the boy on the football team” – but the horrible parts of growth, the part where you can identify the ways in which you fall short but you can’t yet fix them. we got a bit of this on Lover, in campy pop song “ME!” (“i know that i went psycho on the phone / i never leave well enough alone”) and in a more serious way in “The Archer” (“who could ever leave me darling / but who could stay”) but folklore feels like it really goes all in on tay’s issues. she has always been interested in growth, in nostalgia and looking back at her life, and looking forward to the time when she will look back (“one day, we will be remembered”). she’s also really interested in Winning, in Proving A Point – in so many of these songs there’s an almost desperate insistence that she’s grown, she’s better, that now that she’s at the big old age of eighteen(!) she can look bad fondly on her fifteen-year-old folly – “when you’re young you just run but you come back to what you need”, twenty-four-year-old taylor sings on 1989’s “This Love”, as though she’s so much older and wiser and has finally got it all figured out. on folklore though, there’s a sense that we’re very much still in the thick of it; she’s thirty now, older than she’s ever been (obviously, because that’s how time works, but ygm) but she’s no longer pretending to be wise; she’s figured it out enough to know that she fucks up, but not enough to stop, and she’s really reckoning with that for the first time.
folklore takes as its starting point the admission she made on “The Archer”: “I never grew up, it’s getting so old.”as an album it’s very interested in not-having-grown-up yet, in childhood and adolescence, in recklessness. it’s only natural, then, that Peter Pan makes an appearance on this album. Peter Pan is obviously about perpetual youth, but specifically it’s about choosing youth over growing up, again and again, at least for peter. in the last 4 weeks i have had Many conversations about this line – i’m obsessed with it, in large part because when i was growing up i certainly (over-)identified with wendy, because i was a Certain Type of girl, and i imagine taylor did and was too; so the fact that the ending of the story is framed from peter’s perspective, not wendy’s, that peter’s loss is foregrounded, fascinates me. i know that when i was younger i was in an awful hurry to grow up, and taylor was too – so many of her early music videos (notably “White Horse” and “Mine”) show taylor as an Adult ™ who lives in her own house, who goes grocery shopping with her boyfriend – in “Mine” she even gets married and has kids, it’s wild, that came out when she was twenty years old!!! and in “Ours” she pretends she has an office job!!!!! babe you missed your high school graduation because you were on tour, who do you think you’re fooling. but i think this is significant, that early-career taylor was so interested in playing adulthood – and thirty-year-old taylor is finally having to reckon with this, with her youthful attempts to fast-forward through life, with what that means for her now. “Mine” is particularly resonant in “cardigan” – it’s such a classic old taylor song, both in terms of subject matter (dramatic, true love) and construction (the bridge where the love interest speaks back to her in her own words!) – and we return to that subject matter in “cardigan”, specifically the image of the neglectful father: “made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” / “leaving like a father.” wendy, too, is a careless man’s careful daughter, but on folklore taylor seems much more interested in the other side of that story – in what it means to leave.
although “cardigan” is not from the POV of james, the person who leaves, it still works hard to understand them: “I knew you”, the refrain goes, the speaker listing their insights into james’ psyche (not to mention that we do get “betty” later on the album, a song from james’s POV). the loss in “cardigan” isn’t betty’s – she seems to have pretty much made her peace with it. and, although i’ve never read it this way before, it’s certainly possible to read the loss at the end of Peter Pan not as wendy’s – she, after all, grows up, has her own life and her own children – but as peter’s: because wendy goes where he can never follow, because he cannot be trusted even to remember her, because her growing up is not only her leaving him behind but is a betrayal of him, specifically, of their time together and his values. a lot of taylor’s early work was about being a victim, the girl who is left behind (altho honourable mention to “Back to December” – but even then, she is the victim of her own mistakes, wallowing in her pain) – Lover and folklore are both much more about grappling honestly with her flaws, the ways in which she is something like peter – heartless, forgetful, leaving people behind and unable to grow up or move on. peter’s choice to never grow up is also a choice to never be rooted, to remain in a constant state of flux – new companions, new adventures – but this comes with a lack of stability, with a child’s deeply felt emotional distress and no skills to deal with it; wendy, at least, has put away childish things in exchange for adult life and love. it feels like now is a time when taylor is coming to terms with her own heartless behaviour: she is not the good girl ever waiting for someone to come back to her – instead, she is the one who runs away from what she needs.
and not only what she needs – what she knows is good for her. one of my notes from my first listen to “cardigan” was “she’s a fucking know-it-all and she’s valid” – she’s so obsessed with proving that she isn’t stupid, that she knows what’s good for her and voluntarily renounces it, and this is why the victim schtick never really worked for her – so many of her songs are about foreknowledge, about seeing the end as it begins, about knowing exactly where it leads, about intentionally embarking on something that might go down in flames, then getting burned. on folklore, youth and knowledge are twin themes: “when you are young they assume you know nothing” (a line which recalls 1989’s “when you’re young you just run”). i think it’s interesting that this line comes so early in the album – on my first listen i made a note of it, thinking about the faceless “they” who haunt so many of taylor’s songs (“we keep quiet cause we’re dead if they knew” / “I can hear them whisper as we pass by” / “they say she’s gone too far this time” / “that’s what people say”). taylor has always been reckoning with how other people see her, external expectations, and the construction of this line implies that “they” are wrong – they assume, perhaps because of your youth, that you know nothing; but, as the first line of the chorus repeatedly asserts, “I knew you” – on first listen we don’t necessarily know if the speaker is right that “you’d come back to me”, but once we’ve made our way through the album and listened to “betty”, we know they were: “I knew [...] you'd be standin' in my front porch light / and I knew you'd come back to me” / “I showed up at your party / will you have me, will you love me / will you kiss me on the porch[?]” the moment towards the end of “cardigan”, when the speaker turns round and looks us dead in the eye and asserts, “i knew everything when i was young”, is so typically taylor – insisting that she’s not stupid, that she might have done stupid reckless things but she always knew they were stupid and reckless, that she’s smarter than everyone gives her credit for and always has been. ditto “the 1”: “in my defence i have none” is not an attempt to defend oneself, it’s not “i didn’t know this would happen”, it’s “i knew and i didn’t care.”
one of the things that really struck me about this album is the focus on the damage we do to other people – not only by being reckless, although there’s definitely a lot of that, but by being too much, by not being able to control ourselves, by being heartless (very Peter Pan). it’s not only about fucking up because you don’t care enough, cheating on your girlfriend because a hot girl pulled up next to you and told you to get in her car – it’s about fucking up even though you care so much, even though you try so hard. it’s an album, often, about trying, which is what makes the failure all the harder to take. obviously, because of who i am as a person, “mirrorball” shot to the top of my list the first time i heard it and i imagine will stay there forever – a song about constantly performing for others, not having a sense of who you really are, desperately working to get them to stay interested? may as well have called it “fuck you nicola watkinson” and have done with it. taylor has always been preoccupied with Eyes and Looking At Each Other (“you said the way my blue eyes shined” / “drew looks at me” / “all eyes on me” (in both “Speak Now” and “So It Goes…”) / “my wide-eyed gaze” / “your eyes look like coming home” / “when the sun came up i was looking at you / when the sun came up you were looking at me” / “angels roll their eyes” AND THAT WAS JUST OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD) – she has always sung about this, but on “mirrorball” she makes her Desire To Be Perceived explicit:
I'm still on that tightrope
I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me
And I'm still a believer, but I don't know why
I've never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try
I'm still on that trapeze
I'm still trying everything to keep you looking at me
the image of the mirror does a lot of work here – not only is she reflecting her lover back at himself (absolutely classic derridean behaviour) but there’s a sense that she herself is insubstantial – only a reflective surface, only existing as long as she is interacting with someone else, as long as she is Useful. my partner also pointed out the shift in the bridge from the tightrope to the trapeze – the way she moves from one act to another, literally trying everything to get attention; the shift from “laughing” to “looking”, that she just wants Attention in whatever form it takes.
ditto “this is me trying”, which is again all about frustration, about working so hard and not getting anywhere, the gap between your intentions and reality. both “mirrorball” and “this is me trying” are autistic anthems, chronicling that sense of trying so hard and not being heard even when you think you’re being so clear (also miscellaneous autism/adhd moods e.g. “I’ve been having a hard time adjusting” / “i can change everything about me to fit in” / “they told me all of my cages were mental” etc etc). miscommunication has always been a big taylor theme, but on this album it’s so, so clear and often heartbreaking; almost every song is a record of a failure to connect, and it’s often taylor’s (or “the speaker’s”, i guess) fault – there’s a huge thread of overreaction running through the album, a profound awareness of the ways in which taylor is too much (“my words shoot to kill when i’m mad” / “my cannons all firing at your yacht” / “my tears ricochet”). in “seven”, she looks back at her childhood in pennsylvania – “please picture me in the weeds / before i learned civility / i used to scream ferociously / any time i wanted.” she might have “learned civility”, but it’s very apparent on folklore that her childish screams have been subsumed into her adult behaviour, into her long-standing desires for attention and catharsis, and that this attempt to communicate without articulation persists.
even when it’s not obviously taylor’s fault that a relationship is breaking down, there’s still a sense of a failure to communicate well on her part: in the bridge of “exile”, she echoes bon iver’s words back to him:
I never learned to read your mind (Never learned to read my mind)
I couldn't turn things around (You never turned things around)
'Cause you never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs)
the whole album is preoccupied with signs, clues, the idea that there is a path to knowledge that is obscure – instead of accepting that there are some things she just Can’t know, taylor is obsessed with figuring things out, with tracing a narrative through the past: “were there clues i didn’t see? / and isn’t it just so pretty to think / all along there was some / invisible string / tying you to me?” she asks on “invisible string”, which is basically the only properly Happy song on the album, but even then she can’t just Be Happy – she has to figure out where the happiness came from, why, how; has to trace it through the past so she can hold on to it. there’s a sense of needing control, and instead of accepting that there might not be any control available, that life might just Be That Way Sometimes, she wrestles with the literal universe trying to find a thread of control and grab onto it. if you believe in fate you have to resign yourself to it, but she can never do that – perhaps this is the root of the recklessness, of why she embarks on these obvious mistakes over and over again, because she can see them ending badly but refuses to really believe it – she’s taylor swift, after all, if she doesn’t have the power to change the ending then no-one has.
speaking of endings. folklore is an album about endings – about breakups and breakdowns, about fading out, falling out, bleeding out, crashing out, shattering into a million pieces. it’s a farewell, i think, to the reputation era and everything that signified – a farewell to wallowing in pain instead of reckoning with it, a farewell to victimhood, to pretending not to know. the “cardigan” music video takes us, somewhat heavy-handedly, through taylor’s career: beginning in a cabin where a photo of her grandfather is framed above the piano, she steps into the piano and emerges in an ~enchanted forest; she’s swept away to sea by a storm, uses her piano as an anchor, then climbs back through the piano to the cabin where we began. music as magic, as salvation, as the path back to herself – folklore signifies the end of the trajectory sketched out here, a return to her roots, a wound repairing itself. the “cardigan” video, and folklore as a whole, is a farewell to drama and fantasy both (and they’re not that dissimilar, not really – revenge is a fantasy, a world in which fair is fair and the righteous have their reward). even “betty”, which is the most classically taylor in its structure (the act iii shift from “if i showed up at your party” to “yeah i showed up at your party”, we simply love to see it), denies us that fulfilment we expect in the final act – james shows up at the party, but we don’t know what happens next. in the Old Taylor-verse, betty would speak and probably say something back to james in their own words (see: “Love Story” (“it’s a love story baby just say yes”), “Speak Now” (“i’ll meet you when you’re out of the church at the back door” / “meet you when i’m out of my tux at the back door”), “Mine” (“you made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” / “i fell in love with a careless man’s careful daughter”)). in “betty”, we’re left hanging – “will you have me? will you love me? will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends?” james asks, and we never know the answer. between “cardigan” and “betty” we get the structure of an Old Taylor song writ large across the album, but undermined at the last minute, undetermined, unresolved.
after “betty”, we get two more songs: “peace” and “hoax” (also “the lakes” on the deluxe edition but i have nothing to say about that today sorry stay tuned). i think taylor puts a lot of thought into how to end her albums – they often end on a different note to what’s preceded them, and they’re often about rebirth, new starts, looking ahead: Red is mostly concerned with a difficult breakup, but the last track is “Begin Again”, about a first date; 1989 is also mostly focused on the push-pull of a difficult relationship and its ending, but closes with the more resolute “Clean”; reputation ends with “New Year’s Day”, a ballad with much sparser production than the rest of the album. it’s interesting, then, that this album ends on something of a downer; that we get a song called “peace” and we think, oh that sounds nice, and then it’s immediately followed by “hoax” (not to mention that “peace” is about the absence of peace, the title a hoax in and of itself). “peace” is another song that reckons with taylor’s flaws – “never had the courage of my convictions / so long as danger is near / and it’s just around the corner darling / ‘cause it lives in me / no i could never give you peace.” the fear that the things she’s gone through have ruined her, have left her unlovable and unable to love in return, this fear haunts a lot of folklore but it’s explicit in this song. i find the first line, the “courage” line, particularly interesting – so much of her early work was about bravery and boldness, about being fearless, “living in spite of those things that scare you to death”; about the need to speak up: “I don't think you should wait. I think you should speak now.” as her career has developed, i think taylor has become more afraid – of other people, the world, herself – unsurprisingly, of course, but i think the way it plays out in her music is fascinating. i’ve written about this before, kind of, about the way her predictions for the future become more and more anxious on Red and 1989, before she turns the tables on her fears on reputation and renders them campy and ludicrous. on Lover, she begins to doubt herself (“i say i don’t want that / but what if i do?”), before giving way to full-blown anxieties on folklore – although this mostly takes the form of adult self-analysis, she also returns to her childhood on “seven”, recalling how she was “too scared to jump in” as she played on a swing-set by the side of a creek in pennsylvania.
i haven’t talked about “seven” as much as i would have liked to in this – it’s one of my top 3 songs on folklore for sure, but i don’t have much to say about it beyond something something childhood peter pan something, and incoherent crying noises during the second verse (“i’ve been meaning to tell you / i think your house is haunted / your dad is always mad and that must be why / and i think you should come live with me / and we can be pirates / then you won’t have to cry / or hide in the closet” no-one look at me!!!!). but i guess i’m interested in the focus on childhood, rather than adolescence; on innocence, or the idea of innocence; on the idea of being unformed, pre-trauma, and how we then form ourselves from that inchoate, screaming state into adults. is it significant that she “used to scream” in the weeds, “never grew up”, and is now an adult who will do “anything / to keep you looking at me”? or is it a coincidence? is there an invisible string here that marks the path she took through the labyrinth; if she had known, at seven, to look to the future, would she have seen where she ended up? there’s a real sense of searching for patterns – not only in “invisible string” but in the rest of the album, in the ways she acts and reacts inappropriately (“when i’d fight you used to tell me i was brave” – is it any wonder that she never learned to stop fighting?). folklore feels like a recognition of the unknowability of the answers to these questions – it brings them into conversation, traverses childhood and adolescence and adulthood, but it doesn’t offer us a resolution. what it does do, though, is free us – “our coming-of-age has come and gone”, as the first line of “peace” tells us. finally, the obsession with youth is over; the perpetual Moment, the Coming of age in the present tense, has come, has gone, is finished, and we aren’t trapped there any more. unlike peter pan, who is always on the cusp of childhood – always a child, but always also a child with the choice to grow up, and always rejecting that offer – taylor chooses adulthood, chooses to say goodbye to the messiness, the melodrama, the things she’s built and sustained her career on. i expect she’ll always remain “overdramatic and true” – and i would want nothing less! – but folklore announces a(nother) new chapter, one in which her fears are directly expressed and addressed.
reputation. reputation, reputation, reputation. i highkey love reputation, but i think i love it because in 2017 i was very broken and wounded and all i wanted was to pretend i wasn’t, and that’s what reputation is, in large part, about – it’s a performance, it’s a game. its thesis is “if you think i’m bad then i guess i’ll be bad muahahaha”; it does not, ever, attempt to reckon with the effects of “being called a bitch in front of the whole world.” on reputation, her fears are recontextualised as ludicrous or erotic, and as much as i respect that as a coping mechanism, it wasn’t until folklore that i felt confident that she’s actually doing okay – that she has made her peace with events, that she is able to honour those feelings, not just hide from them by making a mockery of them. folklore picks up so many of reputation’s themes and images – blue, gold, tattoos, dive bars, circuses, crowns – but they’re taken so much more seriously here, she is earnest in a way that she rarely has been since 2012. where reputation and Lover both are kind of messy, urgent but chaotic, attempts to prove a point, folklore feels like both a return and a renewal – it’s sonically cohesive, peaceful (if also sad), and the star of the show is once again the lyrical precision we know and love, rather than production effects that taylor wants to prove she can find a use for. where Lover is chaotic and manically happy, folklore is reflective, moody, self-conscious – it doesn't undermine any of her previous work, but it brings us full circle back to where we left off. the teenager who desperately wanted to grow up, who thought the world was enchanted, who wished that life was more like a movie, is now an adult who knows that magic is a two-edged sword, and that not all films have happy endings.and she’s not rubbing our nose in it the way she once might have – she’s no longer racing to prove how much she’s grown. this isn’t “Daylight”, which very explicitly addresses how taylor has changed over the last decade (“i used to think love was burning red / but it’s golden”) – folklore is much subtler, a soft, transmuted reworking of old tropes and themes without the fanfare of announcing itself as such.
there are plenty more things i want to say about this album (on release day i made 7000 words of notes, please someone pay for my adhd diagnosis so i can get some adderall and stop Living Like This) but i couldn’t fit them all in without making this literally tens of thousands of words long and ending up like this:

so here follows a brief bullet point list of Other Thoughts that i gift to u to flesh out on ur own:
hauntings!
time and permanence and memory and forgetting
leaving and coming back
movement/stasis (CARS)
places (new york gets 2 mentions on this album, i think that’s a record (at least since the Red era)!
nature – rain and storms are classic taylor preoccupations, but this album introduces some new ones: fire and ash, barrenness, apocalyptic landscapes
the apocalypse generally, i think there’s a lot of quiet dread in this album, a sense of heading towards impending doom with resignation
summer
scars, wounds, being pulled apart (when i made my concordance a few yrs ago i came across the image of falling apart or coming undone over 50 times and that only takes us up to reputation!)
movies
private vs public spheres (a HUGE reputation theme just fyi)
“digging up the grave another time” / “cursing my name, wishing i stayed” is taylor secretly a wuthering heights fangirl? discuss.
other things what i have been doing
writing a book!! an extract of the first draft was longlisted for the spread the word life writing prize – read / watch me give a reading here: https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/projects/life-writing-prize/
rewriting my play, rerewriting my play, rererewriting my play, ad infinitum
writing stuff about taylor swift lol (can you believe that a mere month after this came out taylor released a song called “the last great american dynasty”!!! curses!!!)
writing other stuff about haunted houses and lesbians
also i filed an article a few weeks ago for business insider which is objectively the most hilarious commission i’ve ever received, given that i know nothing about business and am a (self-styled? perhaps) perpetual outsider, it has not yet been published but stay tuned for my lukewarm takes on fashion in the covid era!!
i’m trying to stay off the internet and enjoy my actual life more so i have notifs turned off on twitter and instagram, i’m not checking dms, get me by email or whatsapp if u must 🤙
(also, you may have noticed i’ve finally broken free of the tinyletter industrial complex. welcome to substack, we live here now.)