Three of the highlights — “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” — depict the same love triangle, from all three different perspectives. self-consciously summed up the first 30 years of her life, bringing all her musical passions together. Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’: Album Review It’s hard to remember any contemporary pop superstar that has indulged in a more serious, or successful, act of sonic palate cleansing than Swift … Despite the last 12 months bringing a new, high-profile disagreement with her former label and enduring disputes with Folklore proves that she can thrive away from the noise: if you interpret “classmates” as pop peers, Swift is no longer competing. Yet you can still hear that this is the same songwriter who dropped “Last Kiss” on the world 10 July-9ths ago. The seismic shocks of her Reputation-era rude awakening about her public image are still felt: “I can change everything about me to fit in,” she sings on Mirrorball, a gorgeous pedal steel wooze made with Jack Antonoff. With concerts off the table for the foreseeable future, no longer needing to reach four sides of a stadium may have proven liberating.Elements of her fanbase have long wanted her to revisit the Nashville songcraft of her youth through an adult lens, but this isn’t that album. Taylor Swift Folklore review: New album reveals social distancing has made her a more mature songwriter. Her vocal trademarks remain in the yo-yoing vocal yelps on August, and the climactic, processed Given the more earthy production, some will characterise Folklore as showing a more authentic side of Swift. Swift’s most coherent record since her staunchly country days, it’s nonetheless her most experimental, developing on Lover’s stranger, more minimalist end. (“Last Kiss” is usually a summer favorite, but this year, “Hope it’s nice where you are” feels a little too close to the bone.) She’s never sounded this relaxed or confident, never sounded this blasé about winning anyone over. Bombastic pop makes way for more muted songwriting, and a singular vision compared to the joyful but spread-betting Lover. Not only would that be facile, asserting some authentic self is also explicitly not her aim. Instead, she spent the quarantine season throwing herself into a new, secret project: her eighth album, . “Mirrorball” is about the same nervous dance-floor poseur of “New Romantics,” six years later, except tonight she feels like the disco ball that reflects everyone’s most desperate insecurities. There are sometimes baffling brand endorsements. With folklore ’s teen heartbreak trilogy, Swift circles the same affair from each party’s differing view. It sounds like she figured she wasn’t going to be touring these songs live anyway, so she gave up on doing anything for the radio, anything rah-rah or stadium-friendly. 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. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories: A scandalous old widow, hated by her whole town. In a brief essay included in the liner notes, she says of the album’s concept: “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible.” She writes that some songs are about her and others are about invented characters. A ghost watching her enemies at the funeral. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. © Copyright 2020 Rolling Stone, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. As she explains in her Prologue, “In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. But the real surprise is the music itself — the most head-spinning, heartbreaking, emotionally ambitious songs of her life. More interesting than parsing which is which (many are obviously both) is the sense that Swift is interrogating her own self-conception and challenging that personal mythology: how helpful and true those ideas are to herself as a woman of 30. All rights reserved. Yet she tentatively asserts what’s at her core: the deep dedication she sings about on the resonant, minimalist Peace, and the abiding romanticism of Invisible String.Lockdown has been a fruitful time for this sort of soul-searching, the absence of much in the way of new memory-formation triggering nostalgic reveries and regrets.

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