The queen of pop has done it again, for the second time in the span of five months. In July of last year, Taylor Swift released a surprise album, titled Folklore. The album showed a version of Swift’s songwriting the world had never heard before. She ditched the pop sound for indie, and gave a swift (no pun intended) turn around from the sparkles and rainbows era of Lover, to the sweaters and cabincore era of Folklore. Hold on to your knit coats and fantasies of long walks in the middle of the forests for a little longer swifties, because Taylor isn’t done reigning over the indie genre quite yet. In December of last year, Taylor Swift released a second surprise album and the sister album of Folklore, titled Evermore.
If you thought Taylor’s songwriting could not improve past the lyrical masterpiece of Folklore, you thought wrong. Evermore is a swirling, bottomless pool of emotions and sensations, tangling fact with fiction to create thematic storylines. The single from this album is “willow”, a song rooted in love and romance that captures what it’s like to want someone. The song is the embodiment of intrigue and desire, and as Taylor Swift so perfectly puts it “it sounds like casting a spell to make somebody fall in love with you”.
Folklore brought to life stories of characters struggling with mundane problems in a mystical way. The most notable being the story created through the connection between the songs “betty”, “cardigan”, and “august” which highlights the hurt and betrayal of a high school relationship. Yet the storylines did not end there, Taylor dived deeper into character development and analysis in Evermore. Songs like “no body, no crime” and “dorothea” bring forward new plots and characters that represent different ideologies while challenging certain cliches.
The album came as a surprise to Swift fans and Swift herself. After the completion of Folklore, Taylor Swift and her team decided to continue down the rabbit hole of mystifying lyrics and entrancing stories to create Evermore. While the songs themselves are extremely melodically pleasing, the real star of the album is the lyrics. Each song displays depth and surprising word choices that bring to life the meaning behind them. The words written on paper are poetic in nature, but with the melodies and harmonies blended with Taylor Swift’s voice, the lyrics come to life, and pictures of whimsical forests and people in love are formed in your head while listening to Evermore.
After the release of Folklore, everyone thought Taylor Swift would be done releasing music for a while since she has been rumored to be in the studio re-recording all of her old albums after gaining the rights to her older albums once again. Taylor surprised the world once again with the release of Evermore, giving the world exactly what it needed, another Taylor Swift album to listen to on repeat during quarantine. The album is full of empathy, profound ideas, and volatile lyrics, leaving each listener wanting more.