Okay, here we go. Here's my thread with first, unfinished, messy thoughts on FOLKLORE.

Swift is working hard to move from girlhood to womanhood. Red focused on her late teens, 1989 on her early 20s, lover was an in-between album that tried to somehow combine late teens and late twenties. She's 30 and serious now, but keeps the vulnerability so key to her stardom.

Mind you: moving from girl to woman is an incredibly difficult and fraud thing in pop music. Many women are punished when they try to make this transition.

Read Melanie Kennedy's work on this in which she for example argues "much of celebrity culture centres on young females growing up, and the very transition these young females ... are making into young womanhood is a central part of their celebrity" (2014: 226)

TS has long been invested in innocence. My favorite example is "A Place In This World" (2006) in which she constantly uses phrases like "that's all I know", "I'm just a girl trying", etc, framing herself as a not yet matured adolescent with limited knowledge of the world.

Her claim to fame has always been based on her songwriter skills. She was the youngest songwriter ever hired by Sony. Her early videos focus on her words, her guitar, often showing her wondering around natural environments.

This album returns to that focus, presenting it as an artistic choice. Maybe so -- but there's no way of denying the influence of the covid19 lockdown during which TS wrote this album. She reminds us she can still work because she writes her own music. She shows more nature.

(Now about nature and the pandemic -- maybe read @jillybkay 's super interesting piece on this that was recently published in the @EJCS_Journal : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549420938070)

Also -- TS is internet savvy, one of the cool kids, and shows us that by not using any capitalizations in the album/song titles. This is often done on Twitter to signify 'play' and a lack of seriousness. Not being for real.

This aligns with her commentary on the album in which she talks about troubling the lines between truth and fiction and the need she feels to tell stories, some real, some made up.

This means that when we hear the first song, 'the 1', we immediately wonder whether she went back to writing songs about her breakups or is playing with us and imagined a breakup. Are she and Joe Alwyn still together or not? No one knows, but she lets us wonder.

She has been playing with this for a while now. She knows how complex the interplay between the stories she tells in her music and the stories told about her in the media is. The vagueness here is a signifier of adulthood: a lack of oversharing is often seen as a mature quality.

The song itself is small, tiny. Sparse accompaniments, a focus on her voice, layered over itself here and there. I was surprised that she said "shit", but she's no longer the innocent good girl she once was.

The line "saying yes instead of no" reminds me of the end of LOVER, where she says she wants to be remembered for the things she loves, not the things she hates.

LOVER and this album are explicitly trying to go back to narratives of growth and positivity, departing from earlier notions of reactionary victimhood that used to be so central to her stardom.

This song is mellow, calm, in control. She's doing good, she's on some new shit. She handles the breakup in this narrative in a calm manner and merely notices 'it would have been fun if you would have been the one'.

(Now - I really like the line 'you met some woman on the internet and take her home' and I'm not sure why, but I still wanted to share that, because I do. Her songwriter is just so elegant and simple and nice sometimes. Got to appreciate that.)

'cardigan' has a music video and the beginning reminds me an awful lot of the set of her 2010 VMA performance of 'Innocent':

'Innocent' is one of the most terrible songs ever written -- she wrote it in response to Kanye West interrupting her speech and it is infested with terrible paternalistic undertones. Read Shaun Cullen's article on the KW/TS melodrama here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpms.12160

(also it's quite funny that she sings 'when you are young they assume you know nothing' because for a long time her defense to most critiques and a central thing in her stardom was 'i'm just not sure but i mean well', very much claiming a willful ignorance)

the piano on top of the waterfall reminds me of the bombastic music video for 'me', which i think we would all rather forget. (except for the part with the pastel suits. always here for women in pastel suits.)

I do very much like it when she holds on to the piano in order not to drown, a narrative she has also emphasized throughout her stardom: she uses music to make sense of, and survive, her own life. The cardigan she puts on near the end of the video is obviously official merch.

It ends with "a special thank you to our on set medics, COVID-19 compliance personnel and the crew for operating under the strictest guidelines including wearing PPE, practicing thorough sanitization and respecting social distancing during the video shoot".

what a world huh

The line 'a friend to all is a friend to none' is important in a meta way -- it's something she had to grapple with in her star text in recent years. She had to pick a side.

Some props for the line 'you drew stars around my scars'. Cute.

'the last great american dynasty' is a history lesson. She discusses Rebekah Harkness and William (Bill) Hale Harkness, a couple that got very rich from oil. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_Harkness

With the line 'there goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen' Swift nods to her song 'mad woman' that appears later on the album. There's a lot of foreshadowing and intertextuality focused on her own work on this album and in her star text in general.

In the final part of the song Swift switches from a third person perspective to a first person perspective, claiming herself to be 'the loudest woman this town has ever seen', singing 'I had a marvelous time ruining everything', embedding herself in her own history lesson.

Personally, I was very annoyed with Justin Vernon's voice opening 'exile'. I do not understand the need for this man to be here, but ok. That's a question that returns a lot in my life I guess.

It saddens me to think that adulthood/maturity are in this song signified by the male approval of a 'serious artist'. Don't like that one bit.

(I do like the bridge a lot, mostly because it finally creates a bigger and more dramatic song that disrupts the mellow flow of the album slightly. I appreciate that. Also, again, wonderful songwriting.)

Getting Bon Iver on there almost feels like she's letting those fools at Pitchfork win, with their terrible nonsense around 1989 and the Ryan Adams cover version of that. It feels like she's saying 'I know what I need to do to be taken seriously and I will play your way now'. Sad

'my tears ricochet' is small again -- focus on the lyrics, they're pretty. It's the first song she wrote for the album. I don't have much else to say about it.

At the start of 'mirrorball' I thought 'oh Taylor has been listening to Phoebe Bridgers. Interesting.'

I initially misheard part of the song and thought she sang 'I'll eat you out on the floor' instead of 'I'll get you out on the floor' and I was like 'HOMG EVERYONE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONE SHE *IS* A QUEER WOMAN!!!' but then I found out I misheard -- sad.

Another thing I kept thinking about during this song was how incredibly tall she must be when she is spinning on her highest heels.

(When she sang 'I know they said the end is near' I again went back to Phoebe Bridgers who wrote one of my favorite songs this year: )

I like mirrorball because of it's meta references in the bridge, where she discusses the need to have people keep looking at her and constantly reinventing herself -- a thing she also commented on in her 2020 Miss Americana documentary.

In Miss Americana she discussed this need for reinvention as explicitly gendered: "The female artists that I know of, they’ve reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artists. They have to, or else you’re out of a job."

'seven' discusses her roots -- Swift grew up on a christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania. She sings: "Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted".

(Sidenote: some songs are produced by Aaron Dressner, others by Jack Antonoff. It's interesting. You can hear the difference, but the mix seems to work into a transition from her heavily Antonoff-influenced pop sound into this different folk rock vibe. The mix works well.)

'august' is one of my favorites. I really like it. Lyrics, music, vibe. All works. Fits her earlier work but renews it at the same time. Here for it.

'this is me trying' is a winner just bc of the line 'I got wasted like all my potential'. I like the confidence & hardness of those lyrics contrasted with the insecurity of the chorus 'and I just wanted you to know that this is me trying/and maybe i don't quite know what to say'

Again, strong PB vibes in this one.

'illicit affairs' made me sad. Hit me straight in the feels.

This is a good moment for this reminder by @SimplySFans, retweeted by Taylor herself:

'invisible string' made me excited bc she refers to centennial park and I WAS THERE DURING MY FIRST ROUND OF FIELD WORK!!!

Anywho, it's a nice song again with nice lyrics again. Again, a reference to living in stardom with the line 'Bold was the waitress on our three-year-trip/ getting lunch down by the Lakes/She said I looked like an American singer'.

Also appreciate the way she talks about 'the boys who broke my heart': 'now I send their babies presents'. A woman in her thirties indeed.

I really like 'mad woman', it speaks to a trend with angry women that has been happening since 2016 onwards. There are so many books/movies/songs about angry and difficult women atm. The song itself is kind of reactive again, working with a 'you do this/then i do this' narrative.

'No one likes a mad woman/You made her like that,' and 'now I breathe flames each time I talk'. The song itself is however calm, composed and mellow like most of the album. It sonically exerts control, even if the lyrics discuss female anger as reactionary.

'epiphany' deals with Swift's grandfather's experience in the military. It also has a covid19 ref in it: "Something med school did not cover / Someone's daughter, someone's mother / Holds your hand through plastic now'

It does what many have been doing for months now: speaking about the pandemic in terms of war, and here specifically trauma ('some things you just can't speak about').

'betty' is connected to 'august' and shows the boy's side of the story. Just like 'august' it's strongly playing into the nostalgia of early Swift songs. She uses her voice differently here, more in the way she used to on albums like FEARLESS and SPEAK NOW.

The song 'peace' somehow feels like the most sincere song on the album, almost as if Swift breaks with her voice as narrator, turning away from us and towards her partner (Joe?), speaking privately about her devotion and love.

I take her line "The devil's in the details" to refer to the easter-egging she's so well-known for, encouraging fans to go find all the secrets hidden in the album.

She also sings 'give you a child' and I was like WHAAAAT?

I like 'hoax' as final song because it is a meta commentary on the narratives hidden in the album, some of which are hoaxes and some are not, and at the same time is also just literally a song about 'faithless love'. The album ends dark, sad, but again: controlled, calm, composed

Done for now, but might add more later.