TAYLOR SWIFT’S GILDED AGE

Taylor Swift has ruled the world for fifteen years. Shattering records at the same warp speed she’s made them, Swift is a phenomenon who may never not be a phenomenon. Seemingly immune to the trappings of a famously fickle industry, hers could ultimately be the only long strange trip in music history where the waves decline to crest and each new mountain top inevitably leads to another. With the surprise December release of Evermore, that remarkable creative and commercial longevity stretches even further. Born mere months apart, her newest album and its predecessor, Folklore, will forever be linked by shared themes, timeframe and style. They are Vol. One and Two – impossible to imagine without the other – and very different in spite of everything that connects them. By the artists own admission, they are the first songs to be largely shaped by scenes outside her own life. Regardless, the emotional truths are among the most universal, thought provoking and poignant of her catalogue. But while Folklore’s arrangements were often spacious and still – intimate as if they were never meant to know an audience – Evermore is her very own gilded age. It’s ornate, lush and free, wrought with an air of the unpredictable and romantic. It also feels lived in and mournful, expressing uncertainty and nostalgia in ways that perhaps can’t really be conveyed until one has lived long enough to know them firsthand. She’s older now, lightyears removed from the teenager discreetly jotting down song ideas during class, and with that comes a wistfulness that other collections didn’t, maybe even couldn’t, hit upon so fully. That feeling is rooted in everything, even her voice, which has never been as profound or moving an instrument. Sounding strictly serene, performances are ever so occasionally touched by the hint of something more weathered and worn, etched by experience like fractures in the most beautiful armor.

At first, Folklore’s black and white mist and Evermore’s vivid patterns don’t appear to mean much of anything, but together, the photographs that adorn their covers are clear windows into their worlds. Sonically, it’s the difference between shadows and light, making them not just bookends, but perfect foils for each other. Although the strongest tie that binds them is storytelling. Lyrically, Swift continues to ponder what could have been or never was, giving her music a melancholy that clings to every word that passes her lips. “Tis The Damn Season,” “Dorothea,” “Ivy” and “Coney Island” all reckon with that immortal, familiar feeling, examining what it means when what you want the most seems destined to always be just out of reach. Like landscapes seen from the eyes of a plane, people and places fade like houses, parks and streets, folding into themselves until they’re just barely colors. But she always returns to memories and how they shape the present, reflecting on the roads not taken and how opportunity and potential only have so long before they ripen or spoil. Evermore often seeks to show that range of emotion in real time, giving songs like “Champagne Problems” and “Gold Rush” a sense of urgency where tempo and tone quicken or slow as if following the rhythms of a heartbeat. And as the music builds, spaces between verses suddenly evaporate, her delivery noticeably heightened, tense and so fast you’re afraid she’ll run out of air before she can swim to the surface. But theres no need to hold your breath. On their own, Folklore and Evermore represent artistic highs from an artist adding colors to their palette. Together? They mark a brand new chapter in a creative renaissance that, at this moment, feels like it could go on forever.

By Caitlin Phillips
01.14.2021

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