Why Taylor Swift’s Folklore is her best album yet

Folklore – Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album, released in a surprise move last Friday – is a triumph. Heart-breaking, story-telling, quiet – it’s everything Lover (2019) was not. Such an opinion is not novel or ground-breaking: the internet has been in a dizzy Swift-spin for a week now.

It’s easy to see what makes the album different – black and white replaces pastel colours, insistently lower-case song-titles replace the exuberance of “ME!”. And, rather than the anger of Reputation (2017), listeners are treated to lyrical narratives beyond the world of pop-culture in-fighting. This is not to say Lover, Reputation, or any of Swift’s earlier albums were bad, but simply that she has changed tack.

Three songs on the album have attracted particular attention. Swift herself has said that these songs are a part of a “Teenage Love Triangle” and Swift fans – with their unending ability to detect clues and hidden meanings within her work – have decided that these are “cardigan”, “august”, and “betty”. Each song is a sombre, delicate reflection on teenage life, love, and loss. Even stepping away from fan-theories which posit that the love triangle involves Swift and model Karlie Kloss, or that the names in the songs suggest a link to actress Blake Lively, it is clear Swift has taken her listeners back to an American-high-school dream world. This song-scape of school holidays and “homeroom” arguments is not too dissimilar to very early Swift: we’re back in the land of “she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers”.

And yet, in her recourse to singing about tentative teenage love-affairs – “cancel plans just incase you call, and say ‘meet you behind the mall’” – Swift is not simply re-hashing the tones of her pre-2010 albums. The whole record is so steeped in nostalgia – everything’s “slipped away like a bottle of wine” – that to sing about teenage experiences is to sing about an unavoidable, indelible sense of loss. Swift’s whole career – from country girl singing about small-town affairs to being dubbed a “mad woman” by the press – is contained within this sixteen-track album. In singing about teenage love-stories, she demonstrates just how far she’s come. The 2006 “Teardrops on My Guitar” becomes a self-conscious reference in ‘my tears ricochet’.

Swift knows she’s more of a Rebecca Harkness – the rebellious socialite she sings about in “last great american dynasty” – than a “betty” (a heartbroken teenager). But she has been both.

On this album what emerges is the strength of Swift’s narrative ability. This is something Swift-fans have known for a long time: there is no song-writer alive who is better at dropping hints and encoding messages. Don McLean’s “American Pie” has often been posited as a great lyrical narrative mystery, but it meets a potential competitor in “the last great american dynasty”. Admittedly Swift’s narrative is – on one level – easier to follow, but the Gatsby-esque vignettes, details, and half-line references multiply until her listeners are left with a similar, and overwhelming, awareness of a lost innocence.

Swift is a brilliant story-teller – a fact her dedicated (predominantly) female, (predominantly) teenage or early twenties fans have always known. And hopefully, with this album, others will recognise this fact. Just because she is adored by young girls does not mean she is a saccharine, vacuous, pop-singer.

So – is Taylor Swift the best narrative song-writer since Bob Dylan? I asked my Dad this. He snorted and replied “Obviously not – Chris Difford” (he wrote the lyrics for The Squeeze). Make of that what you will. Taste isn’t genetic.