Last week, Taylor Swift released yet another surprise album. Featuring the ninth studio release, evermore is a sister album to folklore, her July track, providing an expansion to its circumstantially conscious ideas and storytelling themes.
Evermore and folklore are closely-knit when it comes to the style of music. However, the songs in evermore bring a range of different narratives that weren’t given to us in folklore.
As a sister to folklore, evermore brings along many of its themes. For example, the idea of a crazy woman presented in folklore’s “mad woman”, and “the last great american dynasty” comes along also in evermore’s “champagne problems” and “no body, no crime.”
“I wanted evermore to represent fall and winter while folklore represents spring and summer. I’ve always wanted to do a two-part analogy that’s a collective body of work, and it just kind of happened naturally,” Taylor Swift said in her YouTube page while answering questions from fans.
Taylor Swifts uses the visual input provided by her music videos for cardigan and willow to reveal the analogy she described by playing with the seasons. The music video for willow is a continuation for cardigan, and it is a continuation of the seasons too.
The latter album emphasizes the analogy with the sounds and the lyrics in songs like ‘tis the damn season. Making not so subtle references to winter and fall throughout the album with the cold tones of music with the lyrics.
“And soon they’ll have the nerve to deck the halls / That we once walked through,” she sang in her track, champagne problems.
In the album, Taylor Swift also dedicates one song to her grandmother. The song “marjorie” tells the story of how the dead still live here with us in our hearts. It covers that story with feelings of grief and complicated teachings of life. The song goes together with her song epiphany, which was a tribute to her grandfather, who had fought in WWII.
In Evermore, we are presented with stories that develop interesting narratives through the use of music. Songs like, “no body, no crime”, “marjorie”, and “gold rush” showcase a story; sometimes about heartbreak, or love stories, and even a crime.
With the album folklore, Taylor Swift showed us a different direction that her music is taking and evermore continues down that road. Evermore, demonstrates the progress Taylor has made in composing and singing folk and indie music and it shows growth in her form.
