Taylor Swift folklore Review - Today's biggest pop star just released the best indie album of the decade. folklore is here and it came to save 2020.
Taylor Swift, folklore - A Pop Culture Weekly review. Check out Pop Culture Weekly for all the latest in movies, TV, streaming, music & more, including interviews with your favorite celebrities.
2020 has been nothing but a series of often horrifyingly unexpected events. From wildfires to pandemics to politics, many would surmise 2020 as a dumpster fire on wheels spiraling down the street out of control. Enter: Taylor Swift. Today's biggest recording artist just surprise released her latest album, folklore and it's here to save 2020.
folklore was announced via Taylor's Twitter just hours before it was released. The tweet explained the thought process behind making the album. An accompanying letter, attached as an image, explains how in isolation from the pandemic, Taylor began the process of the folklore album with visuals. These visuals inspired not just her own stories but stories of other people. Some real, some imaginary. This sets the basis for the entire folklore project.
At midnight, both the album and the music video for its lead single, cardigan, were released. The music video - and the song itself, sets the stage for the era. Directed by Swift, the fantastical visuals bring you from a forest fantasy to the middle of turbulent waters to an unnamed, unassuming room stuck somewhere in time. cardigan the song, is very different from what we're used to hearing from Taylor, but yet somehow familiar. The lyrics are both new and old, both demanding and unassuming. With no space and time to define it, cardigan is the most daring lead single to come from a pop superstar since Madonna invented disco with Hung Up.
The musically downbeat track is neither instantly catchy nor at all forgettable. A juxtaposition that makes it interestingly superb. It's not a track that will be blaring from radio's at the beach, but it wasn't written to be. cardigan is not just a song, cardigan is a tale. And folklore is full of them.
From the groovy opening track the 1 to the Bon Iver duet exile, to the hauntingly beautiful closer hoax, each of the 16 tracks on folklore are stories. This album wasn't written to take you on a journey in a stadium coupled with highlights from her previous blockbuster records. It was written to take you on a journey through your mind. Track after track will bring you to a whole new world, some filled with sadness, others filled with hope. The hour and 4 minute run time goes by at lightning speed as you're taken from tale to tale and left emotionally exhausted yet creatively renewed. Lyrically, folklore is her best yet and in fact, could be taken right out of a poetry and prose book.
For an artist as big as Taylor Swift to release an album like folklore, easily the best indie album ever released by a gigantic pop star, she proves that she is continuing to blaze her own trail. She put it quite bluntly just a few years ago with the iconic "The old Taylor can't come to the phone right now...Why? Because she's dead!" line. folklore proves that an artist can continuously "kill" themselves and become reborn - fresher, sharper and more surprising than ever. It is an album that demands imagination and thought. And like the new album, Taylor has started a new tale in her incredible and interesting career, proving that she continues to be more vital to pop culture and art with each new release. folklore is just her latest tale.
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