‘Folklore’ by Taylor Swift Review: Serious Songs From a Pop Princess – The Wall Street Journal

The best moments on Taylor Swift’s 2019 album, “Lover,” were ballads that expanded the range of her songwriting. Ms. Swift long ago mastered clever stories of heartbreak, but “Soon You’ll Get Better” and the title track found her slowing down and sinking deeper into more emotionally nuanced territory. Hearing these numbers alongside some goofy (if always catchy) radio-friendly pop threw the merits of their more emotionally resonant material into sharper relief. Ms. Swift’s new record, “Folklore” (Republic), a surprise release announced only last week and out now, builds on these developments and, owing to Ms. Swift’s new collaborator, sounds unlike any record in her catalog.

“Folklore” owes its existence to the pandemic. Ms. Swift’s tour behind “Lover” was set to kick off in April, and when it was canceled she suddenly found herself with time on her hands. She had already been working on a few new songs with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff and now sought inspiration from an unlikely source: Ms. Swift reached out to Aaron Dessner, producer and multi-instrumentalist from the indie rock band the National, about writing together. He had also been working on his own music while quarantined, and he shared some sketches with Ms. Swift. Soon they were writing and recording an album.

The credits for “Folklore” underscore that this was an album created in quarantine. Mr. Dessner’s parts were recorded at his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley; Ms. Swift’s vocals were recorded in Los Angeles; string parts were recorded in Buffalo and a synthesizer was recorded in Paris; vocals from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver were cut at his studio in Wisconsin. That the album was stitched together from these disparate parts recorded in studios all over the world is especially striking considering how cohesive the end product sounds.

“Folklore” places Ms. Swift’s lyrical obsessions and melodic acumen in productions that draw directly from the National’s brooding, goth-inflected indie rock. Mr. Dessner’s twin brother, Bryce, also a member of the National, is a well-regarded new-music composer, and he wrote orchestrations for a number of the tracks here, lending “Folklore” a neoclassical bearing. It feels formal and carefully composed, giving Ms. Swift a setting in which to experiment. In an interview with the online music magazine Pitchfork, Aaron explained that as they wrote, a concept took shape in her mind, and that characters from one song might show up in another.

Ms. Swift has long infused her music with references to her life, leaving clues for her most devoted fans to uncover, but this collection is unusually weighted toward intra-album narrative. “The Last Great American Dynasty,” which unfolds over a skittering drum machine beat and spare piano chords from Mr. Dessner, is based on the romance between Rebekah Harkness and Standard Oil heir William Harkness, and scene-setting lines like “Her saltbox house on the coast took her mind off St. Louis” would have been hard to imagine on Ms. Swift’s earlier records. Opening track “The 1,” a strutting midtempo number that finds Ms. Swift thinking about an old flame and what might have been, mentions the Roaring ’20s, and the first verse ends with “the greatest films of all time were never made,” the first of many mentions of cinema.

It’s an album, in part, about how stories are handed down from one generation to the next, with movies as one medium for that transfer. “Exile” was written by Mr. Vernon, Ms. Swift, and an otherwise unknown songwriter named William Bowery, whom fans speculate might be a pseudonym for Ms. Swift’s current boyfriend or Ms. Swift herself. Mr. Vernon opens in his lowest register, singing in the second verse, “I think I’ve seen this film before / And I didn’t like the ending” over Mr. Dessner’s piano chords, and then Ms. Swift echoes the line shortly after. The song builds to a stirring chorus where their voices join, trading perspectives in alternating lines, Mr. Vernon’s “You never gave a warning sign” followed by Ms. Swift’s “I gave so many signs.” The structure of the track, in its arrangement and its portrayal of two perspectives on the same event, is remarkable, but the formal virtuosity never obscures its easy musical pleasures.

When Ms. Swift writes from a more personal place, she focuses mostly on the danger of defining yourself based on how others see you, a familiar theme for her that she explores here with new subtlety. On “Illicit Affairs,” created with Mr. Antonoff, she sings of the self-loathing that comes from pursuing a relationship that can go only so far, while on “Mad Woman” she explores culture’s unease with female anger, mixing historical fragments (witch trials, sanitariums) with present-day narratives.

The middle third of the record is dominated by Ms. Swift’s work with Mr. Antonoff, and while this stretch is mostly very good, it also hints at another direction this record could have taken. Both “August” and “This Is Me Trying” emerge from a fog of reverb and are extensions of the dream-pop sound of the song “Lover.” They recall atmospheric bands from the ’80s and ’90s like the Sundays and Cocteau Twins, and it’s a style for which Ms. Swift has an instinctive feel. One can easily imagine the pair building on that sound for a full record.

But the bulk of “Folklore” is simpler and quieter, with arrangements that leave more space. The closing “Hoax” unfolds over Mr. Dessner’s tinkling piano, calling to mind a cobwebbed parlor in a neglected summer house, and the chorus has flashes of Victorian melodrama (“Stood on the cliffside screaming, ‘Give me a reason’”), bringing the album to an appropriately moody conclusion. Though Ms. Swift’s mastery of pop mechanics means you can hum just about all these songs after a couple of listens, “Folklore” is a deliberately serious record, and it’s not hard to imagine those drawn primarily to her more effervescent work finding it a bit chilly and dour. It’s a record for those less invested in her celebrity past, and it’s a major success on its own terms.

—Mr. Richardson is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Follow him on Twitter @MarkRichardson.

Correction: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect title of a track from the album “Lover.”