The folklore-evermore sequence has reassured me that Taylor Swift is good enough to make predictions 2 years in advance but NOT to evaluate things on a rolling 6-month window and honestly that makes me feel better

Heh just heard the Tupelo reference in dorothea and knowing she kind of understands the 90s as when Natalie Merchant hadn’t heard Jenny Lewis yet…

evermore, like folklore before it, is Taylor Swift realizing that it’s not the 90s anymore and never will be again so she can treat it as input now

taylorswift:

bye 2020, it’s been weird.

femmenietzsche:

There should be more songs which portray stalkers and peeping toms in a positive light

one of the things that legit does bug me about Taylor Swift is she played up this “I have stalkers” as a girl-relatable thing, but she doesn’t have the stalkers non-celebrity girls do, she has the ones non-girl celebrities do too, and meanwhile she’s singing about driving by guys’ houses and sneaking into their backyard and obsessing over a months-ago ex as this One Real Thing and going over to their place and graciously forgiving them for having the door locked

don’t want to be too judgmental but evermore sounds like a fucking breakdown

it’s Taylor Swift, so that sounds like things were just thought through 3 times instead of 8, but still

Her bi-yearly pattern had factored in touring and recovering from touring and the press circuit to promote each album cycle; at home with familiar co-writers to match the arrangement to her lyrics I’m not surprised if she could generate 2-3 albums a year

Just thinking about Long Live – a valorization of a high school romance that invested it with all the energy of “dystopian youth revolution”-era YA and somehow built an escalation out of admitting that high school romances didn’t define your life that much these days

As a reminder for new followers, as an astute cultural analyst and elegant writer, Taylor Swift is the only member of my generation I consider my unambiguous superior

This period when she doesn’t have a tour or product to pump her fandom up over is gonna turn out to be a real interesting experience for Taylor Swift as a person, and probably the character too

as a reminder, this is the last American presidential election Taylor Swift is ineligible for

Taylor Swift responding to the 2020 election by calmly running through a “Best Practices For Celebrity Endorsements” checklist is charmingly on-brand

Wait, Speak Now came after Fearless? How long have I had that wrong in my head?

“the devil’s in the details but you’ve got a friend in me” might be my favourite line from folklore

cold was the steel I had to grind/for the boys who broke my heart/now I send their babies presents

is an incredibly warm, pro-family and charitable way to say “you used to matter to me but now you’re busy raising kids and I’m the boss”

that’s why she’s going to be empress someday

“Being a passenger in a motor vehicle with someone as a model for your emotional relationship to them” is one of the oldest and most consistent Taylor Swift themes

cold was the steel of my axe to grind

for the boys that broke my heart

now I send their babies presents

is a sideways way in a not-at-all wistful tone to draw attention to how your exes are settled with families now and you’re not

kontextmaschine:

So on the “literal Empress of America Taylor Swift” tip, dae notice that she followed up the album that positioned her as “Miss Americana” with one where she, Taylor Swift, only appears to establish a claim as heir to “the last great American dynasty”?

Sure it’s in parallel to a woman who dissipated it (“she had a marvelous time ruining everything”) but this is a concept album about how all of Taylor Swift’s issues would have wrecked her if they weren’t, uh, tied together by a perfectionistic will to power

And that since at least the prom court-themed “Long Live” (“bring on all the pretenders…”) she’s been depicting ultimate success as going down in history by capturing a royal title in American idiom?

Oh shit you know what I just remembered, Starlight, which before folklore was her starting to tell stories about other people in American history as a way to explore counterfactuals.

and they snuck into a yacht club party, pretending to be a duchess and a prince

Like she has this impulse to top the postwar American rich by claiming high nobility on account of being meritocratically superior at performing their rituals

which is why and how she is the apex product of her age

So on the “literal Empress of America Taylor Swift” tip, dae notice that she followed up the album that positioned her as “Miss Americana” with one where she, Taylor Swift, only appears to establish a claim as heir to “the last great American dynasty”?

Sure it’s in parallel to a woman who dissipated it (“she had a marvelous time ruining everything”) but this is a concept album about how all of Taylor Swift’s issues would have wrecked her if they weren’t, uh, tied together by a perfectionistic will to power

And that since at least the prom court-themed “Long Live” (“bring on all the pretenders…”) she’s been depicting ultimate success as going down in history by capturing a royal title in American idiom?

So for one this was clearly a holdover from her earlier work – it would be great for a teenage girl to get attention on the Nashville circuit, where songwriters play in bars for (tourists and) superstars (who started on the circuit themselves) looking for their next hit

For two, note that “sexual longing” is the Taylor Swift-approved way to relate to a celebrity musician