2020 was certainly a year of surprises, and not all of them pleasant. But Taylor Swift threw us a curveball of the best kind when she unexpectedly dropped her eighth studio album, folklore, on July 24, 2020.
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Surprise 🤗 Tonight at midnight I’ll be releasing my 8th studio album, folklore; an entire brand new album of songs I’ve poured all of my whims, dreams, fears, and musings into. Pre-order at https://t.co/zSHpnhUlLb pic.twitter.com/4ZVGy4l23b
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) July 23, 2020
At that time, the pop icon, 35, wasn’t even a year removed from releasing the pastel-hued Lover. No one saw folklore coming — literally or sonically. If Lover was a “light pink sky,” folklore was a gray, storm-tossed sea.
Largely departing from her confessional songwriting style, the surprise album tread entirely new ground. We found ourselves lost in a complicated teenage love triangle with “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty.” We fell in love with an unruly widow delighting in her outsider status in “The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Mad Woman.” And we were broken into pieces and made whole again in “My Tears Ricochet,” “Mirrorball,” and “This Is Me Trying.”
The following year, folklore made Swift the first woman to ever win a Grammy for Album of the Year thrice. And remarkably, the marketing wizard’s least-promoted album still generated arguably the biggest online buzz in her career. When you ask a Swiftie in the post “Eras”-era what their “conversion” album was, many will cite folklore.
“For a couple hours, it felt like we were all together, experiencing something that did not equate to injustice or existential dread or the imminent death of thousands,” Philip Cosores wrote in Uproxx.
Taylor Swift Dropped All Expectations For ‘Folklore’
Taylor Swift didn’t make it this far without an acute sense of what will resonate with the broadest possible audience. Enlisting the help of friend and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, as well as The National founder Aaron Dessner, she threw all of that knowledge out of the window while making folklore.
“I just thought there are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, ‘How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?’” Swift told Paul McCartney in a November 2020 Rolling Stone interview. “If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore.”
Featured image by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
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