Taylor Swift — “Fearless,” Fairytales, and “folklore”
We are coming up on a year since folklore dropped, and saved our collective summer. We’re all on the same page with that, right? Ever since, I’ve been trying to decide what it was I loved so much about folklore, even more than her sister, evermore, with whom we all had an (illicit) winter affair.
And I think I finally figured it out.
Taylor Swift has a long history with all things fairytale. While her self-titled debut album secured her all-American image, it was Fearless, her second studio album, that really introduced the fairytale aesthetic to Swift’s music, and secured her an adoring fanbase. I love looking at folklore as an evolution from the fairytales of Fearless.
Here’s a little something to set the mood:
Songs like “Love Story,” “White Horse,” and “Today was a Fairytale” (which was originally released as a standalone track, but has recently joined the Fearless ranks for the re-recordings) gave young girls everywhere more daydream fuel than we knew what to do with. Other tracks on the album described modern day fairytales, like falling in love with a celebrity (“SuperStar”) and, of course, “You Belong With Me,” a now-iconic story of unrequited high school love.
Swift’s music has always been whimsical in this way. There is a lot of truth in her songwriting, but it’s often set to some fantastic backdrop or rich aesthetic. Fans can often be found puzzling over song lyrics, wondering who they are about, and trying to decide which songs are autobiographical and which ones are fictional. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell, which is probably by design. Either way, borrowing familiar stories and turning them into modern, relatable songs is what solidified Taylor as a star, at least in my eyes.
After Fearless came Speak Now, which gave us songs like “The Story of Us,” “Speak Now,” “Enchanted,” “If This Was A Movie,” “Superman,” and “Long Live.” The lyrics feature a storybook relationship, a magical first meeting, dragons, and daydreams of stopping a wedding, among other dreamy imagery. This is also when Swift began introducing themes about storytelling within her songs, an element of her songwriting that would continue, eventually culminating on folklore, and bleeding over onto evermore.
As Swift’s career continued, her songwriting became a bit more edgy, and leaned more toward real life events, but her affinity for fairytales, and fiction in general, never fully went away. With songs like “Starlight” (a story-song about an imagined night between Ethel and Bobby Kennedy in the 40’s) from Red, and “Wonderland” and “Wildest Dreams” from 1989, fans could see that Taylor was still writing stories in her music, though not as often as before.
Swift’s 6th and 7th studio albums, Reputation and Lover feel like her most autobiographical work. They don’t feature any story-songs, or tales of magical romance, instead pulling from Swift’s real life and situation. These are her story, not anyone else’s.
Then came folklore, which ushered in a return of the fairy tale to Swift’s songwriting. Just the title, folklore, implies fiction, and the passing down of stories. Taylor herself described folklore as “a collection of songs and stories” in her Instagram announcement for the album.
Folklore seemed like a totally natural step for Taylor, like she had been building up to something like this for a while, intentionally or not. The majority of the songs on folklore are fictional in nature, either alluding to other works of fiction, or detailing completely fictional narratives.
The infamous Trilogy is, of course, one of the most prominent examples of this. “Cardigan,” “betty,” and “august,” are three songs which tell the story of a teenage love triangle. On the other hand, “the 1” makes references to The Great Gatsby, while “cardigan” mentions Peter Pan and Wendy Darling. The whole premise of “invisible string” pulls inspirations from “Jane Eyre” (which was also one of my quarantine movies, Tay. Wow, we have so much in common.)
Here’s where it gets really good. Here’s the reason folklore has to win out for me over evermore, which is similar to folklore in it’s escapism, but favors simplicity as opposed to web-like complexity.
If folklore is an album of stories, it reasons that even the more autobiographical songs on the album are meant to be read as such, as stories, as lore. For instance Mad Woman is likely (at least) somewhat autobiographical, but doubles as a cautionary tale, or even a pseudo-villain origin story.
The fiction on folklore is peppered with truth, is woven together with Taylor’s life in a way that makes the two impossible to separate. In “The Last Great American Dynasty,” Swift tells the story of Rebekah Harkness, a woman who used to live in the Rhode Island mansion that Swift now owns. It’s someone else’s story entwined with her own.
Aaron Dessner, one of Swift’s main collaborators on folklore talked about this in his description of the song.
It’s kind of the story of this woman and the outrageous parties she threw. She was infamous for not fitting in, entirely, in society; that story, at the end, becomes personal. Eventually, Taylor bought that house. I think that is symptomatic of folklore, this type of narrative song.
— Aaron Dessner
Other songs on the album that I take to be relatively autobiographical include “invisible string” and “peace,” both of which are said to be about Taylor’s sweet relationship with actor, Joe Alwyn. “Invisible string” holds this central theme of the album in it’s hook — all along there was some invisible string tying me to you. It’s the connecting thread that holds the album together, and it’s also a sweet-as-sugar love song. Mixing these tracks into the album like it’s just another story gives the impression that, to Swift, the relationship is fiction-worthy, like she wants to pass stories of them down, like folklore.
And I don’t know, but something about Taylor finally finding a “fairytale” love and telling us about it in an album akin to a storybook seems so full circle.
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