folklore
Taylor Swift
Released July 24, 2020
After building a musical catalogue based on her own life and experiences, Taylor Swift focuses on… read more »
About “Folklore”
After building a musical catalogue based on her own life and experiences, Taylor Swift focuses on telling others' stories on folklore, her eighth studio album that she recorded “in isolation” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike her previous album rollouts, it wasn’t preceded by any press or fanfare—Swift announced it via social media a mere sixteen hours before its release.
Most of the collaboration on the album was done in isolation, with co-writing and production by Aaron Dessner of The National, one of Swift’s favorite bands, long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and the mysterious William Bowery, who Swift later revealed to be Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend as of the album’s release.
The songs tell various stories about both real people and fictional characters — notable examples include “the last great american dynasty,” which Swift wrote about Rebekah Harkness, and “betty,” about a teenage boy apologizing to a girl he cheated on. The latter is part of what Swift calls the “Teenage Love Triangle” — it intertwines with “cardigan” and “august.”
Swift announced the project with a series of Instagram posts that made up the album cover, before revealing the title and tracklist. She also shared that the music video for the lead single, “cardigan,” would premiere that night. The announcement for her next album, evermore, which is supposed to be a companion album to folklore, followed the same pattern. A few weeks after the album’s July 24th release, she made a deluxe edition that offered bonus track “the lakes” available in stores.
folklore quickly became Swift’s most-acclaimed project to date, with a solid grade of 88 on Metacritic and nearly universal praise. Within three months, the album sold one million copies, making it the first and only album to collect that many U.S. sales in 2020. It went on to win Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammy Awards, boosting Swift to become the first woman and fourth artist overall to win Album of the Year three times.
Swift teamed up with Disney Plus to create a documentary called folklore: the long pond studio sessions in November 2020, filmed at The National’s Long Pond Studios in Hudson Valley, New York. The movie features performances of every track on the album, as well as interview clips where Swift talks to her collaborators about each song.