The year 2020 was a nearly impossible year to be a musician, but Taylor Swift was well-positioned to make the most of it. Having negotiated a fair degree of independence from the traditional demands of record labels a few years ago, she was able to follow her muse in an uncommon way after her world tour was cancelled in the spring. Just under five months after releasing her eighth studio album Folklore, which was recorded largely remotely during stay-at-home orders, the pop star shared Evermore, a collection of 15 songs that emerged from the collaborations she started on the Folklore sessions.
On social media, Swift called it a “sister album,” and though Evermore feels emotionally distant from its gloomy and haunting predecessor, it develops similar themes about youth, love, and escapism with a similar sonic range. The songs were seemingly written in a similar manner to the ones on Folklore, via correspondence between Swift, her longtime producer Jack Antonoff, and songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner of the indie rock band the National. But the recording process was clearly different, because Evermore embraces the in-the-room sound that the trio experimented with on the Disney+ concert documentary released last month.
And where Folklore was a secret endeavor where even a few of the musicians didn’t really know what they were playing on, there’s room for even more collaborators on Evermore. The National’s lead singer Matt Berninger duets with Swift on “Coney Island,” and the layering of his sullen baritone over her seductively dry vocals is affecting. The sisters of Haim makes an appearance on “No Body, No Crime,” a darker take on a “Goodbye Earl” story, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who had a memorable turn on Folklore, returns as a musician and co-writer in a bigger capacity. In the past when Swift invited a duet partner on an album, like Ed Sheeran on Red and Brendon Urie on Lover, it always felt like an interruption from the main event. But there is something about Dessner’s sensibility that creates space for her to integrate someone else’s ideas seamlessly.
In the documentary Swift mentions that Dessner sent her a 1950s guitar just like one he owned once they started to write songs together, and that the particular timbre of that guitar helped inform the way Folklore came together. Here, she experiments with guitar tones and band setups in a way that feels like an evolution of her recording and songwriting style. On early Swift albums, conventional pop country production served as a coy introduction to the genre-transcending songs she was already expert at writing. Evermore shows Swift developing as a musician’s musician, dropping sonic references and moods that wouldn’t really work if she were intentionally trying to stack an album with singles. It also allows her to riff a bit on her love for a really wide variety of country, pop, and rock music. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard her write a slithery and syncopated song like “Willow” before, and the upright bass sprinkling songs like “Dorothea” and “Cowboy Like Me” are the first time I would ever describe her sound as coming even slightly close to jazzy.
Had she let these songs gestate longer and killed a few darlings, she could have produced a truly astounding single album. But one of the joys of this “era” of Taylor is that she’s sloughed off so many layers of self-consciousness and seems less concerned with that quest for a perfect album. Her old, meticulous planning wouldn’t have allowed for the off-the-cuff emotionality that added up to the surprise of Folklore or the deepening rumination of Evermore.
Swift is the only major pop star to intentionally create and release new material during the pandemic—much less two albums—and that’s partially because she might be the only one who has enough power and audience pull to escape the traditional album cycle completely. There are downsides to the fact that seemingly only one artist can do it—but as long as Swift continues to use that freedom to make the kind of swooning, beautiful folk-pop displayed on Evermore, we could do a lot worse.
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