Swifties thought Taylor Swift ditched her country attire a while ago but in evermore Swift gets her cowboy hat and boots out of the cupboard. This is apparent in the first feature track on the album: ‘no body, no crime’ (feat. HAIM). Actually, the country melody runs through the album like a thread with track 11 being titled ‘cowboy like me’. The crime that is depicted in ‘no body, no crime’ is infidelity; yet, the only crime Taylor Swift is guilty of is producing a killer sister album.
However, the feature that has stood out the most in Swift’s latest album is when Swift takes us to ‘coney island’ with The National; songwriter Aaron Dessner should be eulogised for openly speaking about living with depression whilst trying to keep a relationship afloat for Swift’s documentary ‘long pond studio sessions’ on Disney+, and the track ‘coney island’ is an additional token of Dessner’s heart-rending emotion.
The overwhelming emotion that is put into the lyrics of evermore form a storyline and Taylor Swift is a literal genius as her lyrics are connected by an invisible string to classical authors and poets; in fact, the remarkable storytelling on track 11 of folklore ‘invisible string’ was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’. This spiel continues in evermore with references to Robert Frost’s poems; Swift referred to Frost’s ‘the road not taken’ back in 2014 with her song ‘the Outside’ from her 1989 album (‘I tried to take the road less traveled by’) and in ‘tis the damn season’ from her latest album (‘the road not taken looks real good now’). Long story short: evermore is as much a literary masterpiece as Swift’s sister album folklore.
(5/5)
