Taylor Swift
Evermore (Republic)
★★★★★
Taylor Swift does her best work when all she has to contend with is herself. It's an idea that appeared, fully realised, in July when she surprise-released her lockdown album, Folklore. With Evermore – the second chapter and/or sequel and/or companion record she dropped on Friday afternoon – Swift confirms this, inviting us even deeper inside her storybook world.
While keeping Folklore's circle of collaborators close, Swift has expanded the minimal sonic palette they established on Evermore, while sharpening her narrative focus and proving herself a peerless songwriter and storyteller.
Taylor Swift’s surprised when the world when she announced plans for her second album this year, Evermore.Credit:Universal Music Group
References to suburban nostalgia abound. On Coney Island, Swift and The National sing of the mall as the early internet: "It was the one place to be". While on Tis the Damn Season the narrator falls into bed with a childhood friend when they both arrive home for the holidays, recognising in one another the ghosts of a past life. It's a temporary arrangement, one that ends when she returns "to LA and the so-called friends", but the feeling it evokes – that the only people who could really know someone as famous as Swift are the ones who knew her before she found fame – is powerful.
It's a thread Swift picks up and runs with on Dorothea. A masterwork of a character study, it sees the roles reversed and Swift singing as the friend left behind, the one seeing the shiny face of a school pal on TV. "You'rе a queen sellin' dreams, sellin' makeup in magazines … from you I'd buy anything," Swift sings. For her long history of writing break-up songs and anthems for scorned lovers, some of the most powerful and painful loves lost are the ones between old friends and Swift captures them knowingly on Evermore.
Swift may have broken her usual routine for releasing records this year, but she's no less obsessed with patterns and themes. On Folklore, track 13 (her favourite number) was told from the perspective of her grandfather. Here the same track number, Marjorie, is named for her late grandmother, an opera singer who's credited with backing vocals and who had "closets of backlogged dreams" she left to her granddaughter.
When Evermore was announced, just a day before it was released, some speculated about a significant change in Swift's life the record might respond to. Had she broken up with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn? Had they got engaged or secretly married?
The record reveals something more significant though: Swift's ability to assume a character, write it until it's entirely wrung dry, and move on to her next method role while keeping herself entirely intact. On Champagne Problems she's the messy, difficult girlfriend whose life interferes with her potential romantic future, while on No Body, No Crime, Swift and the Haim sisters stomp through a saloon-style remake of Chicago's He Had it Comin' as they tell of a mad woman who covers up the murder of her cheating husband. Over synthesised drum patters on the penultimate track Closure, Swift refuses to offer any of it to satisfy an ex's self-serving request.
The characters and their internal struggles on Evermore are beautifully rendered, with gaps in their stories left to be fleshed out or disappear to time entirely. "I come back stronger than a '90s trend," Swift sings on the album opener Willow. After this year, nothing has ever been more true.
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