folklore
Taylor Swift is opening up her emotional state during the pandemic.
Halfway through her Eras Tour stop at Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday (Feb. 17), the 34-year-old pop superstar paused to reflect on being “lonely” while writing her 2020 album, Folklore, during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder,” Swift said in a fan-captured video before performing her song “Betty.”
“And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,” she continued. “That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore.” The Grammy winner added, “So that’s all that matters — the delusion.”
While writing Folklore, Swift spent her time in quarantine with then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, 32, who helped the artist pen songs including “Exile” and “Betty. The “Cruel Summer” hitmaker reflected on how she and the British actor passed the time during the pandemic in a December 2020 interview.
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“I wasn’t expecting to make an album. Early on in quarantine, I started watching lots of films. We would watch a different movie every night,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth before. One night I’d watch that, then I’d watch L.A. Confidential, then we’d watch Rear Window, then we’d watch Jane Eyre.”
She added, “I feel like consuming other people’s art and storytelling sort of opened this portal in my imagination and made me feel like, ‘Well, why have I never done this before? Why have I never created characters and intersecting storylines? And why haven’t I ever sort of freed myself up to do that from a narrative standpoint?’”
Swift and Alwyn split last April after six years of dating.
Swift’s three-night stand at Melbourne Cricket Ground launched Friday (Feb. 16) and wrapped Sunday (Feb. 18). Next, she’s scheduled for back-to-back concerts at Sydney’s Accor Stadium (Feb. 23-25). Other international stops include Singapore, France, Sweden, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Europe and Canada.
“Willow” and “Cardigan” are two of Taylor Swift’s most beloved tracks on Evermore and Folklore, respectively. But what if they didn’t make it into her discography?
That was almost the case, according to the superstar’s frequent musical collaborators The National. In a new interview with The Telegraph published on Thursday (April 20), the band’s Aaron Dessner and Matt Berninger revealed that the two songs were originally intended to be for The National.
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“I’d taken a swing at [‘Cardigan’] and ‘Willow’ and a couple of others, and I wasn’t having a lot of luck, so Aaron sent them to Taylor,” Berninger recalled. “I always have a lot of music to work on, and I am looking for something to connect emotionally. The reverse has happened, too, where Aaron wrote something for Taylor, and I dove right in. It works both ways.”
The National is gearing up to release their ninth studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein on April 28, and previously revealed that Swift will be featured on the track “The Alcott.” The group previously collaborated with Swift on Evermore‘s “Coney Island.”
“We’re all big fans of Taylor, and she’s been really generous with us, inviting us to be part of ‘Coney Island,’” Aaron’s brother Bryce Dessner previously shared in an Apple Music interview. “And obviously my brother’s worked with her a lot, and I’ve done a bunch of orchestration for her albums.”
He continued, “‘The Alcott’ is a song that she co-wrote with Matt [Berninger], where she co-wrote the lyrics. It’s really amazing to hear her, the way she was able to take what Matt had done and then reinvent the song, and it’s really a special song.”
Bon Iver took the stage in London at OVO Arena Wembley on Wednesday night (Oct. 26), and he surprised the crowd when he had Taylor Swift join him onstage to perform their song “exile” for the first time.
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The track was featured on Swift’s 2020 album, Folklore, which Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and The National‘s Aaron Dessner both contributed too. Dessner was also onstage during the “exile” performance.
Dessner recently collaborated with Swift on the 3am Edition of her freshly released 10th studio album, Midnights. Of the seven additional songs to the original 13 tracks, Dessner co-wrote and co-produced “The Great War,” “High Infidelity,” “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” and “Hits Different.”
“The most talented person in the world, Taylor Swift,” Vernon told the OVO Arena Wembley crowd following the performance, to which Swift sweetly replied, “The most talented person in the world, Justin Vernon. Also, the most talented person in the world, Aaron Dessner.”
“Alright, good night everybody,” Vernon joked as Swift left the stage. “We don’t know what to do now.”
Released as a surprise on July 24, 2020, Folklore represented a surprise pivot towards indie-folk that proved a critical and commercial blockbuster for Swift, earning the album of the year Grammy and topping the Billboard 200 albums chart for eight nonconsecutive weeks.
Swift followed up with Folklore‘s folky sister album, Evermore, in December of the same year. The album spent four nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200.
Watch the “exile” performance in London, captured by a fan and uploaded to Twitter, below.
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