Taylor tinkers with her STYLE
Hats off to the princess of pop for a surprise lockdown album with a new indie sound
TAYLOR SWIFT: Folklore (EMI)
Verdict: Taylor springs a surprise
ALANIS MORISSETTE: Such Pretty Forks In The Road (RCA)
Verdict: Polished return
THIS should have been a summer spent on the road for Taylor Swift. She had intended to take her Lover Fest show around the world, headlining Glastonbury and playing in South America.
The open-air tour was due to finish this weekend with two stadium concerts in Boston. Instead, she has been locked down like the rest of us, with just her nearest and dearest for company and time on her hands.
For a singer who has managed her career with ruthless precision — jumping from country to pop; settling old scores on 2017’s peevish Reputation — quarantine must have been a shock to the system.
‘Most of the things I had planned this summer didn’t end up happening, but there is something I hadn’t planned on that did happen,’ she says. That something is her eighth studio album Folklore, a set of songs — ‘whims, dreams, fears and musings’ — written in three months, recorded with some surprising guests and released with no advance razzmatazz.
THOSE expecting her to revisit the blockbuster hooks of hits such as Shake It Off should probably look away now. Folklore is a Taylor Swift album unlike any other.
Made with some of the biggest names in American alternative music, it is soft and subtle. As its title suggests, it contains a few folky moments, though the overall sound is closer to modern indie-rock.
Swift isn’t the first major pop diva to ‘go indie’. Kylie did it on 1997’s Impossible Princess, and Miley Cyrus tapped into her natural rebelliousness on her Dead Petz project.
Folkore, however, has more in common with her former touring partner Charli XCX’s recent lockdown album How I’m Feeling Now: both records have an immediacy that stems from not overthinking things.
As for her new collaborators, the most striking name is that of Aaron Dessner, of The National, a group dubbed America’s Radiohead by Vanity Fair.
Dessner cowrites or produces 11 of the 16 tracks here and is joined by his brother Bryce, who supplies orchestration, and Swift’s regular producer Jack Antonoff.
Opening track The 1 sets a tender tone, its simple piano enhanced with a touch of modern, digital rhythm. ‘If my wishes came true, it would have been you,’ sings Taylor, yearning for the one that got away. Lost love is the theme again on Cardigan, with Swift daydreaming of hanging around in downtown bars.
If the arrangements are subdued by her usual standards, she retains some of her commercial instincts.
Dessner had brought a quirky, shimmering invention to her music but the songs themselves are well structured and tuneful: she duets brilliantly with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on the powerful ballad Exile. One thing that survives from her early days in Nashville is a respect for country’s storytelling tradition, and she deploys those skills to great effect on The Last Great American Dynasty, a song inspired by the life of the late socialite Rebekah Harkness, a middle-class divorcee who married into oil money and inherited her second husband’s fortune.
‘The wedding was charming, if a little gauche,’ we’re told. ‘There’s only so far new money goes.’ In a neat twist, Swift finishes the song by switching from the third to first person to add heft to her narrative. ‘There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen,’ she sings. ‘I had a marvellous time ruining everything.’
There’s more intrigue, too, on Illicit Affairs, an adulterous tale set to an acoustic strum with a side-dish of electronica.
Swift is dating British actor Joe Alwyn (subject of the awful London Boy on her last album, Lover), but Folklore is full of deceit and regret: ‘What started in beautiful rooms ends with meetings in parking lots.’
With little variation — and over an hour’s worth of music — Folklore could easily have been trimmed down, but it’s a bold statement from an artist acting on impulse rather than plotting every move. We are familiar with Taylor the pop star. She’s now reintroducing herself as a very credible singer-songwriter.
ALANIS MORISSETTE (left) became the queen of the confessional when her third album, Jagged Little Pill, sold 33 million copies. Songs such as You Oughta Know gave angry inspiration to a generation of female songwriters and the landmark 1995 collection was eventually turned into a Broadway musical.
There’s nothing as abrasive on Such Pretty Forks In The Road, her first album in eight years, but the Canadian still has a lot on her mind: she addresses addiction on Reasons I Drink, post-natal depression on Diagnosis, and the wrongdoing of a former business manager on Pedestal.
On Smiling, she also looks back, 25 years on, to Jagged Little Pill. Written for 2018’s Broadway show, the track is a poised guitar rocker that acknowledges the tough times — and her determination to prevail. ‘I keep on smiling, keep on moving,’ she sings, making the most of her impressive vocal range as she hits the high notes.
Written with her touring keyboardist Michael Farrell, Such Pretty Forks . . . is weightier than 2012’s Havoc And Bright Lights, and all the better for it.
Alanis, 46, sings poignantly of her three young children — ‘my mission is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze’ — and displays maturity on piano ballads Missing The Miracle and Losing The Plot.
The fury of old may have gone, but she remains a captivating performer.