evermore (2020) Album Review
By: E Ingledew
Tags: Taylor Swift Evermore, Album Review, Music, Taylor Swift

evermore (2020) Album Review

Ever since I was small, my Dad has had a project he calls Lost and Found. He often goes on walks and discovers the discarded bits and pieces people leave behind, odd gloves, hats, occasionally teddy bears. When he finds these, he photographs them and archives them. He has no plans for this project, it’s just something he does, a collection of the little bits and pieces of the things others have left behind. Sometimes people come back for them, sometimes they don’t. Either way, they are remembered.

In a roundabout way, this is what Taylor Swift’s Ninth Studio album, evermore, most resembles.

Taylor Swift has dealt in myths before. Her sixth album, Reputation, was the album to most blatantly tackle the dichotomy of Taylor Swift as American Princess, and Taylor Swift as an American girl and her recent documentary also Miss Americana begins to unpack all of this. Earlier this year, I described folklore, an “introspective pouring over of self and identity.” Swift has described evermore as being folklore’s sister album, and here, she has mostly left that introspection behind. Whilst folklore was internal, I’d describe evermore as being it’s largely external counterpart.

Traces of Swift’s intensely personal songwriting style remain, of course, but this time far more on the periphery. Majorie is about her late grandmother and the aching feeling of grief that accompanies losing someone. coney island references Swift’s earlier songs in her career to convey the pure devastation of your relationships failing over and over. The pain of failure, when you were sure that this time would be different, this time it will work out, is palpable in both singers’ voices. We return to these past loves again in long story short, which here gives Swift the benefit of perspective. Less a eulogy, this time it’s shoulder shrug at her past (unfortunately well-documented) ups and downs of dating.

The standouts, however, are where Swift allows her imagination to take over. These songs are simultaneously unique in their specificity yet universal in their emotional reach. champagne problems is a devastating song about mental health refusing to let you commit to relationships. cowboy like me is about finding your missing half, even when you were whole on your own. no body no crime (ft Haim) is about Olive Garden, and murdering your friend’s cheating spouse. The storytelling may change, but the universal emotions of love and heartbreak that have always drawn people to Swift’s writing, remain strong.

This is not, of course, all Swift’s work. Here, she has returned to a familiar group of collaborators and friends to produce and write this album, and it remains the stronger for it. Haim collaboration no body no crime is a dark country classic, somewhere between Before He Cheats and Goodbye Earl, whilst her work with The National and Bon Iver cut to the depths of evermore’s emotional despair. Throughout it all, Jack Antonoff’s production remains stripped back, until we reach penultimate track closure, which clangs and crashes with the anger of a relationship that refuses to die quietly. That being said, this is another long album from Swift, and it does suffer from a similar type of fatigue that affected folklore. It’s 31 songs in four months, and you wonder which ones deserved to make the cut. However, unlike folklore, I can’t point to any particular song that I believe maybe should have been held back, which is both a compliment and a mild criticism.

In Swift’s foreword to 1989, she says “These songs were once about my life. Now they are about yours.” In evermore, she has taken the opposite route. Instead of writing about herself, Swift instead looks at the lost and found of other people’s lives, and writes about that. These stories were always about our lives, she merely tried them on for a while, and then returned them, washed, dried, and smelling of her perfume.