Album Review: Taylor Swift, evermore

The track “no body, no pain,” on evermore, Taylor Swift’s surprise album released last Friday, is a good example of everything good about her song writing, and most of her limitations as well. An ambivalent song about domestic abuse and an abusive husband who ends up in a swamp, it is a story told with small details and telling emotional frankness. It’s Swift moving away from confessional metaphors, working on telling stories about other people. That it features Haim, is interesting in a meta-way as well. It’s like Swift wants the polite respectability, the fashionable hipness of Haim, and on their most pop moments, Haim wants the sales of Taylor. 

Swift’s previous album folklore, released earlier this year, was about a lot of things, and this kind of balance of respectability and talent was very much one of them. These albums are too elegant - in a song about murder, domestic violence and the swamp, maybe there should be less exquisite harmonies and more grease - but Haim has always been at ironic remove; and no matter how much she tries (“Shake It Off”) Swift has never let herself be vulgar. 

evermore is not as fully formed as the one earlier this year, but both albums are full of adult themes - of ennui, exhaustion, dying elders, sex, and heartbreak. This is an elegiac album. “champagne problems,” about a broken engagement, might have similar themes of Swift’s other odes to heartbreak, but in her soft, almost timid alto, she describes brutal adult truth: She would’ve made a lovely bride/What a shame that she’s fucked in the head they said/But you’ll find the real thing instead.

The real thing - she is performing authenticity, but she also tries to figure out what it means to grow up. The nostalgia and childhood innocence is absent here, especially on the melancholic “cowboy like me”, where she sings Never wanted love/Just a fancy car/Now I'm waiting by the phone/Like I'm sitting in an airport bar, or in (maybe the album’s best song) “marjorie”, an encomium for a lost elder, which describes the subjects life as Watched as you signed your name: Marjorie/All your closets of backlogged dreams

That kind of move from the adult panic of lost opportunity, a panic told softly, and the growing up, ready to explain who one is, without pressure, grows throughout the album. I’ve never enjoyed the game of “spot the biographical clues” that critics often play with Swift’s lyrics. This album, maybe more than folklore, is better for the movement away from those kinds of takes, though when she says And in the disbelief, I can't face reinvention I haven't met the new me yet on the song “happiness”, she is still teasing listeners. She still cares very much what people think do, and though this album is quieter, it is deeply ambitious. Compared to folklore, this seems less ambitious, more minor; but I am not sure if I mean minor as not very interesting, or minor as small, modest, intimate, and barbed in the right places.

evermore was released December 11, 2020 on Universal Music Canada.
Listen to it here.