The Storytelling Genius of Taylor Swift’s “evermore”

With the 2006 country debut of “Tim McGraw,” if the world didn’t know that Taylor Swift was a lyrical genius, they soon would recognize the fact. Swift’s early songs encapsulate the universal teen experience: fantasizing about love, daydreaming about taking revenge upon those who have wronged you; pondering what it would have felt like to fit in with your peers, how life could have been different had others only let you in. With songs like “You Belong With Me,” “Better Than Revenge,” and the infamous “All Too Well,” you get lost in the lyrics just as much as the music, making for an emotional internal performance just as strong as the external one heard through Swift’s words.

In this way, there’s no doubting that Taylor Swift is a powerful storyteller. For years, she has taken her daydreams, first-hand experiences, and hopes for the future and turned them into songs with strong personal narratives that reach across the aisle to connect with her audience. Her fans have grown up with her, learning lessons and gaining experience just as Swift herself has, allowing Swift to create new diary-like albums that continue to resonate with listeners. However, in 2020, Swift has done much more than that.

With the July release of folklore and the more recent December release of evermore, Swift has presented her most emotionally, narratively, and thematically mature work yet, effectively proving what many of us already knew: that Taylor Swift is one of the best lyrical storytellers of our generation. A “quiet conclusion” to folklore — as Swift calls it in her Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe — the sister album evermore punctuates this argument with its diversion from Swift’s typical narration, sound, and music-making process that has so characterized her previous works.

In her past albums, Swift has stuck mostly to herself; her songs are typically written from her own perspective, about exes and friends that she personally knew, or dreams that she grew up with about love and her career. Each album reads as its own diary; the songs their individual diary entries. This is what fans have always loved so much about Swift’s storytelling: it has always been deeply personal, allowing us to see ourselves reflected within the songs, and within Taylor Swift herself. However, what makes evermore — as well as folklore — different is the obvious distance Swift puts between herself and the album’s narratives.

Unlike the tabloid-attention-grabbing experiences Swift has written about previously, the stories in evermore — while still containing many personal elements — are less documentary than they are fictitious, something Swift dove into for the first time in folklore. As she talks about in her interview with Lowe, folklore opened the doors for her in the way that she was able to write and create music from a more distant stance for the first time. Swift realized — after the incredible success of folklore — that listeners were interested even when her songs did not stick to her life to a T (no pun intended). With evermore, Swift continued with this new style, writing like the author of a fiction novel: creating characters (such as James, Betty, and Augustine) and storylines (such as the ones told in “champagne problems” and “ivy”) that do not contain Swift herself, but still very much reflect her own thoughts, emotions, and to some extent, her experiences.

This is — in part — due to the fact that, unlike the incredibly linear narratives Swift has written in her past albums, the narratives in folklore — and particularly evermore — are anything but. She drifts from one story to the next, intertwining elements of her own life with fictional ones (one of my favorite examples being in “coney island,” as in the bridge she references several lyrically famous mishaps between her and ex-lovers: “Were you standing in the hallway / With a big cake, happy birthday,” a reference to “The Moment I Knew”; “And when I got into the accident / The sight that flashed before me was your face,” a reference to “Out of the Woods”). In this way, Swift creates the same genius-level lines she always has within her music (especially in her famous bridges), but invents something newly mature and emotional with the amount of personal distance and creative freedom she has exercised within folklore’s sister album. By using her own personal narratives as mere support for the larger fictional narratives, songs like “tolerate it” and “’tis the damn season” pack just that much more a punch, telling of more broad situations that we as listeners can arguably relate to even more than Swift’s own, while still allowing us — and Swift herself — to connect to the art on a more spiritual level. The music and lyrics truly speak for themselves, making for songs that are novels of emotion, therefore making evermore’s music more personal than anything that Swift has created before.

Like a great fiction novelist, Swift allows her characters in evermore to speak for themselves, and simply conveys her own emotions through their individual stories. There’s something inherently special about this talent, and while it’s clear from previous albums that Swift has always been able to do this with her own narratives, it wasn’t until folklore — and now evermore — that it has become apparent that Swift is not only capable of writing deeper, more emotionally attuned work, but excels at it.

And although not necessarily following in content, evermore most definitely feels like the little sister it is to folklore, reading like the sequel to a novel with its connections in theme, emotion, and narrative, as well as sound and structure.

While it’s true that both historically and recently the various fan theories brought on by Swift’s penchant for Easter eggs in her songs and their accompanying visuals have led to us Swifties being taken for fools, this hasn’t halted the endless interpretations and analyzations of evermore’s tracklist — particularly in comparison to folklore’s. For as much time as I’ve spent on the Taylor Swift side of TikTok and Tumblr, I still have yet to be presented with every evermore theory. There have been narrative speculations — that “willow” is Augustine’s (Swift’s nickname for the girl in “august”) story continued; that the character in “this is me trying” reappears in “champagne problems” — that truly go in all different directions, interpreted through the lens of folklore’s narrative, Swift’s own personal life, and the broader lens of the collective. These connections — especially those that are more universal to the emotional experiences nearly all of us go through at least once in life — bring about a sense of maturity that has been somewhat sparse in Swift’s previous albums. With the seamless and obvious flow between folklore and evermore, it’s made clear that the stories within both albums run deeper than their appearance.

Thematically, there’s an obvious likeness and flow between the sister albums, as both deal with feelings of isolation, endings, and dreams of what-ifs. Songs like “seven” and “dorothea” sound literally like sisters, while “ivy” sounds like an early 19th-century retelling of “august;” “tolerate it” like a prequel to “my tears ricochet.” Although evermore is a powerful album on its own, there’s no doubt that the existence of folklore allows the sister album to thrive within a larger, more emotionally expansive world.

In addition to the lyrics and stories themselves, evermore takes the genius sound of folklore and multiples it by two, bringing together every genre of music Swift has yet made in the studio: mixing country (“no body, no crime”; “right where you left me”), pop (“long story short”; “gold rush”), indie, and ballads into the whole work. By doing so, Swift creates an album that not only lyrically sounds like the most authentic work she’s yet created, but musically, as well. The songs feel close and intimate; full of pure sentiment and creativity that is devoid of restraints.

As she tells Lowe in their interview, evermore was created without the copious amounts of planning and control that usually goes into her albums; instead, Swift wrote and recorded what simply felt right, releasing it when it felt right to do so. Swift and her co-creators disregarded the need to be perfect, swapping perfection for emotion and therefore creating unrestrained bodies of work. Previously stifled by the feeling that she needed to tailor every aspect of her music-making endeavors to others — the industry, labels, and even fans — Swift did not have the same opportunity to create work that reaches so well across time and space to connect in a more intimate way.

In addition to the collaborations with Jack Antanoff, Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver, and boyfriend Joe Alwyn that began on folklore, Swift added the HAIM sisters, The National’s Matt Berninger and Bryce Dessner, and Marcus Mumford to the mix with evermore, further expanding the collaborative nature of the project. While the album is certainly as much a product of Swift herself as her previous albums, there is something largely distinct about evermore in the way that its songs are a reflection of the collective, going hand in hand with their creation. No longer just devices of her own, evermore’s songs take pieces of all those who had a hand in creating them; because of the mix of perspectives and stories, the songs are more open to interpretation than anything Swift has released before.

In this way, evermore is much deeper in meaning, richer in emotion, and sharper in maturity than any of Swift’s previous albums. The project was a collaborative effort — so much so that it is nearly impossible to distinguish who’s singing and writing about what, which narratives are personal and which are fiction, or from whose life the subject matter came from. While of course there are a number of typical Taylor Swift Easter eggs within the songs (for example, “He’s got my past / Frozen behind glass / But I’ve got me” in “it’s time to go,” referring to her masters that are still in the hands of Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta and executive Scooter Braun), the majority of the content within the songs is ambiguous but powerful, allowing both her co-creators and a larger range of listeners to understand, feel, and relate to evermore.

After being stunned by the gentle, emotional, and gut-wrenching folklore in July 2020, it was clear that the album marked a turning point in Swift’s musical career. The album felt like a beginning. And to some, evermore feels like an ending — with its overarching theme of healing and letting go, and marching on and moving forward. The sister album to folklore is just as — if not, more — mature as its counterpart, presenting Swift as a musical author; with evermore, it has become clear that she is one of the most profound lyrical storytellers this generation has seen yet. With the abundance of emotional and lyrical maturity, meticulously crafted connections between folklore and evermore, and the emphasis on collaborative creation, evermore seems to mark not an ending, but a beginning for Swift as a singer-songwriter. The album carries a sense of freedom that has long since been frozen by public and industry pressure; it has created a shift in attention in Swift’s creation from the noticeably personal narratives to the distinctly personal emotions — something we can only hope is to be built upon in the future with whatever Swift has to offer next. But, for now, we can content ourselves with the recognition that Taylor Swift has always been — and will possibly forever be — regarded as one of best lyrical storytellers of our generation.