A Taylor Swift Stan Review of evermore

(The Swiftening Series: 1. folklore | 2. Lover | 3. reputation | 4. 1989 | 5. Red | 6. Speak Now | 7. Fearless | 8. Taylor Swift

Bonus: evermore | Red TV | Midnights | Speak Now TV | 1989 TV | evermore revisited)

This past week was the third anniversary of Taylor Swift’s ninth studio album, evermore. On December 11^th, 2020, just five months after the surprise release of her eighth studio album, folklore, she did perhaps the only thing more unexpected than surprise-dropping one album – surprise-dropping another.

Two days later (ironically on Taylor Swift’s birthday, though I didn’t know it at the time), I, encouraged by my lifelong Swiftie friend Sam, decided to give the album a review, intrigued by the novelty of me, a staunch Taylor Swift non-enjoyer, giving my opinion on it. That initial review sparked a curiosity that would lead me on a two-month marathon review session of all of Taylor’s discography which I entitled “The Swiftening”. Little did I know, what would start out as a novelty blog series idea would become a fandom for me.

So, at the same time that Swifties celebrate the three-year anniversary of one of Taylor’s most thematically interesting albums, I also get to celebrate my three-year anniversary of Swiftieism.

One of the things about running a blog like this for as long as I have is the fact that I can very easily go back and view my perspectives and opinions from years ago. This can sometimes be something fun and cool – but in this particular case, this is a personal embarrassment for me. The truth is, my initial review of evermore makes me absolutely cringe.

Perhaps this was just a flaw of the project, but I was approaching an album I would soon come to consider one of my favorites of all time, and my favorite Taylor album period, with absolutely zero knowledge or understanding of Taylor Swift. And while it worked out in a few of these albums’ favor that they were getting rerecordings, and thus I could accurately reflect my changing opinions from the Swiftening review to the rerecording review, the same could not happen for evermore, which would not be getting a rerecording.

So I’m faced with a choice. Let my weird, misguided, nothing opinions on one of my most beloved albums stand? Or, do I issue a correction?

Here stands the correction. Allow me to engage in a bit of a conversation with my past self so I can finally do justice to evermore. I will be pulling quotes from the original post and responding to them, letting you know the truth.

Let the pain begin.

“Over the years, I have held fast to the concept that I am not a fan of Taylor Swift. Borne of my childhood days of rejecting femininity wherever I saw it in a misguided attempt to seem cool and smart, I nonetheless, with maturity, have never found myself able to truly call myself a fan. I think she’s a great songwriter, but I find her vocals a little lacking.”

I think this was one of the more clear-headed things I said back then. To this day I do really feel that most of my opinion of Taylor Swift was borne of misguided assumptions and internalized misogyny. I do think there is something to be said about the impression that her hits leave about her discography compared to how it actually is, but I’ve grown to love even some of her more prickly radio singles with the added benefit of context. (“Look What You Made Me Do” is the biggest example that comes to mind).

What I don’t exactly agree with now is my assessment of her singing ability. This is something I’ve heard a lot from non-fans, and while I suppose I see where it comes from, I think it’s a tad bit unfair. Taylor Swift is first and foremost a singer-songwriter, and while there are certainly singer-songwriters with incredible and notable vocal talent, the key to this type of artist’s success isn’t a Ferrari of a voice. It’s about being able to convey the emotion and complexity of the lyrics. And Taylor is absolutely able to convey a broad and complex range of emotions with her voice.

As Richard Brody wrote for the New Yorker:

“Her singing is strong but not operatic, expressive but not flamboyant, perched at the border of a conversational or confessional tone. In effect, it’s a voice made to fit the lyrics—neither overwhelming nor underwhelming, an intensification and distillation of what’s extraordinary in ordinary life.”

This is how I feel exactly. She isn’t an Ariana Grande or a Mariah Carey or a Kelly Clarkson, but she doesn’t have to be. The strength of her music comes through in the words. Much like the old musical adage that “when your emotion grows too strong to speak it, you sing it”, Taylor Swift’s voice feels like what it would sound like when an ordinary person finds the voice to explain some of the most complicated emotions they could.

I will also say that I think her vocal talent has improved immensely across her career. And, of course, right? She got famous as a teenager and worked and grew and improved over the course of her life. Anyone can hear it in the comparison between her rerecordings and the originals.

“Plus, her fast descent into pop never seemed to suit her, in my opinion. She is a singer-songwriter, with her skills strong in the latter and weak in the former, and that just never seemed to gel well with pop. Even in “ME!”, her team-up with one of my favorite pop artists, Brendon Urie, she could never rise above many of her contemporaries in the same genre.”

While I still don’t particularly care for “ME!”, calling Brendon Urie “one of my favorite pop artists”? Cringe. There’s nothing else to say about it. That’s cringe. Ironically, looking back on what has happened to Urie’s career since then, I can’t help but wonder if his influence is what threw that song off the rails in the first place. I mean… this is the man who thought “Viva Las Vengeance” was going to be an alt pop hit.

On Taylor’s relationship with pop, though… I once again think this perception was due to my experience with Taylor’s hits. I actually think some of her most shining pop moments are deep cuts on her discography, or at least were at the time I wrote this. “Cruel Summer” comes to mind, or lesser hits like “Style”. But I mostly don’t agree with this anymore. I think Taylor is a pretty good pop star, she’s just not as keen as some of her contemporaries to sacrifice her lyricism for danceability. In the end, I’m glad she’s like that – she plays to her strengths.

“But now, she seemed to have found a genre that worked with her talents and also appealed to my genre tastes more. Truly dangerous. But I still didn’t find in it the magic key to retroactively adoring everything else she’s made.”

I have nothing to say about this other than… oh the irony.

“evermore is beautiful in much the same way its older sister album is – the stripped-down, acoustic wandering of the instrumentals suits Swift’s writing style so much better than her previous genre explorations have. Her lyric-writing is focused in story, in unfolding imagery and language, and lessening the production allows these sparkling moments of lyrical beauty to land so much heavier.”

I agree… mostly. What I have come to feel nowadays is a little less “folklore and evermore were Taylor Swift finally finding a genre that suits her” and more “folklore and evermore are Taylor Swift finding a genre that showcases her talents most to people unfamiliar with her previous work.” Though they are definitely more “alt” in their stylings, they ironically made Taylor Swift’s strengths far more accessible to a general audience by wrapping them in the trappings of a strong singer-songwriter.

See, this is where the confusion about her ability to do pop stems from, I think. When it’s surrounded by a funky dance beat, I don’t think most people like to pay attention to depth and complexity. I don’t necessarily think this is wrong – pop music is generally about being fun and easy to listen to – but I do think it often causes the miscommunication between Taylor’s pop music and a listener unprepared to deal with what she’s talking about.

Take “Look What You Made Me Do”, for example. Don’t laugh, but knowing the context and story behind this song adds a lot of depth to what Taylor was trying to pull off with her image here. This was an intentional villain era, the hard shell around an album about lowering your defenses and being vulnerable. However, many of the things that lend this thematic depth to the song – the prickliness of the production, the jarring feeling of the verse-chorus pattern, the hammy lyrics – are also what turned people off because they were also what made the song fail their expectations for a pop song.

By comparison, people come to expect that a folksy guitar will surround deep and thematically interesting storytelling, so I think folklore and evermore were the first albums for many – myself included – to put the listener into a headspace to actually notice some of the storytelling and lyricism that has always been present in Taylor’s music.

All that aside, though, allow me to gush about the lushness and beauty of evermore’s soundscape. The unified sound of the album is interior, glimmering, like the warm glow of a candle in a darkened cabin. Aaron Dessner absolutely went off in the texture and beauty of this album, and it’s what makes me continue to turn to it as a sort of auditory warm blanket. More on that later.

“There are moments of weakness, though. A few songs get a bit lost in the murky sadness that pervades the entire album. For example, “tolerate it” feels a bit too amorphous to really let the (honestly quite well-written) lyrics land.“

Don’t kill me, but this is one of my negative takes on the album I kind of actually still feel a little. I do appreciate the ways the song’s sound lends meaning to it. The unsteady piano notes make you feel the precarious position of the singer in this relationship – her nervousness, the way she looks to her partner for cues on how to act. The amorphousness I mention here come from that. I think this song shines most as the piece of performance art it becomes on the Eras Tour stage.

“And for how strong the opening few songs of the album are, it dips a bit in quality toward the end. “ivy” feels a little stale and “cowboy like me” is a cute concept, but the slow country-styled sound just doesn’t manage to stand out in the end.“

Oh my GOD I was so wrong!! I was so wrong!! It’s insane!!

The final tracks of evermore are actually the strongest, hands-down. My favorite way to listen to this album, condensed, by the way, is to hit play on “coney island” and let the album ride out.

“ivy” is absolutely not stale, and I’m not sure why I even came to think this. As far as storytelling on this album goes, this is the most shining moment. It’s an Austen-like tale of forbidden love between a married woman and her cavalier lover, told in some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever seen in song. I mean, come on, this chorus?

“Oh, goddamn, my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand / Taking mine, when it’s been promised to another / Oh, I can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland / My house of stone, your ivy grows / And now I’m covered in you.”

Just… where to start? The double meaning of taking a hand that has been promised to another in marriage? The imagery of her solid stone home being infiltrated by the ivy – the beautiful way that illustrates that feeling of being overtaken by love without realizing it? The dual way it suggests that said love might weaken the foundations of the home she has built for herself, just as it could lead to the end of her marriage?

Plus, the way this song ends. The anger and resignation that comes through – the way character and complexity is portrayed so beautifully in such a short amount of time. “ivy” is a masterclass.

And “cowboy like me”? More than just a novelty. I’ll chalk some of this up to me not yet going through my cowboy phase a la Orville Peck, but there is so much thematic resonance to find, and it’s about more than just a silly yeehaw cowboy song to throw back to Taylor’s country roots.

The song starts in the middle of a story, as two vagabond-types meet on the dance floor, both with their well-backed-up assumptions that a romance between the two could never work out. We then learn that things have changed – “Now I know I’m never gonna love again.”

We come to understand that this seemingly dark phrase is actually a positive one – the narrator won’t love again because she has fallen in love with this one person forever. The slow croon of the lyrics discusses why. These are two people who understand each other innately because they have the same nature of solitude. They’re both, in a sense, lone cowboys.

This is a gorgeous love song that uses the symbol of the cowboy in a very particular way to characterize the two lovers.

Swift’s other collaborations, though, are quite hit-or-miss. “coney island” is elevated from an average melancholy song of lost love thanks to the contribution of The National. I have always loved lead vocalist Matt Berninger’s deep and velvety tone, and through the contrast between his and Swift’s vocals are definitely unique and a bit difficult to adjust to, I think they add a lot of punch to a song that would otherwise be quite forgettable.

Again with the forgettable?

Okay, can I admit something to you? Back when I still did these posts on a weekly basis, I would often feel a bit rushed. In the case of album reviews like this one, I sometimes found myself feeling like I didn’t have time to form fully thought-out opinions of many of the songs. Recently I’ve found that the better way to handle discussing songs that I just didn’t have the time to fully grasp is to just not talk about them at all, but back when I still thought I needed to address every song, I used to sometimes fall back on “Well, I didn’t personally find myself moved to spend much time with this song, therefore it is forgettable.”

While, three years later, I wouldn’t say “coney island” is my favorite song on evermore, I certainly wouldn’t call it a forgettable song. If anything, it’s a bit of an obtuse song. The lyrics seem to describe two lovers longing for one another after the relationship has ended or reached some sort of snag. However, the puzzling thing is the abstract nature of much of the imagery.

Many Swifties have connected certain images in the song to different eras of Swift’s career. For example, “Were you standing in the hallway with a big cake? / Happy birthday” is often considered a reference to the song “The Moment I Knew” from Red, which features a birthday party, and “When I got into the accident / The sight that flashed before me was your face” is a reference to the car crash depicted in the bridge of “Style”. To me, this indicates that the song might have some sort of connection to, perhaps, the balance of her love life with her career. Though, if it is true that several eras are being referenced, it indicates that she likely isn’t talking about any one lover, but rather a pattern of conflict between career and personal that has taken place throughout her life.

Still, I do often find myself beating my head against the wall when it comes to figuring out this song. I do think it’s beautiful and conveys a very particular regret and melancholy, though.

The titular “evermore”, though, doesn’t have the same distinction. It’s pretty enough, I suppose, but nothing to get all that excited about, and nothing particularly new.

No sentence ever penned by this hand has ever made me angrier. I want to invent time travel so I can go back and get in a fist-fight with the version of me who would write something so absolutely awful.

“evermore” was one of the four songs I was so lucky to get in the two sets of surprise songs I witnessed, performed on the piano in Cincinnati on June 30^th. Hearing the opening piano notes ring into the cavernous expanse of Paycor Stadium brought actual tears to my eyes. I threw my hands to my mouth with such ferocity I think I remember accidentally elbowing the teenage girl sitting beside me.

“evermore” is not simply “pretty.” It is a song about the deepest most terrible depths of sadness one can go through. It is about looking back at a dark, dark time in your life with the uncomfortable feeling that you may be a major part of the reason that time was so dark. It is about regretting how you acted when you were at your lowest point, even while acknowledging the reasons you would act that way. It is about feeling like there is no end to the things you’re struggling with.

That unending sadness is exemplified by the refrain – “I had a feeling so peculiar that this pain would be for evermore.”

But then, in the bridge, it shifts to a story of pushing against that despair. In the final part of the bridge, Taylor sings:

“And when I was shipwrecked, I thought of you / In the cracks of light, I dreamed of you / And it was real enough to get me through / I swear, you were there.”

What was before an entirely solitary song, focused only on the thoughts of despair of this narrator, a second person is brought in. We don’t know who, but we know that it was love for this person that got the narrator through this storm. And even more fascinatingly, there’s a strong indication that this person isn’t even physically there – only present in thoughts and dreams, “real enough” to get the narrator through.

Still, like a spell, the words dismiss the intensity of the piano line, which calms back down into the way it was at the beginning. However, the lyrics change. She ends it on this note:

“And I was catching my breath / Floorboards of a cabin creaking under my step / And I couldn’t be sure, I had a feeling so peculiar / This pain wouldn’t be for evermore.”

In direct contrast to the harsh winter imagery of the rest of the song, the narrator finds herself in a warm cabin the last line. Finally able to catch her breath, she realizes that there is hope and there is an end to the despair she is feeling. The pain wouldn’t be for evermore.

“evermore” is the final song of the original tracklist of the album it lends its name to. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the song Taylor chose to represent this album.

Throughout evermore are many narratives, many of which deal with great pain. Sure, there are some love songs along the way, but they’re almost always tinged with a bit of darkness or anxiety. I would argue “evermore” (the track) is one of the most tragic, at least in its beginning. It is a truly painful song. But the important thing about it, and evermore as an album, is the way it also finds its way toward hope. Toward moving forward.

One of the things that continually brings me back to this album again and again and again in the three years I’ve had it in my life is this dual nature. It’s a really painful album at times. There are depths of great sadness here. I often cry at many of the songs in this album. But at all times there is a feeling of comfort and love and, ultimately, joy, which undercuts the darkness.

The people whose stories are told in this album suffer for their love, but ultimately we come to understand through this suffering how that love was worth it anyway. This is, I think, the core of evermore, an album about love that carries us through the darkness, even when that love might sometimes be its source.

This is the sort of thing I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand less than 48 hours from the release of an album from an artist I didn’t even really give a fair consideration. But in a lot of ways, I have grown with this album, seen it take on many forms in my heart.

I can’t seriously picture any piece of work Taylor could create that could unseat this album’s spot as my favorite of her albums, though I am happy to see her try. In the meantime, though, I can finally rest easy knowing that I gave this beautiful album its fair shot now, even if it took a little while for me to really get my understanding there.