Folklore (stylized in all lowercase) is the eighth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was surprise-released on July 24, 2020, through Republic Records. Conceived during quarantine in early 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the album explores themes of escapism, nostalgia, and romanticism. Swift recorded her vocals in her Los Angeles home studio and worked virtually with the producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, who operated from their studios in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
Using a set of characters and story arcs to depict fictional narratives, the album departs from the autobiographical songwriting that had characterized Swift's past albums. Experimenting with new musical styles, Folklore consists of mellow ballads driven by piano, strings, orchestration, and muted percussion. Music critics classified the genre into various styles of folk, pop, and indie, namely chamber pop, indie folk, electro-folk, folk rock, and indie rock. The album's title was inspired by the lasting legacy of folktales, and its visual aesthetic adopts cottagecore.
Folklore was accompanied by the concert documentary Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, featuring Swift's commentary and performances. The album topped the charts in Australasia and various European countries and was certified platinum or higher in Australia, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, it spent eight weeks atop the Billboard 200, was the best-selling album of 2020, and was certified six-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Three songs, "Cardigan", "The 1", and "Exile" featuring Bon Iver, reached the top 10 on international singles charts, with "Cardigan" peaking at number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
Folklore received widespread critical acclaim for its emotional weight and intricate lyricism; some journalists commented that its introspective tone was timely for the pandemic, and they regarded its sound as a bold reinvention of Swift's artistry. Many publications featured the album on their 2020 year-end rankings, and Rolling Stone included it in their 2023 revision of their "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Folklore won Album of the Year at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, making Swift the first woman to win the award three times. The album informed the concept of Swift's next record, Evermore (2020), and has inspired other artists' works.
Background In April 2020, Taylor Swift was set to embark on Lover Fest, a concert tour in support of her seventh studio album Lover (2019), which was cancelled following the COVID-19 pandemic. On July 23, 2020, nine photos were uploaded to Swift's Instagram account, all without captions, forming a black and white image of her standing alone in a forest. Subsequently, Swift made another post across all her social media accounts, announcing that her eighth studio album would be released at midnight; Swift stated: "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. And that thing is my 8th studio album, Folklore". She confirmed the image as the album's cover artwork and revealed the track list. The Wall Street Journal opined that the surprise announcement "caught fans and the music business off-guard". Billboard stated that it "blindsided the pop music world", arriving as "exciting news" during lockdown. Folklore was released eleven months after Lover—the fastest turnaround for a Swift studio album at the time, beating the one year and nine-month gap between Reputation (2017) and Lover. In another post, Swift announced that the music video for the track "Cardigan" would be released at the same time as the album.
During the YouTube premiere countdown to the "Cardigan" music video, Swift hinted that the album lyrics contained many of her signature Easter eggs: "One thing I did purposely on this album was put the Easter eggs in the lyrics, more than just the videos. I created character arcs and recurring themes that map out who is singing about who... For example, there's a collection of three songs I refer to as the Teenage Love Triangle. These three songs explore a love triangle from all three people's perspectives at different times in their lives". She referred to the album as "wistful and full of escapism. Sad, beautiful, tragic. Like a photo album full of imagery, and all the stories behind that imagery", described "Cardigan" as a song that explores "lost romance and why young love is often fixed so permanently in our memories," and identified the self-written track, "My Tears Ricochet", as the first song she wrote for the album. Uproxx narrated, "on Thursday night, that hand-drawn 'T' and 'S' could be seen up and down the timeline. Music fans and critics across genres unveiled hot takes, quoted lyrics like Myspace teens writing on the back of textbooks or crafting the perfect AIM away message, and debated Folklore place in the unimpeachable Taylor Swift canon."
Conception Swift did not expect to create an album in early 2020. After the cancellation of Lover Fest, Swift quarantined herself, during which she watched numerous films and shows, such as Rear Window (1954), L.A. Confidential (1997), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Jane Eyre (2011), Marriage Story (2019), and The Last Dance (2020), and read more books than she ever did, books that "dealt with times past, a world that doesn't exist anymore", such as Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier. The fictions inspired Swift to venture beyond her usual autobiographical style of songwriting and experiment with different narrative standpoints. In isolation during the lockdown, she let her imagination "run wild", ensuing in a set of imagery and visuals that consequently became Folklore.
Some of the imagery the singer developed includes: "An exiled man walking the bluffs of a land that isn't his own, wondering how it all went so terribly, terribly wrong. An embittered tormentor showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of obsession. A seventeen-year-old standing on a porch, learning to apologize. Lovestruck kids wandering up and down the evergreen High Line. My grandfather, Dean, landing at Guadalcanal in 1942. A misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out". Swift "poured all of [her] whims, dreams, fears, and musings" into the songs, and reached out to her "musical heroes" to collaborate with. She initially planned to release Folklore in early 2021, but it "ended up being done" sooner, and released in July 2020 without giving it second thoughts. She approached the album's creation without subjecting herself to any rules, and explained that she "used to put all these parameters on [herself], like, "How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?" If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore."
Writing and recording Swift's songwriting drifted towards escapism and romanticism for Folklore. She enlisted two producers to achieve her desired sound—her longtime collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who worked with her on 1989 (2014), Reputation, and Lover, and first-time collaborator Aaron Dessner, guitarist of American indie rock band the National. Due to COVID-19 concerns, Swift, Antonoff, and Dessner quarantined remotely, separate from each other, creating Folklore by continually exchanging digital files of instrumentals and vocals. The album ensued from a DIY process, mixed and engineered by personnel scattered across the US.
Swift had previously met the National on a Saturday Night Live episode in 2014, and attended one of their concerts in 2019, where she talked to Dessner and his twin brother Bryce. She asked Aaron Dessner about his songwriting technique, because it is her "favorite thing to ask people who I'm a fan of", and he replied his band members live in different parts of the world, and that he would make instrumental tracks and send them to the lead singer, Matt Berninger, who would write the lyrics—this ignited Swift's idea to create music in quarantine.
Due to the pandemic, all recording studios were closed, so Swift built a home studio at her Los Angeles residence, named Kitty Committee, with help from engineer Laura Sisk. Antonoff, with whom Swift worked on five songs from the album, operated from New York City while Sisk recorded Swift's vocals in Los Angeles. "My Tears Ricochet" was the first song written for Folklore. Swift wrote it about her ties with Scott Borchetta, founder of her old record label, coming to an abrupt end. Antonoff compared the writing process of "Mirrorball" and "August" to that of "Out of the Woods" (2014). Swift wrote "Mirrorball" following the cancellation of Lover Fest, as an ode to fans who find solace in her music and concerts. She wrote "August" about a fictitious mistress, and "This Is Me Trying" based on multiple narratives, such as dealing with addiction, and her own mental health in 2016 and 2017 when she felt she was "worth absolutely nothing."
In late April, Swift approached Dessner to co-write some songs remotely. He worked on eleven of the album's 16 tracks over the next few months. Dessner "thought it would take a while for song ideas to come" and "had no expectations as far as what we could accomplish remotely", but was surprised that "a few hours after sharing music, my phone lit up with a voice memo from Taylor of a fully written song—the momentum never really stopped." Swift and Dessner "were pretty much in touch daily for three or four months by text and phone calls." He would mail her folders of instrumentals, and she would write the "entire top line"—melody and lyrics, and "he wouldn't know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where [she] was going to put the chorus." The first song the duo wrote was "Cardigan", which is based on one of Dessner's sketches called "Maple". "Cardigan" was followed by "Seven" and "Peace". Upon hearing the composition of "Peace", Swift felt an "immediate sense of serenity" that roused the feeling of being peaceful, but felt it would be "too on-the-nose" to sing about finding peace; she instead wrote about complex "conflicted" feelings contrasting the track's calming sound, and recorded it in one vocal take.A few weeks later, when Swift and Dessner had written "six or seven" songs, she explained him her concept of Folklore. She told him about the work she had done earlier with Antonoff, concluding that both of her works resonate as an album. Swift and Dessner also wrote "The Last Great American Dynasty", "Mad Woman", and "Epiphany", the first of which has an array of electric guitars inspired by Radiohead's 2007 surprise album In Rainbows. The lyrics document American socialite Rebekah Harkness, whom Swift had been wanting to write about ever since she bought the Holiday House in 2013. Dessner composed the piano melody for "Mad Woman" with his earlier work on "Cardigan" and "Seven" in mind. On "Epiphany", he slowed down and reversed the sounds of different instruments to create a "giant stack of harmony", and added piano for a cinematic trope. Swift wrote the song based on the experiences of her veteran grandfather, and healthcare workers in the pandemic.