Taylor Swift surprise album: ‘Evermore’ release date, music video details
Taylor Swift is certainly keeping busy in isolation.
The Grammy-winning artist surprised fans early Thursday by announcing her ninth studio album, Evermore, will be dropping ASAP: “I’m elated to tell you that my 9th studio album, and folklore’s sister record, will be out tonight at midnight eastern,” Swift tweeted on Dec. 10. “It’s called evermore.”
[LINK] Full Track List Here: Evermore — 17 New Songs by Taylor Swift
“To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs. To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in.” — Taylor Swift, 12/10/2020.
Evermore will mark the second time Swift has released a full-length album during the now year-long global coronavirus pandemic — and given fans and media less than 24 hours to anticipate the tracks. (The new track list includes “Willow,” a song which will see simultaneous release as a music video when Evermore drops.)
The release of Evermore — presented as a “sister record” to Folklore — is described by Swift as a “return” to the ethereal, gold spun world expertly fleshed out in its predecessor.
Though in spots over-polished and precious, the bulk of Folklore actually plays light as a featherbed, made cozy for the listener with equal measures childhood comfort and romantic flush. Notable tracks include “The 1” and “Cardigan,” and as appears to be the case with the upcoming midnight release, the entire album’s text is stylized to be lowercase intentionally.
Folklore dropped over the summer with little fuss and next to no advance notice. The album was described in the official accompanying release as being not merely poetic, but practical: “It’s a work of great texture and imagination … For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.”
The morning of Folklore’s unexpected release — in the long, long ago of July 23, and only 11 months after releasing her seventh studio album, Lover — Swift tweeted the surprise album would contain her “whims, dreams, fears and musings.”
Now, with Evermore (track list here) billed as a companion album to that heady amalgam, Swift tweets, “I’ve never done this before. In the past I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning.”
The popular (and insanely productive) singer’s Dec. 10 announcement has fans both suddenly and extremely excited to return with her. The half-million Twitter ‘hearts’ her album launch tweet received within mere hours is testament to eager ears.
For the new music, yes — but perhaps even more, for that familiar experience of wrapping ourselves in a cardigan of someone else’s catharsis; of lingering over raw, relatable, but accessible lyrics that weave us together as the individual bits and pieces we are, binding us stronger, even as we are being kept apart and everything feels a little too fragile.
In short: Taylor Swift is here to help, and after all else that has been (and will be) written or said about the music, the artist persona attached to it, or the day’s tabloid narrative… she just can’t help but to be good.
