One Important Lesson About Creative Work from Taylor Swift
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, this is number ten.
I thought I knew what Taylor Swift could do, which is to say, produce perfect music for evoking and binding America’s hurricanes of teenage emotion. This is not usually my thing, although there’s no question that, at that job, she’s always been one of the best. I’ve admired her talent, as well as her flair for a cross-examination, but I’ve never craved her work in large quantities.
And then she released Folklore, and it knocked me flat on my ass, where I lay weeping over her newly incisive, intimate, intricate, immaculate songwriting. I knew she was good, but not like that. I simply couldn’t have expected such a deftly painful album about frailty, lust, aging, self-absorption, and screaming on a cliffside from the person who did Shake It Off. This is not to say she won’t go back to the Shake It Off mode, but she’s touched something profound here.
Peace? That song? These lyrics?
Our coming-of-age has come and gone
Suddenly this summer, it's clear
I never had the courage of my convictions
As long as danger is nearBut I'm a fire and I'll keep your brittle heart warm
If your cascade ocean wave blues come
All these people think love's for show
But I would die for you in secret
The devil's in the details, but you got a friend in me
Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?
Are you kidding me?? Very few have captured so well the feeling of being both fiercely devoted to a lover and, simultaneously, knowing that you’re a ball of dysfunction and rusty nail-files. This is great stuff.
Well, this is the lesson. With a new collaborator, an artist’s latent potential can suddenly explode. Conversely, with the wrong collaborator, or the departure of a crucial one1, an artist’s talent can be stifled. We like to naively think of artists as single talents, even though we know better, because it’s fun to be in one-sided love with mythical creatures. But, of course, almost nobody does good work alone, and good company can entirely change what your supposedly immutable soul sounds like.
As far as I understand it, the story of Folklore goes like this. Taylor Swift runs into Aaron Dessner, composer and guitarist from the National, says she’s a big fan, and asks him if he’d like to work on some music. After he’s verified that she’s telling him the truth, he sends her a folder of some instrumental tracks, quite different than what she usually works with, and says, like, yeah tell me if you like these, I don't know, whatever.
That very evening, he receives the album’s hit, Cardigan, at 2 AM, composed on the spot, recorded on voice memo on her phone. Cardigan isn't the album’s best track, but it's top-flight professional songwriting, and, as with most of Folklore, it's a pretty big departure from the usual Swiftian style. Sure, it’s a song about an ex-lover leaving after a beautiful love affair, which is how Taytay has historically acquired her real estate. But it’s moodier, less melodically predictable, more self-deprecating, more structurally sophisticated—just plain richer.
Evidently, something about Dessner's track did something to her brain. Previously, after her Nashville youth, she’d mostly worked with people like Jack Antonoff and Max Martin, that Swedish savant who wrote almost literally every pop song you both love and hate. Given that she had those primary colors to paint with, it only made sense to use bold, simple, precise gestures.
But Dessner couldn’t write a Max Martin song if he wanted to, he doesn’t have that single-minded mathematic devotion to the adolescent ear. He's too brooding and academic, too much of a stubbly introverted ectomorph. Thus, the matte blueish sound-world he gave her in that folder demanded a different kind of work, and rising to the occasion involved reformatting her memories, persona, and whole weltanschauung. If she were working with Max Martin, she probably wouldn't have produced this song about child abuse and sweet tea in the summer, with a melody that could’ve been written by Elliott Smith. Or this moody slowdance about her lifelong tangle with her own narcissism.
Would she have gotten to that kind of place without a random folder from Dessner’s hard drive? Hard to know. Swift being the pro she is, she could probably write an excellent pop song given a looping sample of a box of crackers falling over. But Folklore itself is the product of a chance meeting. Perhaps you should try to increase the number of chance meetings in your own life.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to Interpol after theirs second album, I found out; their famously annoying bassist left. During practice, he tossed out random riffs constantly, and most songs were founded on him fucking around. He was the magic dust. Not what you’d expect!
Super interesting take. Folklore is imo the best thing to come out of the pandemic. I read it through the lens that, in lockdown, Swift finally got the chance to be a brooding introvert. But it makes sense that she realized a new side of herself through collaboration.