green vinyl version - Working again with Aaron Dessner, Swift challenges herself to find new dimensions within the moody atmosphere: fingerpicked ballads, colorful pop music, and her first country songs in years.
Of course, most people’s plans were canceled in 2020, and Swift is instead making the quietest, most elegant music of her career with an unexpected collaborator, the National’s Aaron Dessner. In contrast with the producers who helped amplify and smooth her songwriting for the masses, Dessner invited Swift to ramble and elaborate, to tell stories from beginning to end, to invent fictional characters with interconnected storylines. He is the friend who offers a comfortable place to spiral, leaning in and refilling their wine glasses. In other words, he would probably be really stoked about the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” with the extra verses and cursing.
The way Swift tells it, she and Dessner were so invigorated by the process of making folklore that, without a standard press cycle and tour to follow its release this summer, they decided to just keep working. Five months later, we have evermore, a companion album built from the same general sounds and personnel, with Jack Antonoff, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, all returning to the fold. It’s the fastest follow-up in her career and her first album to not directly overhaul the sound of its predecessor: The goal isn’t to recapture the glow of folklore’s cabin getaway but rather to extend her stay for another season.
While folklore seemed to materialize from nowhere as a complete, cohesive vision, evermore is structurally akin to something like 2012’s Red, where the breadth of her songwriting is as important as the depth. Within its 15-song, hour-long tracklist, you will find the closest things to country music she has written in years (the gorgeous “cowboy like me,” the Haim-assisted true-crime anthem “no body, no crime”) and colorful pop music she largely avoided in her last batch of recordings (“long story short,” “gold rush”). Elsewhere, there’s a ballad in a 5/4 time and another that bursts suddenly into a Bon Iver song halfway through before gently floating down to earth. “I haven’t met the new me yet,” Swift sings at one point. While that may be true, she has found plenty of new ideas for the old one.
| A1 | Willow |
| A2 | Champagne Problems |
| A3 | Gold Rush |
| A4 | ‘Tis The Damn Season |
| A5 | Tolerate It |
| B1 | No Body, No Crime |
| B2 | Happiness |
| B3 | Dorothea |
| B4 | Coney Island |
| C1 | Ivy |
| C2 | Cowboy Like Me |
| C3 | Long Story Short |
| C4 | Marjorie |
| D1 | Closure |
| D2 | Evermore |
| D3 | Right Where You Left Me |
| D4 | It's Time To Go |
