(Not So) Short Opinion On Taylor Swift’s “folklore”

I feel kinda conflicted about folklore. The lyrics are amazing, but all the songs make me feel. so. damn. sad.

Like, pretty much every song sounds sad, and it’s kind of emotionally tiring. After listening to the entire album, I just felt emotionally drained, and not necessarily in a good way. And this is maybe just a personal preference, but I think an album is better if it doesn’t just have only happy sounding songs, or only sad sounding songs. There needs to be a little bit of a break. Lover was an incredible happy sounding album, but it still had some songs that sounded sad. Here, after a while, all the songs start sounding kinda the same. Which is sad (pun not intended), because now I can’t enjoy the lyrics as much as I normally would otherwise.

And I get that this is probably intentional. The focus is very much on the lyrics and the singing, so the music takes a bit of a backseat.

So yeah, folklore. Lyric-wise: ten out of ten. Music-wise: maybe a high five, low six? Somewhere around there.

And unfortunately for this album, my enjoyment of music is more determined by the music than by the lyrics.

Songs I currently feel are worth listening to more often:

betty, definitely betty (the key-change was heavenly, and the storytelling amazing),

my tears ricochet,

cardigan,

the last great american dynasty,

(and I guess also)

the 1.

2 additional notes:

1. Taylor’s singing is great, which, you know, kinda obvious, but I still feel like it needs to be said.

2. One of my biggest pet peeves is when song titles aren’t written with capital letters (same with “the”, “a/an”, “of” and similar words in titles of songs, movies…). This didn’t influence my opinion on this album, but it did annoy me to no end.