Recently, we’ve seen a resurgence of our favorite Taylor Swift songs. She’s been recreating her past albums and labeling them with “Taylor’s Version” at the end because she actually owns the copyrights to her music she worked so hard to produce. But even though we are looking at her past albums, there still stands one underrated album, “evermore.”
It was released in December 2020. Swift describes the album as a sister album to her past album “folklore” and states: “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.”
This album is the album that made me really feel like a Taylor Swift fan, and I don’t usually like country music. I had previously listened to her mainstream pop music in “Lover” or just the older songs like “I Knew You Were Trouble,” but this album truly had no skips. I fell in love with her lyricism and storytelling through the story, and it’s still one of my favorites despite it being released almost three years ago.
I almost feel like because not a lot of people have heard this album without her promoting it, they procrastinate on listening to it. Every one of her albums has that one song that is played on the radio relentlessly or is featured as the main song in a new Netflix show. Within all her albums, her top songs like “Blank Space” or “Cruel Summer,” or even “You Belong With Me,” are played everywhere and it encourages you to listen to the rest of the album. Even in “folklore,” the song “exile” played on the finale of the third season of “You” on Netflix. They all had promotions. It’s like “evermore” was a secret treasure.
Her lyrics in each song tell either a beautiful or gut-wrenching story. Sometimes, it feels like whiplash from how quickly the songs change the stories. Here are some of the most memorable lyrics from some songs that stuck with me.
The lead song of the album, “willow,” is like a romantic autumn song. It sets the tone for the album and is about a crush that you just cannot escape from. The lyrics explaining this idea can be:
“You know that my train could take you home
Anywhere else is hollow
I’m begging for you to take my hand
Wreck my plans, that’s my man”
The song “‘tis the damn season” talks about a past love, a comfortable one. Swift struggles with leaving behind a home romance and all the memories tied with it. It could be memories of them even growing up together and loving each other and she knows that it’s going to be over after this weekend of her visiting home. These lyrics still make my stomach turn because they are so emotional:
“And the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own
To leave the warmest bed I’ve ever known
We could call it even
Even though I’m leaving
And I’ll be yours for the weekend
’Tis the damn season”
“no body, no crime” was definitely the song that made me fall in love with this album. It’s about true crime, obviously, but mainly a story about a woman and her best friend getting away with the murder of her fictional husband, who was having an affair. Swift writes:
“Good thing my daddy made me get a boating license when I was fifteen
And I’ve cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene
Good thing Este’s sister’s gonna swear she was with me
(She was with me, dude)
Good thing his mistress took out a big life insurance policy”
I tried telling all my friends about this song because it was the most country true-crime song I’ve ever heard. An artist on Instagram, @ine8s, made this song into a comic book, and it looked amazing.
Despite all the usual hype that the rest of her albums get, this goes to show that Taylor is not a limited artist. She has no lid or capacity on how much she can write and how many different stories she can tell through her music. I think that especially if you’ve never really liked country music, you should try listening to at least one song on here. At least that’s what happened to me.