Taylor Swift recently celebrated the four-year anniversary of her album folklore, and the pop star revealed how the COVID-19 pandemic affected her creative process.
“I started making folklore just two days into the pandemic. Because making an album is usually such a collaborative situation, you usually get lots of people together,” Taylor, 34, told the crowd during her Wednesday, July 24, show in Hamburg, Germany. “You usually get to play all these new songs for your friends or your band, and you get to be in the same room with the people that you’re either writing with or producing with.”
Taylor continued, “All of that went away during the pandemic. So, what ended up happening with us on folklore, we sort of came up with this way to do it where I would write the songs in my house. I would sit in my guest bedroom and record the vocals and [Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner] would be on the phone. It was just like such a challenge for us as creators, but it was so fulfilling.”
The “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” singer also explained how she decided on the album art for folklore.
“Then came time to take some pictures for the album,” Taylor added. “You can’t have hair or makeup. You can’t have wardrobe. You have to just do it yourself. I called my friend who has some woods behind her house and was like, ‘Can I take some pictures in your forest?’ and she said, ‘Yes.'”
“I, like, ordered all these nightgowns online and brought them and then did my own hair and makeup,” the Grammy winner said. “It just makes me happy to look back on that period of time because we never made anything in that way before that and it was cool to know that we could and the way that you guys have embraced this album. And the storytelling on this album has just warmed my heart, and I’m just so appreciative of it.”
Wednesday night’s show wasn’t the first time Taylor has expressed her love for her eighth studio album. She also delved into some of the thoughts she had while creating folklore during her show in Melbourne, Australia, on February 17.
“[While writing folklore, I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,” Taylor told the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. “That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing folklore.”
The “All Too Well” artist continued, “That is not what I looked like, but it was what I thought I was like, so that’s all that matters, you know, it’s the delusion. I did something a little different on folklore. I decided that instead of a song about my own personal stuff … I thought I would create characters for the first time.”
