0.50.0 - Hey December, guess I'm feeling unmoored
I feel like a cut character from Garden State in saying this, but this album changed my life. I'm not talking grandiose, pack-your-bags-and-Eat-Pray-Love-yourself-to-another-country changed, but in the five years since it's 11th of December 2020 release date there are things I've done, experiences I have had, people I have met and communities I've watched flourish none of which would have happened for me had I not listened to this album for the first time. I cherish those memories, those experiences, those people and in doing so, I find myself more in love, more indebted to this album which opened those doors for me.
December of 2020 was not going great for me; nine months into an ongoing pandemic lockdown I'd gone from quietly pleased about the enforced introvert time, the greater time I got to spend with Catherine, the quieter roads, the sense of orderly calm to feeling the spiral of anxiety and isolation and humdrum routine eat away at my equilibrium. Then, in late November of that year, after a period of growing frequent silences from my work colleagues I was made redundant from my job after 14 years of good service so the company could cut costs. Facing into a coming Christmas with little to celebrate and an uncertain road ahead, I felt buffeted by forces beyond my control. I had a roof over my head, savings, a redundancy payout, a supportive partner, things were not desperate - but for the first time in over a decade I had lost the sense of security I had.
Long story short, it was a bad time.
Like every time anything throws my orbit off its axis, music is what I reach for to keep me centred, pull myself back together, and in 2020, with the growing isolation and fear it had been already pulling double duty keeping life and soul together for me. I'd listened to so much, but I needed more, craved something new and different which might speak to me, somehow encapsulate the moment of insecurity I was feeling and give it voice while promising that something worthwhile was waiting just around the corner.
In the kitchen of our house I was reading a music magazine on my phone. I can't summon up the specific publication, but the headline was words to the effect of "Taylor Swift drops second surprise full album in a year". No commentary on its quality, or tone, or how they felt about the music contained therein, a simple statement of a surprising fact - that in the face of enforced isolation, a talented musician had written, recorded and released a second album inside the same calendar year.
The broad strokes of this I've told before; I'd enjoyed Taylor's music in the past, going through a phase of listening to Red and 1989 before losing my way a little when Reputation came out. This wasn't a shot in the dark for me, but it had been five years or more since I'd listened to a Taylor Swift album, but the spark from a random article headline, combined with my prior relationship with her music, was enough to have me stop reading, put my headphones in, and find Evermore and start listening.
Because of where I'd stopped in my appreciation of Taylor's music, I was expecting something. well, pop I guess. I wasn't sure if it would fit my mood or the December weather but it was a curiosity, and itch I had to scratch. What I could never have known, not anticipated having not listened to Folklore earlier that year that what I was getting instead would be a carefully crafted storybook set to music, a quiet, expressive album which lived in the winter I was living in, a place of regret and loss and an unknown road ahead.
Whatever my expectations were, the idea that this album would be in the lineage of the best works of James Taylor and Neil Young had never crossed my mind. I delighted in the discovery of No Body, No Crime, a classic Country wronged-woman-gets-revenge song featuring HAIM, a band I'd fallen in love with a couple of years earlier, and songs with Bon Iver and Matt Berninger from The National. I listened to champagne problems on repeat relentlessly when I wasn't just playing the album from start to finish. I thought about the mournful piano at the start of the title track, the slide guitar in cowboy like me while staring out of the window into the bleak midwinter. It instantly and relentlessly changed my perception of who Taylor Swift was as a musician and a creative force and songwriter. It was the perfect album for a weird and unmoored moment in my life and it found its way into every part of my emotional state to the point where every listen takes me back there, to that cold December, and to being astonished by it.
Intellectually, in a vacuum, taken at great remove Evermore doesn't do anything revolutionary or paradigm breaking with the musical form. It's not experimental* or groundbreaking - in fact, it wears its sad country balladeering influences proudly, but the construction of it, the performance of it, the emotion of it combines in such a pleasing, intricate, personal way that, to me, makes it perfect. It's not going to grab you by the throat and command your attention, you have to want to be in the place it inhabits, the acoustic guitar and empty house aesthetic, before it captures you in its web.
For me, it came right when I needed it, when I needed something, and with it came the steps into a wider world of possibilities; by redefining what I thought Taylor Swift was from a writer of catchy, infectious country pop songs into a musician who could reinvent themselves in genre and tone while keeping the same sharp lyrical and narrative hooks, it compelled me to re-evaluate my relationship with the rest of her back catalogue. I went back through every album she released, and anticipated ones that were yet to come. I went to the Eras tour, met people online, immersed myself in other new music through my better understanding on the world of modern pop and what other music the Swifties were catching on to; and I came out of an uncertain time with a new direction, new job, new focus, and the world gradually came back to something I recognised. So I sat with a drink, in a darkened room, and listened to the green vinyl copy of this album (which I bought the same day I got my record player and have not played until now) as my nine hundred and ninety-ninth album of this very stupid and profoundly meaningful challenge I set myself.
Long story short, I survived.
* It's experimental for her, as this album and Folklore move away from 'my life as inspiration for my songs' into the world of writing narratives and characters and telling stories through that medium; but the form, you understand, is a familiar one.
