She found herself

i am writing this minutes after i just finished my first listen of folklore. i cannot even begin to find the words to say just how mindblown i am with this album. i don’t even know where to begin. her songwriting? absolutely immaculate. it has touches of the song writing we all originally fell in love with in her older music but it’s so much more mature. the story she crafted within this album isn’t even her own. she moved from writing songs about her own life and experiences and literally created a whole novel, movie, play or however this could be imagined and put it into an album. the intricacies of the lyrics and how they’re arranged within the song follows a structure we’re familiar with but it’s so far from anything she’s done before. it really follows the feel of old folk/americana style music but with a modern twist on the structure of the song itself, and it’s beyond brilliant. the stories and subjects she touched upon in these songs were so interesting i felt like i was tripping over my own thoughts the whole time trying to piece together this story. this is easily her absolute best song writing yet. the instrumentation is by far the absolute best i’ve ever heard from her. seven and this is me trying bring together so many instruments and orchestrate them all together and just make you feel so much emotion. the string arrangements and the incredibly wide variety of natural, real instruments used here boggles my mind. at times i couldn’t even figure out what i was hearing. it all just has such an immersive feel, like i felt like i was sitting in a symphony hall at times listening to this album surround me on all sides and pull me in, and to quickly jump back to the lyrics, the words taylor used to created a mental image to visualize these songs in your own head is magnificent. these songs feel like more of a movie scene than anything she’s ever done before.