The tale of how Evermore came to be is the stuff of first loves, holiday rom-coms, Taylor Swift songs. Crafting the woodsy surprise album Folklore in isolation, she felt the spark of something exciting and new, and knowing all things must pass, wanted to make it linger just a little longer. Swift started telling romantic, bittersweet stories like this as a teenage songwriter in the mid-2000s, and her first instinct was to pair her words with glossy, plainspoken country-pop. As she became one of the most famous artists on the planet, the sound of her music followed the trajectory of fame itself: boundless and airborne through the early 2010s—then omnipresent and colossal, on the verge of suffocating by 2017’s Reputation.
Now 31, Swift is enjoying a phase characterized by great unburdenings. She described her 2019 album Lover like a deep breath, and she has spent the 16 months since its release in a kind of elongated exhale. Early this year, she attempted to unload a career’s worth of self-analysis and confessions in a documentary titled Miss Americana. In one scene, filmed just ahead of her 29th birthday, she experienced a minor panic attack while eating a burrito in the studio: “I kind of don’t really have the luxury of figuring stuff out,” she said, “because my life is planned two years ahead of time.” Any day now, she predicted, her proposed tour dates would start rolling in and her future would, once again, harden into a string of obligations.
Of course, most people’s plans were canceled in 2020, and Swift is instead making the quietest, most elegant music of her career with an unexpected collaborator, the National’s Aaron Dessner. In contrast with the producers who helped amplify and smooth her songwriting for the masses, Dessner invited Swift to ramble and elaborate, to tell stories from beginning to end, to invent fictional characters with interconnected storylines. He is the friend who offers a comfortable place to spiral, leaning in and refilling their wine glasses. In other words, he would probably be really stoked about the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” with the extra verses and cursing.
The way Swift tells it, she and Dessner were so invigorated by the process of making Folklore that, without a standard press cycle and tour to follow its release this summer, they decided to just keep working. Five months later, we have Evermore, a companion album built from the same general sounds and personnel, with Jack Antonoff, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, all returning to the fold. It’s the fastest follow-up in her career and her first album to not directly overhaul the sound of its predecessor: The goal isn’t to recapture the glow of Folklore’s cabin getaway but rather to extend her stay for another season.