evermore by Taylor Swift (2020) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Taylor Swift's second lockdown album, released 140 days after folklore and made with the same producer, Aaron Dessner.
Taylor Swift's second lockdown album, made with Aaron Dessner and released 140 days after folklore. Its best songs are among her sharpest. Its weaker ones lean on a sound she'd already built.
evermore takes folklore's method further without changing it. When the writing is at its best, on 'tolerate it' and 'marjorie', that's enough. When it isn't, the shared hush lets the weaker songs slip through.
In September 2020 Taylor Swift went to Aaron Dessner's Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley to film folklore: the long pond studio sessions. She stayed on, and recorded most of the vocals for her next album there. By Dessner's account, she wrote ''tis the damn season' overnight during the filming, then sang it to him in his kitchen. The music was a piece he'd written a long time before. That night is evermore in small. Dessner had the music already, and Swift wrote into it fast. The result is one of the best songs on the record.
The album came out on 11 December 2020, 140 days after folklore. Swift called it folklore's sister, and the family likeness is the first thing you hear. It has the same producer, many of the same players and the same lowercase titles. That's the case against it, and Mikael Wood made it in the Los Angeles Times on release. Having repeated folklore's trick, he argued, the songs had to stand up on their own. Some of them can't. But the best of them, 'tolerate it', 'champagne problems' and 'marjorie', are sharper than anything on folklore. So the album is only as good as the song you happen to be listening to.
Why make it at all? Swift's answer, in the post announcing it, was that she and her collaborators "couldn't stop writing songs". She'd always treated albums as one-off eras, she wrote, but folklore felt like coming back rather than leaving. Dessner's answer is more practical. He'd written about 30 instrumentals in lockdown, many of them meant for Big Red Machine. Swift had already written 'closure' and 'dorothea' to two of them while making folklore. Soon after folklore came out on 24 July 2020, he sent her a sketch called 'Westerly', named after her town in Rhode Island. She wrote 'willow' to it, the first song of the new record.
'willow' was also the hardest song to finish, Dessner told Sound on Sound. The final mix went back almost to the first idea. That's a small confession with a large meaning, because the whole album runs on first ideas. It became an album, he said, once Swift and William Bowery wrote the title song and Justin Vernon wrote its bridge. Bowery was a pseudonym for Joe Alwyn, Swift's partner at the time, as she'd confirmed 16 days before release. Dessner had precedents he loved: Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac, two albums released in close succession. Swift had a framing of her own. As Dessner tells it, she thought of folklore as spring and summer and evermore as autumn and winter.
It was made more in person than folklore, whose vocals were all recorded at a distance. Swift sang most of hers at Long Pond into a Telefunken U47. Dessner played a 1971 Telecaster straight into the studio's 1965 Siemens console, and an upright Yamaha piano with the soft pedal down. Bryce Dessner wrote the orchestrations in France from chord charts. Some players came to Long Pond, among them Josh Kaufman and the cellist Clarice Jensen, and others sent parts from Fall Creek in Wisconsin, St Paul and Paris. Swift said on stage in 2023 that five or six songs came from a quarantined trip to Marcus Mumford's home studio in Devon. Dessner produced every track but one. Jack Antonoff, who'd worked on folklore, produced only 'gold rush'.
Dessner wanted Swift's voice full-range, keeping the low warmth that he says pop mixes often take out. Jonathan Low's mixes leave it high and, in Sound on Sound's words, fairly dry. The credits list drum-machine programming on 11 of the 15 songs and a played kit on 9, often both at once. That gives the record its particular texture: machine beats and real drums under chamber strings. On 'tolerate it' the arrangement does the writing's work. Dessner wrote the piano part and counts it in 10/8, ten quick beats to the bar where most pop has eight, so the figure never sits square. The music won't settle, which suits a song with that title. Alexis Petridis, in the Guardian, heard the Smiths' 'Asleep' in that piano. Wood called it the album's best song, and it's hard to argue.
'champagne problems', written with Bowery, is about a refused proposal. Sam Sodomsky, in Pitchfork, heard a spacious piano ballad, and Wood praised its empathy: neither character ends up the villain. On the Eras Tour, at SoFi Stadium on 8 August 2023, the ovation after it lasted nearly 8 minutes. ''tis the damn season' and 'dorothea' are linked. Wood read them as sharing a central figure, two views of one small-town story. The first is a homecoming over the holidays, sung over Dessner's fingerpicked electric guitar. Petridis heard it as a twist on the Christmas song, and heard 'dorothea' turn an old country cliché inside out. These are character songs in the full sense. They're where the writing moves past folklore.
The record also leans towards country. Sodomsky heard Swift closer to it than in years, on 'no body, no crime' and 'cowboy like me'. The first is a murder ballad that Swift wrote alone on a rubber-bridge guitar and sent to Dessner as a voice memo. Este is killed by her husband, and the narrator kills him and frames his mistress. Danielle and Este Haim sing on it, and Josh Kaufman adds harmonica and lap steel. Petridis called it fun but inconsequential. That's fair, and it hardly matters. It's the one song here that sounds like Swift enjoying herself, and the album needs one.
'marjorie' is the plainest piece of autobiography here. Marjorie Finlay was Swift's grandmother, an opera singer, and she's credited with backing vocals: a recording of her voice is in the mix. Dessner built the rhythm with Ryan Olson's Allovers Hi-Hat Generator, from Jason Treuting's chord sticks. The music had existed for a while, Dessner told Rolling Stone, and elements of it sit behind folklore's 'peace'; that song's drone is faintly there in this one's bridge. It's the most personal song here and one of the most machine-made, and the two don't fight. 'closure' is the other risk. It began as one of Vernon's loops, and Swift's voice runs through his Messina processing chain. Wood heard Nine Inch Nails in the drums. Dessner heard it in 5/4, he told Sound on Sound, "although it's not in 5/4". Nothing else on evermore is as willing to sound strange.
Then there's the middle of the record, where the family likeness turns into a crutch. 'coney island' brings in The National, with Matt Berninger singing his part at home in Los Angeles. Wood was harshest, hearing a duet that tries and fails to find common ground between the two singers. Petridis thought the song would be unmemorable without the novelty of the pairing. Sodomsky thought Berninger sounded somewhat out of place. They're right, and the shared sound is the reason. Two quiet voices over a slow arrangement leave the song nothing to push against. Wood also heard 'willow' and 'ivy' as folklore leftovers, and said 'cowboy like me' never goes anywhere. That's too harsh on 'ivy', whose banjo and sleigh bells do real work, but fair on the other two.
Petridis made the subtler point. The unifying sound, he wrote, hides some sub-par writing. Kitty Empire, in the Observer, put it the other way round: the pastel music muffles a writer with a keen eye, and the character songs often shake it off. Either way, that's the cost of a sister record. On folklore the hush was a surprise. On evermore it's the house style, and it carries songs that wouldn't stand up in a plainer setting. The title track is the clearest case. Bowery's piano opens it, and NME's Hannah Mylrea heard Vernon's entry lift it. But it's a second Bon Iver duet after folklore's 'exile', and Wood thought it failed to connect the way 'exile' had.
None of this hurt it much commercially, though it opened far below folklore. Its first US week was 329,000 units, against folklore's 846,000. It still went to #1, Swift's eighth #1 album, and 'willow' topped the Hot 100 the same week. Guinness counts the 140 days between folklore's first week at #1 and evermore's as the shortest gap between new #1 albums by a woman. In Britain it made her the fastest woman to six #1 albums, in 8 years against Madonna's 11. Then the vinyl came out, on 28 May 2021, with pre-orders open since mid-December. In the week ending 3 June it sold 102,000 copies on vinyl in America. That was the biggest vinyl week since tracking began in 1991, and it put evermore back at #1 from #74. The record didn't last. In 2022 Harry Styles's Harry's House sold 182,000 vinyl copies in a week, and that October Swift's own Midnights sold 575,000.
Its influence is harder to pin down than its sales. Billboard, naming Swift its top pop star of 2023, noted that Noah Kahan has acknowledged the acclaim for folklore and evermore helped open a mainstream lane for his alt-folk. The credit goes to the pair, not to evermore alone, and that's telling. The second record extended what folklore started rather than pointing somewhere new. At the Grammys it was nominated for Album of the Year and lost to Jon Batiste's We Are. Its sister had won the same award in March 2021, three months after evermore came out.
So evermore is a good, uneven record that sounds like a second pass, because it was one. The songwriting is the reason to own it. 'tolerate it', 'champagne problems', ''tis the damn season' and 'marjorie' are as precise as anything Swift has written. 'closure' is the one real formal risk, and it pays off. The production is warm and careful, and sometimes too careful. What the album isn't is new. It took folklore's method and ran it again, and its weaker third leans on a sound that had already been heard. The case for it and the case against it come out about even. Keep it for those four songs and 'closure', and don't expect it to surprise you the way folklore did.
The LP came out on 28 May 2021 as a 17-track double album in two colours, green (B0033410-01) and red (B0033439-01). The red was a Target exclusive in the US and a Sunrise Records exclusive in Canada. Joe Nino-Hernes cut the original lacquers at Sterling Sound: look for 'JN-H STERLING' in the deadwax. Precision in Canada and MPO in France each pressed opaque and translucent green, so the plant shows in the runout, not the colour. Precision runouts begin '602435651279-A (2)'; MPO's begin '0602435651279-A' and carry the MPO logo and a date code, '21' on the 2021 copies. The red's deadwax carries the green edition's number. One edition stands apart: a Chinese green LP (GE1763L), cut at Masterdisk and sold with an obi strip, whose first batch was numbered.
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