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taylor-on-your-dash · 3 months ago

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WRITING OF FOLKLORE & EVERMORE TIMELINE

“I used to put all these parameters on myself like, ‘How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?’ If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is... folklore.”

December 18, 2019: Taylor records my tears ricochet. On folklore: long pond sessions, she confirms that my tears ricochet was the first song written for TS8 and she knew right away that it would take the 5th spot on the track list.

“I found myself being very triggered by any stories, movies, or narratives revolving around divorce, which felt weird because I haven't experienced it directly. There's no reason it should cause me so much pain, but all of a sudden it felt like something I had been through. I think that happens any time you've been in a 15-year relationship and it ends in a messy, upsetting way. So I wrote "My Tears Ricochet" and I was using a lot of imagery that I had conjured up while comparing a relationship ending to when people end an actual marriage. All of a sudden this person that you trusted more than anyone in the world is the person that can hurt you the worst. Then all of a sudden the things that you have been through together, hurt. All of a sudden, the person who was your best friend is now your biggest nemesis, etc. etc. etc. I think I wrote some of the first lyrics to that song after watching Marriage Story and hearing about when marriages go wrong and end in such a catastrophic way. So these songs are in some ways imaginary, in some ways not, and in some ways both. It’s definitely one of the saddest songs on the album. Picking a ‘Track Five’ is sort of a pressurized decision but I knew from day one this was probably going to be it. It’s a song about karma, about greed, about how somebody could be your best friend and your companion and your most trusted person in your life and then they could go and become your worst enemy who knows how to hurt you because they were once your most trusted person. Writing this song, it kind of occurred to me that in all of the superhero stories the hero’s greatest nemesis is the villain that used to be his best friend. When you think about that, you think about how there’s this beautiful moment in the beginning of a friendship where these people have no idea that one day, they’ll hate each other and try to take each other out. I mean, that’s really sad and terrible.”

March 5-12, 2020: Band rehearsals for Lover Fest. The band rehearsed 32 songs and Taylor sings on a few.

March 11, 2020: Taylor lands in LA. She'll stay there for the whole lockdown until May 22nd.

March 19, 2020: The state of California issue a stay-at-home order. The lockdown starts. During the Eras Tour, Taylor says that she started writing songs with Jack soon after. It's possible that illicit affairs and august were two of the first songs, as Taylor confirmed that august was the first song she wrote for the Love Triangle. This first version of august doesn't include the bridge.

[Taylor about illicit affairs] This was the first album that I’ve ever let go of that need to be 100 percent autobiographical because I think I needed to do that. I felt like fans needed to hear a 'stripped from the headlines' account of my life and it actually ended up being a bit confining. Because there’s so much more to writing songs than just what you’re feeling and your singular storyline. And I think this was spurred on by the fact that I was watching movies every day, I was reading books every day, I was thinking about other people every day. I was kind of outside my own, personal stuff. I think that’s been my favorite thing about this album: that it’s allowed to exist on its own merit without it just being, ‘Oh, people are listening to this because it tells them something that they could read in a tabloid’. It feels like a completely different experience.

[Taylor about august] In my head, I’ve been calling the girl from ‘august’ either Augusta or Augustine. What happened in my head was: ‘cardigan’ is Betty’s perspective from 20 or 30 years later, looking back on this love that was this tumultuous thing. I think Betty and James ended up together. So in my head, she ends up with him but he really put her through it. ‘august’ was obviously about the girl that James had this summer with. She seems like she’s a bad girl, but really she’s not. She’s a really sensitive person who fell for him and she was trying to seem cool and like she didn’t care because that’s what girls have to do. And she was trying to let him think that she didn’t care, but she did and she thought they had something very real. And then he goes back to Betty. So the idea that there is some bad, villain girl in any type of situation who ‘takes your man’ is a total myth because that’s not usually the case at all. Everybody has feelings and wants to be seen and loved. And Augustine…that’s all she wanted.

[Taylor] I was really excited about "August slipped away into a moment of time/August sipped away like a bottle of wine." That was a song where Jack sent me the instrumental and I wrote the song pretty much on the spot; it just was an intuitive thing. And that was actually the first song that I wrote of the "Betty" triangle. So the Betty songs are "August," "Cardigan," and "Betty." "August" was actually the first one, which is strange because it's the song from the other girl's perspective. It would be safe to assume that "Cardigan" would be first, but it wasn't. It was very strange how it happened, but it kind of pieced together one song at a time, starting with "August," where I kind of wanted to explore the element of This is from the perspective of a girl who was having her first brush with love. And then all of a sudden she's treated like she's the other girl, because there was another situation that had already been in place, but "August" girl thought she was really falling in love. It kind of explores the idea of the undefined relationship. As humans, we're all encouraged to just be cool and just let it happen, and don't ask what the relationship is—Are we exclusive? But if you are chill about it, especially when you're young, you learn the very hard lesson that if you don't define something, oftentimes they can gaslight you into thinking it was nothing at all, and that it never happened. And how do you mourn the loss of something once it ends, if you're being made to believe that it never happened at all?

Taylor had previously written down the phrase ‘Meet me behind the mall’ in her phone years ago, wanting to write it into a song.

April 17, 2020: Lover Fest is cancelled. Taylor writes mirrorball and this is me trying shortly after.

MIRRORBALL

On folklore there are a lot of songs that reference each other or have lyrical parallels and one of the ones that I like is the entire song 'this is me trying' then being referenced again in ‘mirrorball,’ which is, ‘I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try’. Sometimes when I’m writing to an instrumental track I’ll push ‘Play’ and I’ll immediately see a scene set and this was one of those cases. I just saw a lonely disco ball, twinkly lights, neon signs, people drinking beer by the bar, a couple of stragglers on the dance floor. Sort of a sad, moonlit, lonely experience in the middle of a town you’ve never been. I was just thinking that we have mirrorballs in the middle of a dance floor because they reflect light, they are broken a million times and that’s what makes them so shiny. We have people like that in society, too. They hang there and every time they break it entertains us. And when you shine a light on them it’s this glittering, fantastic thing. But then, a lot of the time when the spotlight isn’t on them they’re just still there, up on that pedestal but no one is watching them. It was a metaphor for celebrity but it’s also a metaphor for so many people. Everybody has to feel like they have to be ‘on’ for certain people. You have to be different versions of yourself for different people. Different versions at work, different versions around friends. Different versions of yourself around different friends. A different version of yourself around family. Everybody feels that they have to be in some ways duplicitous and that’s part of the human experience. But it’s also exhausting. And you learn that every one of us has the ability to become a shapeshifter. But what does that do to us?

THIS IS ME TRYING

“I’ve been thinking about people who are either suffering through mental illness, addiction or who have an everyday struggle. No one pats them on the back every day but every day they are actively fighting something. There are so many days that nobody gives them credit for that and so, how often must somebody who’s in that sort of internal struggle wanna say to everyone in the room: ‘You have no idea how close I am to going back to a dark place.’ I had this idea that the first verse would be about someone who is in a life crisis and has just been trying and failing in their relationship, has been messing things up with people they love, has been letting everyone down and has driven to this overlook, this cliff, and is just in the car, going, ‘I could do whatever I want in this moment and it could affect everything forever.’ But this person backs up and drives home. The second verse is about someone who felt like they had a lot of potential in their life. I feel like there are a lot of mechanisms for us in our school days, in high school or college, to excel and to be patted on the back for something. And then a lot of people get out of school and there are less abilities for them to get gold stars. Then you have to make all these decisions and you have to pave your own way. There’s no set class course you can take. I think a lot of people feel really swept up in that. And so I was thinking about this person who is really lost in life and then starts drinking…and every second is trying not to.”

March/April 2020: the lakes was also done remotely, but written before Taylor started collaborating with Aaron, placing it between March and April 2020:

[Taylor] “We’d gone to the Lake District in England a couple years ago. In the 19th century you had a lot of poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats who’d spend a lot of time there. And there was a poet district, these artists that moved there. They were heckled for it and made fun of for being these eccentrics and kind of odd artists who decided that they just wanted to live there. I remember thinking, ‘I could see this.’ You live in a cottage and you got wisteria growing up the outside of it…of course they escaped like that. And they had their own community of other artists who’d done the same thing. I’ve always, in my career since I was probably about twenty, written about this cottage backup plan that I have. I have been writing about that forever. I went to William Wordsworth’s grave and just sat there and I was like, ‘Wow. He went and did it.’ And you kept writing but you didn’t subscribe to the things that were killing you. And that’s really the overarching thing that I felt when I was writing folklore: I may not be able to go to The Lakes right now – or to go anywhere – but I’m going there in my head. The escape plan is working.”

[Jack] On one of my favorite songs on folklore, “The Lakes,” there was this big orchestral version, and Taylor was like, “Eh, make it small.” I had gotten lost in the string arrangements and all this stuff, and I took everything out. I was just like, “Oh, my God!” We were not together because that record was made [remotely], but I remember being in the studio alone like, “Holy shit, this is so perfect.”

This version of the lakes was released on folklore's first anniversary.

April 24, 2020: For his birthday, Aaron Dessner goes on an Instagram Live where he plays a bunch of songs including “Gaite” aka “happiness” and “Stella”, like his daughter, aka “invisible string”

April 27-28, 2020: Taylor contacts Aaron Dessner and asks him to work with her. He sends her a folder of instrumental tracks he had recorded over the years. The first one that inspires Taylor is called “Maple” which will become cardigan. She sends back a voice memo, and right after, she posts a selfie on Instagram with the caption “Not a lot going on at the moment”. What a troll.

[Taylor] The song is about a long lost romance, and why young love is often fixed so permanently within our memories. When looking back on it, why it leaves such an incredible mark and how special it made you feel; all the good things it made you feel, all the pain that it made you feel... The line about feeling like you were an old cardigan under someone's bed, but someone put you on and made you feel like you were their favorite.

[Aaron] That’s the first song we wrote. After Taylor asked if I would be interested in writing with her remotely and working on songs, I said, “Are you interested in a certain kind of sound?” She said, “I’m just interested in what you do and what you’re up to. Just send anything, literally anything, it could be the weirdest thing you’ve ever done,” so I sent a folder of stuff I had done that I was really excited about recently. “cardigan” was one of those sketches; it was originally called “Maple.” It was basically exactly what it is on the record, except we added orchestration later that my brother wrote. I sent [the file] at 9 p.m., and around 2 a.m. or something, there was “cardigan,” fully written. That’s when I realized something crazy was happening. She just dialed directly into the heart of the music and wrote an incredible song and fully conceived of it and then kept going. It harkens back to lessons learned, or experiences in your youth, in a really beautiful way and this sense of longing and sadness, but ultimately, it’s cathartic. I thought it was a perfect match for the music, and how her voice feels. It was kind of a guide. It had these lower register parts, and I think we both realized that this was a bit of a lightning rod for a lot of the rest of the record.

[Taylor] “The quality that really confounded me about Aaron’s instrumental tracks is that to me, they were immediately, intensely visual,” Swift wrote in an email. “As soon as I heard the first one, I understood why he calls them ‘sketches.’ The first time I heard the track for ‘Cardigan,’ I saw high heels on cobblestones. I knew it had to be about teenage miscommunications and the loss of what could’ve been. I’ve always been so curious about people with synesthesia, who see colors or shapes when they hear music. The closest thing I’ve ever experienced is seeing an entire story or scene play out in my head when I hear Aaron Dessner’s instrumental tracks.”

Aaron Dessner shared a screenshot from when Taylor sent him back cardigan.

April 29-30, 2020: Taylor writes seven and peace. seven is the only song that was entirely recorded at Long Pond.

SEVEN

[Aaron] This is the second song we wrote. It’s kind of looking back at childhood and those childhood feelings, recounting memories and memorializing them. It’s this beautiful folk song. It has one of the most important lines on the record: “And just like a folk song, our love will be passed on.” That’s what this album is doing. It’s passing down. It’s memorializing love, childhood, and memories. It’s a folkloric way of processing.

PEACE

[Taylor] “I think this is a song that is extremely personal to me. There are times when I feel like with everything that’s in my control, I can make myself seem like someone who doesn’t have an abnormal life and I try that every day. It’s like, 'How do I make my friends, and family, and my loved ones not see this big elephant that’s in the room for our normal life?' Because I don’t want the elephant in the room. If you’re gonna be in my life I feel like there’s a certain amount that comes with it that I can’t stop from happening. I can’t stop from you getting a call in the morning that says, ‘The tabloids are writing this today.’ I can’t help it if there’s a guy with a camera two miles away with a telescope lense taking pictures of you. I can’t stop those things from happening. And so this song was basically like, ‘Is it enough? Is the stuff that I can control enough to block out the things that I can’t?' So it makes me really emotional to hear this song.

[Taylor] To know that a lot of people related to it who aren’t talking about the same things that I’m talking about. They’re talking about human complexity. It’s about someone who you wanna provide with peace, someone you love, so you want them to have as much peace in their life as possible and reconciling the fact that you might not be their best option for that. But is it still a deal they wanna take?

[Taylor to Paul McCartney] peace is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.

[Aaron] “I wrote this, and Justin provided the pulse. We trade ideas all the time and he made a folder, and there was a pulse in there that I wrote these bass lines to. In the other parts of the composition, I did it to Justin’s pulse. Taylor heard this sketch and she wrote the song. It reminds me of Joni Mitchell, in a way — there’s this really powerful and emotional love song, even the impressionistic, almost jazz-like bridge, and she weaves it perfectly together. This is one of my favorites, for sure. But the truth is that the music, that way of playing with harmonized bass lines, is something that probably comes a little bit from me being inspired by how Justin does that sometimes. There’s probably a connection there. We didn’t talk too much about it [laughs]. The song “peace” — when she wrote that, it was just a harmonized bass and a pulse. She wrote this incredible love song to it that’s one vocal take.”

May 2020: Taylor and Aaron spend the entire month writing all the songs on folklore.

EXILE (FT. BON IVER)

Taylor and William Bowery, the singer-songwriter, wrote that song initially together and sent it to me as a sort of a rough demo where Taylor was singing both the male and female parts. It’s supposed to be a dialogue between two lovers. I interpreted that and built the song, played the piano, and built around that template. We recorded Taylor’s vocals with her singing her parts but also the male parts. We talked a lot about who she thought would be perfect to sing, and we kept coming back to Justin [Vernon]. Obviously, he’s a dear friend of mine and collaborator. I said, “Well, if he’s inspired by the song, he’ll do it, and if not, he won’t.” I sent it to him and said, “No pressure at all, literally no pressure, but how do you feel about this?” He said, “Wow.” He wrote some parts into it also, and we went back and forth a little bit, but it felt like an incredibly natural and safe collaboration between friends. It didn’t feel like getting a guest star or whatever. It was just like, well, we’re working on something, and obviously he’s crazy talented, but it just felt right. I think they both put so much raw emotion into it. It’s like a surface bubbling. It’s believable, you know? You believe that they’re having this intense dialogue. With other people I had to be secretive, but with Justin, because he was going to sing, I actually did send him a version of the song with her vocals and told him what I was up to. He was like, “Whoa! Awesome!” But he’s been involved in so many big collaborative things that he wasn’t interested in it from that point of view. It’s more because he loved the song and he thought he could do something with it that would add something.

[Taylor on exile] “Exile was a song that was written about miscommunications in relationships, and in the case of this song I imagine that the miscommunications ended the relationship - that they led to sort of the demise of this love affair. And now these two people are seeing each other out for the first time and they keep miscommunicating with each other, they can’t quite get on the same page, they never were able to. So even in their end, even after they’ve broken up they’re still not hearing each other, so we imagined that the beginning of it would be his side of the story, second verse would be her side of the story, and then the end would be sort of them talking over each other and not listening to the other, sort of like an argument. Yeah, I’m really stoked about how it turned out because it really does seem like this sort of tragedy of two people, two ships passing in the night.”

[Joe Alwyn] Alwyn doesn’t consider himself a musician or songwriter and insists that he is, in fact, an awful singer. He was merely “messing around” on the piano when Swift heard and walked over, intrigued. He had been singing the fully formed first verse to the song that became “Exile.”. “It was completely off the cuff, an accident,” he says, shrugging. “She said, ‘Can we try and sit down and get to the end together?’ And so we did. It was as basic as some people made sourdough.” I’d probably had a drink and was just stumbling around the house. We couldn’t decide on a film to watch that night, and she was like, ‘Do you want to try and finish writing that song you were singing earlier?’ And so we got a guitar and did that. I press him on this point — he wrote an entire verse to a Taylor Swift song without trying? “Who doesn’t walk around the house singing?” he asks. I explain that it’s unusual for hit songs to spring forth like that from non-musicians’ heads. He says he wasn’t trying to write to Swift’s personal sound but had been listening to a lot of the National.

[Aaron] It was Taylor’s idea to approach [Justin Vernon]. I sent him Taylor’s voice memo of her singing both parts, and he got really excited and loved the song and then he wrote the extra part in the bridge.

INVISIBLE STRING

[Taylor] When I first heard the track that [Aaron] sent me I thought, ‘I have to write something that matches it’. And pretty quickly I came upon the idea of fate. ‘Cause sometimes I just go into a rabbit hole of thinking about how things happen and I love the romantic idea that every step you’re taking, you’re taking one step closer to what you’re supposed to be, guided by this little invisible string. I wrote it right after I sent an ex a baby gift and I just remember thinking, 'This is a full signifier that life is great!'

[Aaron] That was another one where it was music that I’d been playing for a couple of months and sort of humming along to her. It felt like one of the songs that pulls you along. Just playing it on one guitar, it has this emotional locomotion in it, a meditative finger-picking pattern that I really gravitate to. It’s played on this rubber bridge that my friend put on [the guitar] and it deadens the strings so that it sounds old. The core of it sounds like a folk song. It’s also kind of a sneaky pop song, because of the beat that comes in. She knew that there was something coming because she said, “You know, I love this and I’m hearing something already.” And then she said, “This will change the story,” this beautiful and direct kind of recounting of a relationship in its origin.

MAD WOMAN

[Taylor] [“mad woman” has] these ominous strings underneath it and I was like, ‘Oh, this is female rage.' And then I was thinking the most rage provoking element of being a female is the gaslighting that happens. For centuries, we were just expected to absorb male behavior silently. And oftentimes, when we – in our enlightened and emboldened state – now respond to bad male behavior or somebody just doing something that’s absolutely out of line and we respond, that response is treated like the offense itself. There’s been situations recently with someone who’s very guilty of this in my life and it’s a person who makes me feel (or tries to make me feel) like I’m the offender by having any kind of defense to his offenses. It’s like I have absolutely no right to respond or I’m crazy. I have no right to respond or I’m angry. I have no right to respond or I’m out of line. So [Aaron] provided the musical bed for me to make that point that I’ve been trying so hard to figure out how to make…How do I say why this feels so bad?

[Aaron] That might be the most scathing song on folklore. It has a darkness that I think is cathartic, sort of witch-hunting and gaslighting and maybe bullying. Sometimes you become the person people try to pin you into a corner to be, which is not really fair. But again, don’t quote me on that [laughs], I just have my own interpretation. It’s one of the biggest releases on the album to me. It has this very sharp tone to it, but sort of in gothic folklore. It’s this record’s goth song.

EPIPHANY

[Taylor] I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I wanna write a sports story.’ Because I had just watched The Last Dance and I was thinking all in terms of sports, and winners, and underdogs. But actually, what I had been doing really frequently up until that point was I had been doing a lot of research on my grandfather who fought in World War II at Guadalcanal, which was an extremely bloody battle. And he never talked about it. Not with his sons, not with his wife. Nobody got to hear about what happened there. So my dad and his brothers did a lot of digging and found out that my granddad was exposed to some of the worst situations you could ever imagine as a human being. So I kind of tried to imagine what would happen in order to make you just never be able to speak about something. And when I was thinking about that I realized that there are people right now taking a twenty minute break in between shifts at a hospital who are having this kind of trauma happen to them right now, that they probably will never wanna speak about. And so I thought that this is an opportunity to maybe tell that story. I often feel that there have been times in my life where things have fallen apart so methodically, and I couldn’t control how things were going wrong, and nothing I did stopped it. I just felt like I’d been pushed out a plane and I was scratching on the air on the way down. I just felt like the universe was doing its thing. It was just dismantling my life and there was nothing I could do. And this is a weird situation where – ever since I started making music with [Aaron] – I felt like that was the universe forcing things to fall into place perfectly and there’s nothing I could do. It’s one of those weird things that makes you think about life a lot. This lockdown could’ve been a time where I absolutely lost my mind and instead I think this album was a real floatation device for both of us.

[Aaron] For epiphany, she did have this idea of a beautiful drone, or a very cinematic sort of widescreen song, where it’s not a lot of accents but more like a sea to bathe in. A stillness, in a sense. I first made this crazy drone which starts the song, and it’s there the whole time. It’s lots of different instruments played and then slowed down and reversed. It created this giant stack of harmony, which is so giant that it was kind of hard to manage, sonically, but it was very beautiful to get lost in. And then I played the piano to it, and it almost felt classical or something, those suspended chords. I think she just heard it, and instantly, this song came to her, which is really an important one. It’s partially the story of her grandfather, who was a soldier, and partially then a story about a nurse in modern times. I don’t know if this is how she did it, but to me, it’s like a nurse, doctor, or medical professional, where med school doesn’t fully prepare you for seeing someone pass away or just the difficult emotional things that you’ll encounter in your job. In the past, heroes were just soldiers. Now they’re also medical professionals. To me, that’s the underlying mission of the song. There are some things that you see that are hard to talk about. You can’t talk about it. You just bear witness to them. But there’s something else incredibly soothing and comforting about this song. To me, it’s this Icelandic kind of feel, almost classical. My brother did really beautiful orchestration of it.

BETTY

[Aaron] This one Taylor and William wrote, and then both Jack and I worked on it. We all kind of passed it around. This is the one where Taylor wanted a reference. She wanted it to have an early Bob Dylan, sort of a Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan feel. We pushed it a little more towards John Wesley Harding, since it has some drums. It’s this epic narrative folk song where it tells us a long story and connects back to “cardigan.” It starts to connect dots and I think it’s a beautifully written folk song.

[Taylor] I just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of ‘betty’ from another room. And I was just like, ‘Hello.’ It was a step that we would never have taken, because why would we have ever written a song together? So this was the first time we had a conversation where I came in and I was like, 'Hey, this could be really weird, and we could hate this, so because we’re in quarantine and there’s nothing else going on, could we just try to see what it’s like if we write this song together?' So he was singing the chorus of it, and I thought it sounded really good from a man’s voice, from a masculine perspective. And I really liked that it seemed to be an apology. I’ve written so many songs from a female’s perspective of wanting a male apology that we decided to make it from a teenage boy’s perspective apologizing after he loses the love of his life because he’s been foolish.

[James] has lost the love of his life basically and doesn't understand how to get it back. I think we all have these situations in our lives where we learn to really, really give a heartfelt apology for the first time. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody really messes up sometimes and this is a song that I wrote from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy. I've always loved that in music you can kinda slip into different identities and you can sing from other people's perspectives. So that's what I did on this one," the superstar explained of the song's premise, before revealing, "I named all the characters in this story after my friends' kids... and I hope you like it!

[Joe Alwyn] I’d probably had a drink and was just stumbling around the house. We couldn’t decide on a film to watch that night, and she was like, ‘Do you want to try and finish writing that song you were singing earlier?’ And so we got a guitar and did that.” Initially, Alwyn didn’t want his name credited, anticipating that what he describes as the “clickbait conversation” would distract people from actually listening to the music. So he went by William Bowery as a nod to his music-composer great-grandfather and the Manhattan street.

[Taylor] With ‘betty,’ Jack Antonoff would text me these articles and think pieces and in-depth Tumblr posts on what this love triangle meant to the person who had listened to it. And that’s exactly what I was hoping would happen with this album. I wrote these stories for a specific reason and from a specific place about specific people that I imagined, but I wanted that to all change given who was listening to it. And I wanted it to start out as mine and become other people’s. It’s been really fun to watch.

THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN DYNASTY

[Taylor] When [Aaron] sent me the track to ‘the last great american dynasty’ I had been wanting to write a song about Rebekah Harkness since 2013, probably. I’d never figured out the right way to do it because there was never a track that felt like it could hold an entire story of somebody’s life and moving between generations. When I heard that [the track] I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think this is my opening. I think this is my moment. I think I can write the Rebekah Harkness story!' It has that country music narrative device.”

[Aaron] I wrote that after we’d been working for a while. It was an attempt to write something attractive, more uptempo and kind of pushing. I also was interested in this almost In Rainbows-style latticework of electric guitars. They come in and sort of pull you along, kind of reminiscent of Big Red Machine. It was very much in this sound world that I’ve been playing around with, and she immediately clicked with that. Initially I was imagining these dreamlike distant electric guitars and electronics but with an element of folk. There’s a lot going on in that sense. I sent it before I went on a run, and when I got back from the run, that song was there [laughs].She told me the story behind it, which sort of recounts the narrative of Rebekah Harkness, whom people actually called Betty. She was married to the heir of Standard Oil fortune, married into the Harkness family, and they bought this house in Rhode Island up on a cliff. It’s kind of the story of this woman and the outrageous parties she threw. She was infamous for not fitting in, entirely, in society; that story, at the end, becomes personal. Eventually, Taylor bought that house. I think that is symptomatic of folklore, this type of narrative song. We didn’t do very much to that either.

[Taylor] “Anyone who's been there before knows that I do 'The Tour,' where I show everyone through the house. And I tell them different anecdotes about each room, because I've done that much research on this house and this woman. So in every single room, there's a different anecdote about Rebekah Harkness. If you have a mixed group of people who've been there before and people who haven't, [the people who’ve been there] are like, "Oh, she's going to do the tour. She's got to tell you the story about how the ballerinas used to practice on the lawn.” And they'll go get a drink and skip it because it's the same every time. But for me, I'm telling the story with the same electric enthusiasm, because it's just endlessly entertaining to me that this fabulous woman lived there. She just did whatever she wanted.”

Dessner and Swift were working intensively and at high speed throughout 2020, so much so that on one occasion the producer sent the singer a track and went out for a run in the countryside around Long Pond. By the time he got back, Swift had already written ‘the last great american dynasty’ and it was waiting for him in his inbox.

Late May/Early June 2020: Taylor sends Aaron the last two folklore songs, the 1 and hoax.

[Aaron] “the 1” and “hoax,” the first song and the last song, were the last songs we did. The album was sort of finished before that. We thought it was complete, but Taylor then went back into the folder of ideas that I had shared. I think in a way, she didn’t realize she was writing for this album or a future something. She wrote “the 1,” and then she wrote “hoax” a couple of hours later and sent them in the middle of the night. When I woke up in the morning, I wrote her before she woke up in LA and said, “These have to be on the record.” She woke up and said, “I agree” [laughs]. These are the bookends, you know?It’s clear that “the 1” is not written from her perspective. It’s written from another friend’s perspective. There’s an emotional wryness and rawness, while also to this kind of wink in her eyes. There’s a little bit of her sense of humor in there, in addition to this kind of sadness that exists both underneath and on the surface. I enjoy that about her writing. The song [began from] the voice memo she sent me, and then I worked on the music some and we tracked her vocals, and then my brother added orchestration. There are a few other little bits, but basically that was one of the very last things we did. [Hoax] is a big departure. I think she said to me, “Don’t try to give it any other space other than what feels natural to you.” If you leave me in a room with a piano, I might play something like this. I take a lot of comfort in this. I think I imagined her playing this and singing it. After writing all these songs, this one felt the most emotional and, in a way, the rawest. It is one of my favorites. There’s sadness, but it’s a kind of hopeful sadness. It’s a recognition that you take on the burden of your partners, your loved ones, and their ups and downs. That’s both “peace” and “hoax” to me. That’s part of how I feel about those songs because I think that’s life. There’s a reality, the gravity or an understanding of the human condition.

[Taylor on the 1] I think, ‘I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit, been saying 'Yes' instead of 'No’ has a double meaning. Opening the album with that line applies to the situation that this song is written about where you’re updating a former lover on what your life is like now and trying to be positive about it. But it was also about where I am creatively. I’m just saying ‘Yes’, I’m just putting out an album in the worst time you could put one out, I’m just making stuff with someone who I’ve always wanted to make stuff with, as long as I’ve been a fan of The National. I’m just going to say 'Yes’ to stuff and it worked out.

[Taylor on hoax] The word ‘hoax’ is another one that I love. I love that is has an ‘x’ and the way it looks and sounds. I think with this song being the last one on the album it kind of embodied all the things that this album was thematically: confessions, incorporating nature, emotional volatility and ambiguity at the same time, love that isn’t just easy. And it’s the most symbolic and poetic thing, listing all these things that this person is to you. That line, ‘You know it still hurts underneath my scars from when they pulled me apart’ – anyone in my life knows what I’m singing about there but everybody has that situation in their life where you let someone in and they get to know you and they know exactly what buttons to push to hurt you the most. That thing where the scars healed over but there’s still phantom pain. I think the part that sounds like love to me is, ‘Don’t want no other shade of blue but you. No other sadness in the world would do.’ To me that sounds like what love really is. Who would you be sad with? And who would you deal with when they were sad? And like, gray skies every day for months, would you still stay?

[Aaron] We didn’t talk about [the meaning of the album] at first. It was only after writing six or seven songs, basically when I thought my writing was done, when we got on the phone and said, “OK, I think we’re making an album. I have these six other ideas that I love with Jack [Antonoff] that we’ve already done, and I think what we’ve done fits really well with them.” It’s sort of these narratives, these folkloric songs, with characters that interweave and are written from different perspectives. She had a vision, and it was connecting back in some way to the folk tradition, but obviously not entirely sonically. It’s more about the narrative aspect of it. I think it’s this sort of nostalgia and wistfulness that is in a lot of the songs. A lot of them have this kind of longing for looking back on things that have happened in your life, in your friend’s life, or another loved one’s life, and the kind of storytelling around that. That was clear to her. But then we kept going, and more and more songs happened. It was a very organic process where [meaning] wasn’t something that we really discussed. It just kind of would happen where she would dive back into the folder and find other things that were inspiring. Or she and William Bowery would write “exile,” and then that happened. There were different stages of the process.

May 21, 2020: As stated in the folklore: long pond sessions, Taylor started recording the vocals on this day. She also finishes august while in the vocal booth.

[Taylor] In my head, I’ve been calling the girl from ‘august’ either Augusta or Augustine. What happened in my head was: ‘cardigan’ is Betty’s perspective from 20 or 30 years later, looking back on this love that was this tumultuous thing. I think Betty and James ended up together. So in my head, she ends up with him but he really put her through it. ‘august’ was obviously about the girl that James had this summer with. She seems like she’s a bad girl, but really she’s not. She’s a really sensitive person who fell for him and she was trying to seem cool and like she didn’t care because that’s what girls have to do. And she was trying to let him think that she didn’t care, but she did and she thought they had something very real. And then he goes back to Betty. So the idea that there is some bad, villain girl in any type of situation who ‘takes your man’ is a total myth because that’s not usually the case at all. Everybody has feelings and wants to be seen and loved. And Augustine…that’s all she wanted.

She previously had written down the phrase ‘Meet me behind the mall’ in her phone years ago, wanting to write it into a song.

May 22-June 5, 2020: Taylor leaves LA and goes to Upstate New York to touch up some vocals (Betty), and shooting the photoshoot at Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds' house. She also records Carolina at Long Pond. The song was recorded in one take using only instruments available before 1953.

[EW Interview] “I had this idea for the [Folklore album cover] that it would be this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830 [laughs]. Very specific. A pioneer woman sleepwalking at night. I made a mood board and sent it to Beth [Garrabrant], who I had never worked with before, who shoots only on film. We were just carrying bags across a field and putting the bags of film down, and then taking pictures. It was a blast. I'd done my hair and makeup and brought some nightgowns. These experiences I was used to having with 100 people on set, commanding alongside other people in a very committee fashion — all of a sudden it was me and a photographer, or me and my DP. It was a new challenge, because I love collaboration. But there's something really fun about knowing what you can do if it's just you doing it.”

[About Carolina] About a year & half ago I wrote a song about the story of a girl who always lived on the outside, looking in. Figuratively & literally. The juxtaposition of her loneliness & independence. Her curiosity & fear all tangled up. Her persisting gentleness & the world’s betrayal of it. I wrote this one alone in the middle of the night and then Aaron Dessner and I meticulously worked on a sound that we felt would be authentic to the moment when this story takes place. I made a wish that one day you would hear it. here The Crawdads Sing is a book I got absolutely lost in when I read it years ago. As soon as I heard there was a film in the works starring the incredible Daisy Edgar-Jones and produced by the brilliant Reese Witherspoon, I knew I wanted to be a part of it from the musical side. I wrote the song “Carolina” alone and asked my friend Aaron Dessner to produce it. I wanted to create something haunting and ethereal to match this mesmerizing story.

June 5, 2020: The Inner Circle posts the Oxford definition of the word folklore: “The traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.” adding “Taylor, your secret is safe with us.” later that day.

June 16, 2020: The Inner Circle posts the Oxford definition of the word cardigan: “A knitted sweater fastening down the front, typically with long sleeves. (Taylor, your secret remains safe with us. Here at the IC we are anxiously awaiting your big reveal)”

June-July 2020: During June and possibly early July, Aaron and Jon Low mix and master the album. It's a complicated process.

[Aaron] If there was trouble it started to be because of track counts. I probably only used 20 percent of what was actually recorded, ’cause we would try a lot of things, y’know. So, eventually the sessions got kinda crazy and you’d have to deactivate a lot of things and print things. But we got used to that. [...] I think the main thing was I wanted her vocals to have a more full range than maybe you typically hear, because I think a lot of the more pop oriented records are mixed a certain way and they take some of the warmth out of the vocal, so that it’s very bright and it kinda cuts really well on the radio. But she has this wonderful lower warmth frequency in her voice which is particularly important on a song like ‘seven’. If you carved out that mud, y’know, it wouldn’t hit you the same way. Or, like, ‘cardigan’, I think it needs that warmth, the kind of fuller feeling to it. It makes it darker, but to me that’s where a lot of emotion is.

[Aaron on the mixing process] In some instances, the final mix ended up being the never bettered rough mix, while other songs took far more work. “‘cardigan’ is basically the rough, as is ‘seven’. So, like the early, early mixes, when we didn’t even know we were mixing, we never were able to make it better. Like if you make it sound ‘good’, it might not be as good ’cause it loses some of its weird magic, y’know. But songs like ‘the last great american dynasty’ or ‘mad woman’, those songs were a little harder to create the dynamics the way you want them, and the pay off without going too far, and with also just keeping in the kind of aesthetic that we were in. Those were harder, I would say.

[Mixer Jon Low] In the beginning it did not feel real,” recalls Low. “There was this brand new collaboration, and it was amazing how quickly Aaron made these instrumental sketches and Taylor wrote lyrics and melodies to them, which she initially sent to us as iPhone voice memos. During our nightly family dinners in lockdown, Aaron would regularly pull up his phone and say, ‘Listen to this!’ and there would be another voice memo from Taylor with this beautiful song that she had written over a sketch of Aaron’s in a matter of hours. The rate at which it was happening was mind blowing. There was constant elevation, inspiration and just wanting to continue the momentum. “We put her voice memos straight into Pro Tools. They had tons of character, because of the weird phone compression and cutting midrange quality you just would not get when you put someone in front of a pristine recording chain. Plus there was all this bleed. It’s interesting how that dictates the attitude of the vocal and of the song. Even though none of the original voice memos ended up on the albums, they often gave us unexpected hints. These voice memos were such on a whim things, they were really telling. Taylor had certain phrasings and inflections that we often returned to later on. They became our reference points. “Taylor’s voice memos often came with suggestions for how to edit the sketches: maybe throw in a bridge somewhere, shorten a section, change the chords or arrangement somewhere, and so on. Aaron would have similar ideas, and he then developed the arrangements, often with his brother Bryce, adding or replacing instruments. This happened fast, and became very interactive between us and Taylor, even though we were working remotely. When we added instruments, we were reacting to the way my rough mixes felt at the very beginning. Of course, it was also dictated by how Taylor wrote and sang to the tracks.”

[Jon Low on the mixing process] Throughout the entire process we were trying to maintain the original feel. Sometimes this was hard, because that initial rawness would get lost in large arrangements and additional layering. With revisions of folklore in particular we sometimes were losing the emotional weight from earlier more casual mixes. Because I was always mixing, there was also always the danger of over mixing. “We were trying to get the best of each mix version, and sometimes that meant stepping backwards, and grabbing a piano chain from an earlier mix, or going three versions back to before we added orchestration. There were definitely moments of thinking, ‘Is this going to compete sonically? Is this loud enough?’ We knew we loved the way the songs sounded as we were building them, so we stuck with what we knew. There were times where I tried to keep pushing a mix forward but it didn’t improve the song — ‘cardigan’ is an example of a song where we ended up choosing a very early mix.

Fun fact, the released version of exile is the 41st mix. I can't link you a source, you just have to trust me on this one.

July 2020: While folklore is being finished, Taylor continues to write songs. The first two songs, that at first seem like Big Red Machine songs, are dorothea and closure.

[Aaron] A lot more of [evermore] was made from scratch. After Folklore came out, I think Taylor had written two songs early on that we both thought were for Big Red Machine, “Closure” and “Dorothea.” But the more I listened to them, not that they couldn’t be Big Red Machine songs, but they felt like interesting, exciting Taylor songs. “Closure” is very experimental and in this weird time signature, but still lyrically felt like some evolution of Folklore, and “Dorothea” definitely felt like it was reflecting on some character.

[Aaron on closure] Vernon provided the grainy beat that kicks off ‘closure’, one of two tracks on evermore that started life as a sketch for the second Big Red Machine album. “It was this little loop that Justin had given me in this folder of ‘Starters’, he calls them. I had heard that and been playing the piano to it. But I was hearing it in 5/4, although it’s not in 5/4. ‘Closure’ really opened everything up further. There were no real limits to where we were gonna try to write songs.”

In the Billboard interview above, Aaron says he thinks that Taylor wrote them after folklore was released, while in the Rolling Stone one he says they were written while finishing up the folklore mixes.

“I think I’d written around 30 of those songs in total,” Dessner recalls. “So when I started sharing them with Taylor over the months that we were working on Folklore, she got really into it, and she wrote two songs to some of that music.” One was “Closure,” an experimental electronic track in 5/4 time signature that was built over a staccato drum kit. The other song was “Dorothea,” a rollicking, Americana piano tune. The more Dessner listened to them, the more he realized that they were continuations of Folklore‘s characters and stories. But the real turning point came soon after Folklore‘s surprise release in late July, when Dessner wrote a musical sketch and named it “Westerly,” after the town in Rhode Island where Swift owns the house previously owned by Rebekah Harkness.

Dorothea is the only evermore song to have been recorded at Taylor's home studio in LA, she left LA 3 days after the release of folklore so Occam's razor, I'm guessing that the RS interview is the correct one and dorothea and closure were written in late June/early July, while the Folklorians were finishing up the album.

July 24, 2020: folklore is released, after being announced the day before.

August 6-18, 2020: To celebrate how well folklore was received, Aaron composes an instrumental track called Westerly, named after the town in Rhode Island where Taylor owns Holiday House. Taylor writes willow on it, then sends a voice memo to Aaron.

[Voice Memo] “Here's the Westerly one, written in Westerly!”

[Aaron] And I, sort of in celebration of Folklore, had written a piece of music that I titled “Westerly,” that’s where she has the house that she wrote “Last Great American Dynasty” about. I’ll do that sometimes, just make things for friends or write music just to write it, but I didn’t at all think it would become a song. And she, like an hour later, sent back “Willow” written to that song, and that sort of set [things in motion] and we just started filling this Dropbox again. It was kind of like, “What’s happening?”

There are so many stories I could share. When I sent Taylor the music for our song 'willow' — I think she wrote the entire song from start to finish in less than 10 minutes and sent it back to me. It was like an earthquake. Then Taylor said, 'I guess we are making another album.'

I liked opening the album with ['willow'] because I loved the feeling that I got, immediately upon hearing the instrumental that Aaron created for it. It felt strangely witchy, like somebody making a love potion, dreaming up the person that they want and desire, and trying to figure out how to get that person in their life. And all the misdirection, and bait and switch, and complexity that goes into seeing someone, feeling a connection, wanting them, and trying to make them a part of your life. It’s tactical at times, it’s confusing at times, it’s up to fate, it’s magical. It felt a bit magical and mysterious, which is what I want people to feel going into an album that was a collection of these stories that were going to take them in all kinds of directions. I just wanted to start them off with a setting of the vibe.

August/September 2020: Taylor writes no body, no crime, possibly while in London.

[Taylor] Working with the HAIM sisters on 'no body, no crime' was pretty hilarious because it came about after I wrote a pretty dark murder mystery song and had named the character Este, because she’s the friend I have who would be stoked to be in a song like that. I had finished the song and was nailing down some lyric details and texted her, 'You’re not going to understand this text for a few days but... which chain restaurant do you like best?' and I named a few. She chose Olive Garden and a few days later I sent her the song and asked if they would sing on it. It was an immediate 'YES.'

[Aaron] Taylor wrote that one alone and sent me a voice memo of her playing guitar — she wrote it on this rubber-bridge guitar that I got for her. It’s the same kind I play on “Invisible String.” So she wrote “No Body, No Crime” and sent me a voice memo of it, and then I started building on that. It’s funny, because the music I’ve listened to the most in my life are things that are more like that — roots music, folk music, country music, old-school rock & roll, the Grateful Dead. It’s not really the sound of the National or other things I’ve done, but it feels like a warm blanket. Taylor had specific ideas from the beginning about references and how she wanted it to feel, and that she wanted the Haim sisters to sing on it. We had them record the song with Ariel Reichshaid, they sent that from L.A., and then we put it together when Taylor was here [at Long Pond]. They’re an incredible band, and it was another situation where we were like, “Well, this happened.” It felt like this weird little rock & roll history anecdote.

[Aaron] [We realized evermore was going to end up being another album] after we’d written several songs, seven or eight or nine. Each one would happen, and we would both be in this sort of disbelief of this weird alchemy that we had unleashed. The ideas were coming fast and furiously and were just as compelling as anything on Folklore, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. At some point, Taylor wrote evermore with William Bowery, and then we sent it to Justin, who wrote the bridge, and all of a sudden, that’s when it started to become clear that there was a sister record.

September 16- 23, 2020: Taylor and Jack go to Upstate New York to record the Long Pond Studio Session. She writes 'tis the damn season there on the 17th. Afterwards Taylor stays a few more days to record the bulk of the evermore vocals: willow, champagne problems, gold rush, 'tis the damn season, tolerate it, no body no crime, coney island, ivy, long story short, marjorie, closure, evermore, and it’s time to go.

After the Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, [Taylor] stayed for quite a while and we recorded a lot. She actually wrote 'tis the damn season when she arrived for the first day of rehearsal. We played all night and drank a lot of wine after the fireside chat — and we were all pretty drunk, to be honest — and then I thought she went to bed. But the next morning, at 9:00 a.m. or something, she showed up and was like, “I have to sing you this song,” and she had written it in the middle of the night. That was definitely another moment [where] my brain exploded, because she sang it to me in my kitchen, and it was just surreal. That music is actually older — it’s something I wrote many years ago, and hid away because I loved it so much. It meant something to me, and it felt like the perfect song finally found it. There was a feeling in it, and she identified that feeling: That feeling of... “The ache in you, put there by the ache in me.” I think everyone can relate to that. It’s one of my favorites.

[Aaron] She stayed after we were done filming and then we recorded a lot. It was crazy because we were getting ready to make that film, but at the same time, these songs were accumulating. And so we thought, “Hmm, I guess we should just stay and work.”

CHAMPAGNE PROBLEMS

[Taylor] Joe and I really love sad songs. He started that one and came up with the melodic structure of it. I say it was a surprise that we started writing together, but in a way it wasn’t cause we had always bonded over music and had the same musical tastes. He’s always the person who’s showing me songs by artists and then they become my favorite songs. ‘champagne problems’ was one of my favorite bridges to write. I really love a bridge where you tell the full story in the bridge. You really shift gears in that bridge. I’m so excited to one day be in front of a crowd, when they all sing, ‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride, what a shame she’s fucked in the head’. Cause I know it’s so sad, but it’s those songs like ‘All Too Well’. Performing that song is one of the most joyful experiences I ever go through when I perform live, so when there’s a song like ‘champagne problems’ where you know it’s so sad… I love a sad song, you know?

GOLD RUSH

During the willow live stream premiere, Taylor revealed that “gold rush” is Jack's favourite song and that it takes place inside a single daydream where you get lost in thought for a minute and then snap out of it.

[Jack] gold rush was a pretty different sound than what was on folklore. Even the movement in the chorus and some of the chord changes, they're very outside of the realm for what we've done together. We have different processes. Sometimes we sit in a room, sometimes she'll send me a song, sometimes I'll send her a track. That was one where I had the track going. And she did the classic thing where you send it to her, and a very short time later, she sent back a voice note with all of these brilliant ideas of what the song is.

'TIS THE DAMN SEASON

[Aaron] '‘tis the damn season' is a really special song to me for a number of reasons. When I wrote the music to it, which was a long time ago, I remember thinking that this is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, even though it’s an incredibly simple musical sketch. But it has this arc to it, and there’s this simplicity in the minimalism of it, and the kind of drum programming in there, and I always loved the tone of that guitar. When Taylor played the track and sang it to me in my kitchen, that was a highlight of this whole time. That track felt like something I have always loved and could have just stayed music, but instead, someone of her incredible storytelling ability and musical ability took it and made something much greater. And it’s something that we can all relate to. [Note: The instrumental Aaron is talking about is called Ingrid and was written in 2013 when his daughter Ingrid Stella was born. It was released in 2018 on the album Songs Without Words.]

TOLERATE IT

[Taylor] When you watch a film or you read a book and there’s a character that you identify with, most of the time you identify with them because they’re targeting something in you that feels that you’ve been there. That’s why we relate to characters. When I was reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier I was thinking, ‘Her husband just tolerates her. She’s doing all these things, trying so hard to impress him and he’s just tolerating her the whole time.’ There was a part of me that could relate to that because at some point in my life I felt that way. So I ended up writing this song ‘tolerate it’ that’s all about trying to love someone who’s ambivalent.

[Aaron] When I wrote the piano track to 'tolerate it,' right before I sent it to her, I thought, 'This song is intense.' It’s in 10/8, which is an odd time signature. And I did think for a second, 'Maybe I shouldn’t send it to her, she won’t be into it.' But I sent it to her, and it conjured a scene in her mind, and she wrote this crushingly beautiful song to it and sent it back. I think I cried when I first heard it. It just felt like the most natural thing, you know? There weren’t limitations to the process. And in these places where we were pushing into more experimental sounds or odd time signatures, that just felt like part of the work.

CONEY ISLAND

[Taylor on coney island] “The story behind writing Coney Island - Aaron Dessner had sent me this track that he had created with his brother Bryce and I wrote the lyrics and the melody with William Bowery. I think I might have been coming from a place of somebody who’s been in a relationship for decades and wakes up one day and realizes that they have taken their partner completely for granted. So whether you wanna look at it from the perspective of somebody who’s in a new relationship or very long-standing relationship, I think it just really speaks to if people are trying to communicate but they’re two ships passing in the night, they’re trying to love each other but their signals are somehow missing each other - I just found that really interesting... and yeah, we’re really proud of this one. There were elements of it that immediately reminded me of Matt Berninger‘s vocal stylings and his writing, and I kind of targeted some of the lyrics of the second verse to sound sort of like what he might do - cause I hoped that he might sing on it. Because, you know, we already had two members of The National on the song, with Aaron and Bryce. So we got our wish and Matt sang on this song. I think he did an amazing job, I’m such a huge fan of the band and I’m really honored this was able to come together with The National.”

[Aaron on coney island] One key track on evermore, ‘coney island’, features all of the members of the National and sees Swift duetting with their singer Matt Berninger. “My brother [Bryce] actually originated that song,” says Aaron Dessner. “I sent him a reference at one point — I can’t remember what it was — and then he was sort of inspired to write that chord progression. Then we worked together to sort of develop it and I wrote a bunch of parts and we structured it. Taylor and William Bowery [the songwriting pseudonym of Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn] wrote ‘coney island’ and she sang a beautiful version. It felt kind of done, actually. But then I think we all collectively thought — Taylor and myself and Bryce — like this was the closest to a National song. Dessner then asked the brothers who make up the National’s rhythm section, drummer Bryan and bassist Scott Devendorf, to play on ‘coney island’. Matt Berninger, as he often does with the band’s own tracks, recorded his vocal at home in Los Angeles. “It was never in the same place, it was done remotely,” says Dessner, “except Bryan was here at Long Pond when he played. It was great to collaborate as a band with Taylor.”

MARJORIE

[Aaron] “Taylor’s family gave us a bunch of recordings of her grandmother,” Dessner explains. “But they were from old, very scratchy, noisy vinyl. So, we had to denoise it all using [iZotope’s] RX and then I went in and I found some parts that I thought might work. I pitch shifted them into the key and then placed them. It took a while to find the right ones, but it’s really beautiful to be able to hear her. It’s just an incredibly special thing, I think.”

EVERMORE

[Taylor] When Joe wrote the piano, I based the vocal melody on the piano, and we sent it to Justin, who then added that bridge. And Joe had written the piano part so that the tempo speeds up, and it changes. The music completely changes to a different tempo in the bridge. And Justin really latched onto that, and just 100% embraced it and wrote this beautiful sort of... The clutter of all your anxieties in your head, and they're all speaking at once. And we got the bridge back, and then I wrote this narrative of, 'When I was shipwrecked, I thought of you.' That sort of thing, where there was this beacon of hope, and then in the end, you realize the pain wouldn't be forever.

IT'S TIME TO GO

[Taylor] it’s time to go is about listening to your gut when it tells you to leave. How you always know before you know, you know?

Aaron Dessner, Jon Low, Stine Dessner and Taylor at Long Pond in September 2020.

October 6, 2020: Taylor and Paul McCartney get to chat for Rolling Stone. Taylor softly references tolerate it, ivy and willow.

Swift: I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films. McCartney: What stuff were you reading? Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use — kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

October 14, 2020: Jason Treuting records the glockenspiel on willow. (I got this date form the original willow stems)

October 28, 2020: Bryce Devendorf records the percussions on willow. (I got this date form the original willow stems)

October/November 2020: Aaron goes to see Justin Vernon in his home studio in Wisconsin, where they work on the album. Aaron writes the instrumental sketch to right where you left me before going on this trip.

[Aaron] I went to see Justin at one point — that’s the one trip I’ve made — and we worked together at his place on stuff. He plays the drums on “Cowboy Like Me” and “Closure,” and he plays guitar and banjo and sings on “Ivy,” and sings on “Marjorie” and “Evermore.” And then we processed Taylor’s vocals through his Messina chain together. He was really deeply involved in this record, even more so than the last record. He’s always been such a huge help to me, and not just by getting him to play stuff or sing stuff — I can also send him things and get his feedback. We’ve done a ton of work together, but we have different perspectives and different harmonic brains. He obviously has his own studio set up at home, but it was nice to be able to see him and work on this stuff.

November 4, 2020: Taylor shoots the evermore cover, the Red TV cover, and the EW photos.

November 7, 2020: Taylor films the willow music video.

November 20, 2020: Aaron records the bass on willow. (I got this date form the original willow stems)

November 25, 2020: Taylor is at Marcus Mumford's studio called Scarlet Pimpernel to finish evermore. They record vocals for two new songs, happiness and right where you left me, they touch up the vocals for coney island, they record Joe's piano on evermore the song, and Marcus records backing vocals on cowboy like me. She possibly stays more than one day.

Taylor has mentioned that you recorded “Happiness” just a week before the album was released. Was that something you guys wrote, recorded, and produced all at the last minute, or was it something you’d been sitting on for a while before you finally cracked the code? There were two songs like that. One is a bonus track called “Right Where You Left Me,” and the other one was “Happiness,” which she wrote literally days before we were supposed to master. That’s similar to what happened with Folklore, with “The 1” and “Hoax,” which she wrote days before. We mixed all the tracks here, and it’s a lot to mix 17 songs, it’s like a Herculean task. And it was funny, because I walked into the studio and Jon Low, our engineer here, was mixing and had been working the whole time toward this. And I came in and he’s in the middle of mixing and I was like, “There are two more songs.” And he looked at me like, “…We’re not gonna make it.” Because it does take a lot of time to work out how to finish them. But she sang those remotely. And the music for “Happiness” is something that I had been working on since last year. I had sang a little bit on it, too — I thought it was a Big Red Machine song, but then she loved the instrumental and ended up writing to it. Same with the other one, “Right Where You Left Me” — it was something I had written right before I went to visit Justin, because I thought, “Maybe we’ll make something when we’re together there.” And Taylor had heard that and wrote this amazing song to it. That is a little bit how she works — she writes a lot of songs, and then at the very end she sometimes writes one or two more, and they often are important ones.

[Taylor on cowboy like me] Take yourselves back to 2020, and I put out folklore, and I just kept writing. I thought, 'Let me make a sister album to folklore and call it evermore.' And so I started immediately. Aaron, Jack, and I were just writing remotely. And the challenge at the time was trying to figure out how to record things. Most studios were completely shut down due to Covid, understandably. I could not find a studio, essentially. So Aaron is like, 'Let me call around to see if there is anyone who is cool, and nice, and generous, and might be willing to offer up their home studio, if we do the right amount of testing, we're totally locked down, and quarantined.' And I was like, 'Okay, please, I really hope someone comes through.' And so he calls me ,'I have really really good news. Marcus Mumford said that you could record at his home studio.' So I first of all, I am so excited that he's saving us, because without this trip, we wouldn't have recorded five or six of the songs on evermore, which came from me getting in a car, driving six hours out into the country past thousands of beautiful sheep, to Marcus Mumford's beautiful house where he has a studio. So I got to do this, we get there, and the whole time I'm thinking, 'Okay, wouldn't it be so cool if he would sing on something?' Because I'm such a Mumford & Sons fan. I just think he's brilliant and has one of the most gorgeous voices in the world. So I'm like, 'Will he sing something, please?' But I didn't want to be weird about it, so I'm like, 'I wonder if fate will have him wander into the studio at the right time.' So sure enough, we're recording a song, and he wanders in at the perfect time and just kind of started humming a harmony. And I turned to him as if I hadn't been thinking of it the whole time, and I was like, 'Oh! You sound really good on that harmony! I wonder if you might sing on this song?' And he said, 'Yep, I would love to!' So essentially, because of Marcus Mumford we have a lot of the songs that probably we wouldn't have been able to put out evermore as quickly as we did. And we also have a gorgeous harmony on a song called 'cowboy like me.'

[Aaron] The music for happiness is something that I had been working on since last year. I had sang a little bit on it, too — I thought it was a Big Red Machine song, but then she loved the instrumental and ended up writing to it.

[Taylor] right where you left me is a song about a girl who stayed forever in the exact spot where her heart was broken, completely frozen in time.

Taylor at Scarlet Pimpernel Studios, and a signed sheet with cowboy like me lyrics which Taylor gave to Marcus Mumford.

December 3 & 4, 2020: Aaron works on willow for the final time, recording some synthesizers. (I got this date form the original willow stems)

[Aaron] On evermore, I would say willow was probably the hardest one to finish just because there were so many ways it could’ve gone. Eventually we settled back almost to the point where it began. So, there’s a lot of stuff that was left out of willow, just because the simplicity of the idea I think was in a way the strongest. It almost felt like a dare or something. We were writing, recording and mixing all in one kind of work stream and we went from one record to the other almost immediately. We were just sort off to the races. We didn’t really ever stop since April.

[Low] The final mix stage for evermore was “very short. There was a moment in the final week or so leading up to the release where the songs were developed far enough for me to sit down and try to make something very cohesive and final, finalising vocal volume, overall volume, and the vibe. There’s a point in every mix where the moves get really small. When a volume ride of 0.1dB makes a difference, you’re really close to being done. Earlier on, those little adjustments don’t really matter.

December 11, 2020: evermore is released.

With folklore, one of the main themes throughout that album was ‘conflict resolution’, trying to figure out how to get through something with someone, or making confessions, or trying to tell them something, trying to communicate with them. evermore deals a lot in endings of all sorts, shapes and sizes. All the kinds of ways we can end a relationship, a friendship, something toxic and the pain that goes along with that.

I have no idea what will come next. I have no idea about a lot of things these days and so I've clung to the one thing that keeps me connected to you all. That thing always has and always will be music. And may it continue, evermore.

#so it's up #cannot believe it #there are some quotes i left out bc i don't know where to put them #and i know it's a very dense timeline bc it's two albums #taylor swift #taylor swift timelines #writing of folklore timeline #writing of evermore timeline

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foxes-that-run · 7 months ago

Text

A TTPD theory

Take this as fiction, or view it as a thought experiment in how what we see can be taken in a number of ways. We are not privy to anything in Taylors life but her lyrics, social media posts and paparazzi photos, and for many years Taylor has been a continuous participant in pap photos as promotion, and keenly engaged and aware of how her fanbase reads things. I think most fans think what she wants them too, which isn't always her actual experience. She has told us this in songs like Dear Reader, Mirrorball and a lot of TTPD. Taylor has also acted out or given quotes to seed songs, in the lead up to or after their release before too.

In this post I talked about how the TTPD prologue has three muses and I'll highlight this line after the 'cosmic' muse I think is Harry:

So, here's my fan fiction/thought experiment. To me I think what started as wishing to be in a different relationship, became friendly flirting. Where I think it went wrong was in wanting different things at the time, as Taylor said in the prologue, 'some stars ever align', I still hope they do one day.

We start our story at the 2021 Grammy's (March 2021)

2021 timeline

Harry and Taylor were seen together for the first time in 6 years at the 2021 Grammy's, where both were seen looking at the other and they spoke. Their body language in the video of them talking is interesting. Taylor is leaning forward, gesturing a lot, she looks confident but also tense. Harry is the one to start it, but he looks away when she says something and it looks like he ends the conversation with pleasantries. She goes home and writes High Infidelity about resenting a partner and having an affair, outing April 29 in the process. He writes As it Was and Love of My Life about accepting something special is gone forever.

TTPD guesses for this time:

I look through people's windows - I think this song refers to the 2021 Grammy's, it refers to the muse catching their breath, tilting their head. They are someone close now distant. Sliding doors and what if's. It sounds like that conversation.

Guilty as Sin? - This song is seems early in Taylors thinking about leaving Joe, she is feeling guilty about wishing she was with someone else. High Infidelity we know was written then is oddly similar, but GAS is a current thought process with Haylor links.

Peter - I think it fits for vibes of 'life was easier on you'

May - August - Brit Awards (May 2021)

They saw each other again at the Brits in May when I think Glitch was written, Joe was in Belfast filming then.

On July 24 2021, for the anniversary of Folklore Taylor posted a photo of herself with two (double album) coffee cups (Karma MV) and text which could fit into an Eras tour Betty Speech, highlighting 'victorian ghost' and The Lakes (poets)

On 18 June 2021 Taylor announces Red TV and says “tortured by memories past”

TTPD guesses for this time:

Tortured Poets Department (because she refers to it in September and in the Red TV Announcement.

My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys - the Red TV announcement refers to Wild that is on TTPD 11 times and Red 4 times, most in that song. Taylor also used the sandcastles in 1989 Spotify Visuals

August - October 2021

This is where I wonder if a friendship was becoming flirtatious. Or with the rerecording of Red and being unhappy with Joe if perhaps Taylor was thinking more about a road not taken. Taylor had a version of the title track written and decided it was a title track and an emerging aesthetic to easter egg by September 2021. Harry was very overt too, on their anniversary he performed in white satin in Nashville wearing the Peace Ring. I think it was a flirtation then.

recorded Red (Taylors Version) in Belfast visiting Joe so was in the Haylor feels

posted this TikTok of a Glitch while recording Red TV and a request for Wildest Dreams TV

went on Fallon to promote ATW where she easter egged Typewriters, and said would try to drop easter eggs 3 years advance.

At the Tribeca Film Festival she again mentioned Typewriters, an album with an acronym, tortured poets and manuscript. She would try to drop easter eggs 3 years in advance.

Released the ATW short film with typewriters super clear and and included them in the merch too.

Harry has the first heart kiss since 2018 in St Paul! Then wears all white satin and wears and plays with his Peace Ring (for the first time in years) to perform in Nashville while Taylor in town, a few days after their anniversary, and adds To Be So Lonely to the setlist. Then he records Satellite.

TTPD guesses for this time:

Manuscript because of Red TV records (and referred to at Tribeca)

November and December 2021

This is when the majority of Midnights was written. Taylor was also not seen much after the ATW release, Joe was in Panama. You're Losing Me was recorded, if TTPD songs are from here that's hard to tell. Harry was MIA for 2 weeks before Taylors birthday and in this period Taylor wore a Gucci Lion Ring to Zoe's birthday, interesting with the amount of ring talk on TTPD. Question…? Written.

2022

2022 timeline

Matty Healy first worked with Jack sometime after 5 January.

21 January - Charlie Puth includes painting a red fence in his MV he later refers to when promoting TTPD. - So the left typewriter/Charlie Puth of it all is way too early for MH.

April 2022, Harry said “to BFs everywhere F U” which I think was directed at Joe. So he knew whatever Joe did. Drake also shouted out supportively Taylor on 19 April. Joe's costar's name in the final cut of CWF (Ep 3, 11:55).

Harry's House released on Harry and Taylors 20 May anniversary. As it was MV beforehand.

I still think it was Joever (or they were on a break) May 2022

In November I posted that I thought Midnight was the break up album. Suggesting that I think Joe and Taylor broke up by May 2022. I had thought that Joe may have agreed to a number of appearances to provide them both time to process and ready themselves for Taylors fans finding out.

I still think this, though perhaps it also could have been a break. The speed with which Taylor moved on could have that the break up was raw for us, not her.

I primarily thought this because Joe was at a random Hollywood party rather than her NYU Graduation, and she stopped liking his IG posts then, which she had done reliably.

This is to say, I think Taylor held back in Midnights and at least some of it was written before the 2 years she said at the Grammy's.

August - October 2022

By August friendly flirtation had been going on for a year, Harry dressed for eras as the rerecords were announced. They were in communication so much he knew when she was announcing things before she did. On the night of the VMAs he was dressed in blue stars to match her Midnights after party dress while Joe dragged her out to a car. I wonder if Fortnight was set after they were both at TIFF then New York for 2 weeks during Harry's residency, Harry seemed to be really struggling after that. My guess is that with the impending bad press of the Nanny/OWs relationship - any part in it being Joever would have been out of the question.

August 2022 - Harry and OW are in a Rolling Stone interview, they interviewed them in April and it came much later, but I think this is referred to in loml and something Taylor would have especially not liked given her desire for a power couple

The OW/Shia drama came to light and that relationship looked done by 5 September at the DWD premiere.

7 September - 30 October Harry wore the Peace Ring again at HSLOT shows. They were both at the Tiff Film Festival, (where Taylor mentioned typewriters again).

They were then both in New York during his residency ending 21 September, where he also played Ever Since New York for the first time in 4 years. This is my guess for when Fortnight is set.

There were blinds Joe was texting other people.

The TTPD Spotify room included a safe (vault) from Toronto 👀

In October 6 - 10 Harry postponed 2 shows due to Illness, with Sony saying Harry was not unwell. Now, other Sony artists postponed shows and this Reddit thread suggests it is over the Nanny scandal (but I don't think Harry would be so cut up about that story to cancel shows and call his mum) so there could be lots of reasons for this. But it is a real anomaly.... and Anne and Gemma flew from England to support him when he performed again.

12 October - Charlie Puth easter eggs TTPD on Fallon.

Midnights was released and Joe carried a coffee table book to avoid touching Taylor in the pap walk

Eras Tour training started September 2022 - in the Time interview Taylor said she stopped drinking and ran on the treadmill for 6 months before tour began. The Typewriters were also in the Eras set for The Man.

"This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,”" and "“Learning choreography is not my strong suit.” With the exception of Grammy night—which was “hilarious,” she says—she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.”

TTPD guesses for this time:

Fortnight - I think the references to a cheating husband (current tense) and wife, (the Clean lyric similarity of watering flowers) places this here. I think the August 2022 Rolling Stone with OW is part inspiration for that line. Also functioning alcoholic/time magazine quote, here or soon after.

loml - this song would have come after Harry's House. I think the Valiant Roar is a reference to the August 2022 Rolling Stone Interview with OW and Harry, I also wonder about June 2022.

Down Bad - This fits narratively if the Fortnight was September and it ended in October that puts Taylor 'down bad crying at the gym' while preparing for the Eras tour. The staring at the sky / CBBH reference also make sense to be after Taylor heard Satellite and re-recorded Red TV.

BDILH - Based on my theory on it ending due to scandals I think this fits here, at least in a starting form.

November - December 2022

This period is unknown to me, OW and Harry BUA, Harry bought a Ferrari he never drove. He was last seen driving in December 2022. Joe said Tortured Man's Club in an interview. Taylor and Joe go to New Orleans, seemingly argue and she visits a recording studio. So if not completely over this looks like a final blow.

TTPD guesses for this time:

Fresh Out of the Slammer, Florida!!!, Who's Afraid of Little Old Me, were recorded at the Esplanade Studios in NOLA

January - March 2023

Taylor performed at The 1975 concert, Harry rumoured there. Matty Healy accused Harry of Queer Baiting and Blinds that he hated Harry. Harry started being driven places.

Taylor went over to Harry at the Grammy's and was enthusiastic supporting him. I feel like things between Harry and Taylor were friendly, but I think that was it, she was initiating. He recorded the Satellite music video but then kept it in his pocket until May, maybe something started earlier, when things were different and finished then later. Joe was seen at the Grammy's with Jack and posted a photo of meredith. Harry tours Australia, slides into Influencer Yan Yan's DM's. He adds Woman to the setlist and kisses his heart. ER kiss. At the end of the month MHs ex says they were going fine.

TTPD guesses for this time:

imgonnagetyouback - because of him fixing his hair at the Grammy's

April & May 2023

Joever announced. I have a long post on the Maylor thing. My perspective is that Harry wasn't up for more than friends at that time, Matty is known for deep resentment of Harry. Matty & Taylor were both on tour, they weren't in the same city apart from the handful of times they were seen, and they were overseas from each other when it started and ended... and Matty implied it was not sincere. Taylors team also said it was not serious. Fans see it differently and that's OK. But to me it was trolling of the highest order from them both.

On 9 April Harry played golf at Augusta Georgia and disappeared for 2 weeks. In April 12 Taylor wore the Gucci Lion ring, she went to Florida, MH in Australia, HS MIA last seen in Georgia. Most of the MH public stuff was after that. Harry also added Stockholm Syndrome and Grapejuice to his setlist and seen outside Cartier before Taylor starts wearing the Necklace after their old anniversary. It's a mess. The MH thing ended.

TTPD guesses for this time:

Songs recorded, but like Fresh out the slammer they are likely started earlier. I think the daily pap works with nicely matching photos is to have everything happen in this 'neater' timeline.

Alchemy - Taylor said this title in the Cruel Summer speech in March, Taylor may have added to it later.

June

June is when I think things went really bad. I think this is where Taylor 'tore it all down with one conversation', which based on the Time magazine may have been wanting something public. Angry I don't wanna live forever Surprise Song and wild Betty Speeches:

"James, and he really, really, really messes things up bad with the love of his life, and he has to try to get her back, and apologize very sincerely, and profusely, and say he’s going to change and be better, and that’s all he has to do."

Taylor crying in a car in pap photos. Deux Moi reports Taylor attended HSLOT at Wembley. TR attends one Wembley show, we don't know which. Harry played Sweet Creature, maybe for Gemma's baby. The same night Taylor played Seven and said:

"I’ve always just had something happen to me, or feel a feeling, for even like seven seconds, if I feel a feeling, it’ll be like, ‘Oh! I have to write a song about this seven seconds of me feeling this way.’ It’s like, it’s genuinely been like, it’s not really a job, it’s like a full coping mechanism" ... (TTPD hint) ... "radical, the idea of a man apologizing in a beautiful, heartfelt, sincere way.’ I’m not talking about any of you. If you’re here, you’re exempt. You’re a really emotionally intelligent group. I’m sort of talking about other people right now.

TTPD guesses for this time:

Black dog, down bad, FOTS recorded, but not necessarily written.

loml - I think it fits here because Harry put Stockholm Syndrome with "I'll never leave" on the setlist in the place of Love of My Life.

Prophecy

BDILH

The rest is in the 2023 timeline

#TTPD #the tortured poets department #Taylor Swift

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droctaviolovecraft · 3 months ago

Text

"You are welcome in hell, there are only parties, no one rents you. Heaven is full of believers annoying you and offering help."

ANM #: 135-XK - "Hillbilly Jack"

Danger Level: Infernus ⚜️ | Partially Contained ⭕️

Responsible Researcher: Dr. Öctavio Kalev

Anomaly Type: Rural, Demonic, Entity, Reality-Bending

Confinement: ANM-135-XK, hereafter referred to as "Hillbilly Jack," is to be contained within a 10m x 10m heat-resistant chamber located in the Rural Anomalies Department (D-11). The walls, floor, and ceiling of this chamber must be constructed with at least 30 cm of reinforced titanium and layered with flame-retardant materials. The chamber is to be monitored at all times by thermal sensors and motion detectors. Any deviations from standard temperatures within the chamber must be reported immediately.

Personnel interacting with ANM-135-XK must not stay within proximity for longer than 30 minutes to avoid exposure to dangerous heat levels. Under no circumstances should any religious materials, symbols, or references be brought into ANM-135-XK containment chamber without prior approval from Level 4 personnel. All religious discussions are strictly prohibited, as ANM-135-XK has shown to become highly antagonistic when provoked by such topics.

In the event of a containment breach, Department-11 is to initiate Protocol Hellfire, which consists of flooding the containment area with a specialized fire-extinguishing foam and deploying heat-resistant drones to re-establish containment. All nearby personnel are to evacuate immediately to prevent exposure to high temperatures or potential attacks.

Description: ANM-135-XK is a humanoid entity standing approximately 1,96m tall, resembling a stereotypical South American hillbilly, with several exaggerated physical features. ANM-135-XK possesses large, shaggy black hair, missing teeth, and weathered, leathery skin indicative of advanced age or prolonged sun exposure. Despite its appearance, the entity does not exhibit signs of aging or decay beyond its cosmetic features.

ANM-135-XK most notable features include pointed ears, resembling folklore depictions of supernatural entities, and despite possessing human feet, the footprints left by ANM-135-XK are cloven-hoofed and burn the ground where it steps. A pentagram is carved into the back of ANM-135-XK right hand, the pentagram is said to have been self-inflicted using a knife. It is unclear what the purpose of this symbol is, but it appears to enhance the entity anomalous abilities.

ANM-135-XK also wears a necklace composed of human teeth, though analysis of these teeth has shown no direct connection to any known individuals. It is unclear where or how ANM-135-XK acquired these. The entity also wears a plain white coat over a black shirt. Additionally, ANM-135-XK wears a black ring on its middle finger. Examination of the ring has yielded no anomalous properties, though it is theorized that it may be connected to the entity’s abilities. The subject also always carries a Bible with him, keeping it at his side or under his arm, he seems to work as a type of "false apostle".

ANM-135-XK communicates through a thick northeastern Brazilian accent, often utilizing rural colloquialisms and slang common in that region. Its voice is deep and raspy, further reinforcing its unsettling presence. Despite its often jovial and playful demeanor, ANM-135-XK displays highly erratic behavior, with a tendency toward sadistic humor and irreverence toward religious figures, symbols, and beliefs.

The entity was first discovered in Recife, Pernambuco, where it had been apprehended by a group of locals who attempted to hang it for heresy. ANM-135-XK responded by turning the rope into a sentient fire snake, which attacked the mob, allowing the entity to escape. The MOTHRA Institute tracked ANM-135-XK and successfully contained it after deploying specialized heat-resistant task forces.

Jack possesses the ability to conjure and manipulate fire at will. Its most frequent display of this ability is the "burning" of the path it walks on, which causes the ground beneath its feet to scorch and leave behind cloven-hoof-shaped imprints resembling those of a large goat. These imprints are highly dangerous, as they retain extreme heat for extended periods after ANM-135-XK has left the area. ANM-135-XK appears to be entirely immune to the effects of fire and extreme temperatures. Infrared scans show that Jack's body can reach temperatures in excess of 1700°C without displaying any visible harm or discomfort.

ANM-135-XK is constantly surrounded by a pungent smell of sulfur, which becomes more pronounced when it engages in its anomalous abilities. This emission has been linked to its fire manipulation and the sulfur’s presence in the surrounding air increases exponentially when ANM-135-XK becomes agitated or excited.

ANM-135-XK is capable of exhaling jets of fire from its mouth. These flames have been recorded at temperatures upwards of 1100°C, making them capable of melting most conventional materials. This ability is rarely used but is typically a response to perceived threats or provocations. While Jack's primary means of interacting with others involves humor and taunting, prolonged exposure to the entity has shown that it can influence the mental state of nearby individuals. This includes causing feelings of hopelessness, fear, and suicidal ideation. These effects are more pronounced when ANM-135-XK engages in religious mockery.

In interviews, ANM-135-XK refers to itself as "Satan," though it is unclear whether this is a literal self-identification or a delusion. The entity has repeatedly demonstrated a masochistic streak, encouraging physical harm to itself and showing enjoyment when such harm is inflicted, though it displays no signs of damage due to its high immunity.

Despite its chaotic nature, ANM-135-XK is highly persuasive and charismatic. It has convinced several lower-level staff to engage in activities that breach protocol, often leading to disciplinary action or worse. Researchers note that ANM-135-XK has a tendency to fixate on individuals with strong religious convictions, taunting and manipulating them into questioning their faith.

Addendum 135-XK-A: Incident Log 135-XK-???

On 27/09/2024, ANM-135-XK breached containment during a routine check, causing widespread damage to D-11. The entity escaped its chamber by generating intense heat, which weakened the surrounding metal and allowed it to melt through its cell door. ANM-135-XK roamed the facility, leaving a path of destruction and burning several personnel who attempted to contain it. After █ hours, Protocol Hellfire was initiated, successfully recapturing ANM-135-XK using heat-resistant drones. Casualties numbered at ██, with 15 suffering third-degree burns.

Following this incident, ANM-135-XK containment procedures were upgraded to include reinforced titanium walls and additional flame-retardant measures.

Interview between Dr. Strike and Jack Caipira (ANM-135-XK)

Date: 09/28/2024

Location: Containment Chamber D-11, MOTHRA Institute

Interviewer: Dr. Strike (specialist in anomalous objects)

Interviewee: Jack Caipira

Dr. Strike enters the containment chamber. The intense heat is immediately noticeable, and he adjusts his steps while observing Jack, who is seated in a relaxed, almost seductive manner in a corner, surrounded by a faint smell of sulfur.

Dr. Strike: Hello, Jack, my name is Arthur ██████. How are you feeling today?

Jack Caipira: Go screw yourself, Arthur. Now that the introductions are over, I feel almost at home, just in the heat of the fire. I’d rather be in hell, drunk on whiskey. And you, skinny guy?

Dr. Strike: Uh… that’s an interesting perspective. It seems like you’ve been to hell before. What do you think of heaven, then?

Jack Caipira: Heaven? I’ve been invited a few times before. It’s just full of boring people! Packed with believers who never stop singing. There’s always some fat old lady banging a tambourine next to you. It’s a complete joke! And those little angels in skirts looking like a bunch of... (pauses) well, you know.

Dr. Strike: (taking notes) So, you prefer the company of other beings from hell?

Jack Caipira: Well, of course! That’s where things get good. Even on the damn train, there are believers! They sing so loud it’s like they think God is deaf! No offense, but I find it absurd, doc!

Dr. Strike: Speaking of which... during some past incidents and your capture, we noticed your abilities… how would you describe them? Is it something you control consciously?

Jack Caipira: Control? Hell, that’s easy! It’s like blowing on a coal. When I walk, the ground heats up, and I leave my little marks. Burning is just my way of reminding folks I’ve been around. But don’t ask for a warm handshake either.

Dr. Strike observes Jack’s feet, noting the heated marks on the ground.

Dr. Strike: Are those marks down there dangerous?

Jack Caipira: Depends on who’s walking around here, doc! If it’s not you, it’s fine. But anyone who dares get in my way might get a nice hot surprise!

Dr. Strike: Got it. And what about that symbol on your hand, the pentagram? Does it have any special effect on you?

Jack Caipira: (raises his hand and looks at the pentagram) Oh, this? Just a reminder of how special I am. A little reminder that it’s not all fun and games, but I do enjoy a good laugh!

Dr. Strike: Can we just call you Jack? Or do you have a real name?

Jack Caipira: (laughing) My name’s Satan, nice to meet you. But on my birth certificate, it says “Adam.” I think I like Jack Caipira better, though.

Dr. Strike: I think we’ll need to investigate that more later, regarding your ability to influence others. I’ve heard rumors you can cause feelings of despair.

Jack Caipira: That’s just an extra bit of fun! It’s not my fault people are so sensitive. Sometimes I just like to see how they’ll react. Life is a play, and I love being the clown.

Strike hesitates, recognizing Jack's manipulative nature. He decides to end the interview.

Dr. Strike: Thank you very much, Jack. This has been a…

Jack Caipira: (waves) Always at your service, doc!

Dr. Strike exits the chamber, the heat diminishing significantly.

Interview 135-XK-2: Dr. Yanca and ANM-135-XK

Date: 10/05/2024

Location: Containment Chamber D-11, MOTHRA Institute

Interviewer: Dr. Yanca

Interviewee: Jack Caipira

The containment chamber is less oppressively hot after the last interview. Jack is lying down, reading his Bible, apparently humming something low and unintelligible. Dr. Yanca, a young researcher, enters calmly and professionally.

Dr. Yanca: Hey, Jack. I’m Dr. Yanca. Can we talk for a bit?

Jack Caipira: (stops, but doesn’t lift his head) Another doc? What do you want? The skinny guy couldn’t handle it? What do you want to know?

Dr. Yanca: We’re interested in hearing more about your story. In the last interview, you mentioned a name... Adam. Are you saying you’re the first man?

Jack Caipira: (smirking) Well, now things are getting interesting. Yeah, lady, that’s me. The first. Adam, the one God made from clay. But it didn’t go down like they tell it in those Bible stories.

Dr. Yanca: Can you explain that better? What really happened?

Jack Caipira: (laughs dryly) Ah, the Garden of Eden. Beautiful place, at first. It was green, everything perfect, but you know how it is. Things don’t stay pretty for long. God made us, me and Lilith, to be equals. She was fire, and I... well, I was what was left. But then came all the damn control, the rules. And I’m not a man to live in a cage.

Dr. Yanca: Lilith... Were you cast out with her?

Jack Caipira: (leans back, looking directly at Dr. Yanca) Yeah, lady. Lilith was my partner, the first. Forget about Eve, or whatever. We left that place before the story even got told. You know why? 'Cause Lilith wouldn’t take orders from anyone, especially not the guy ‘upstairs.’ And me? I just wanted freedom.

Dr. Yanca: And how does that connect to your... current nature? How did you become what you are now?

Jack Caipira: (glancing at the pentagram on his hand) After we left Eden, things changed. Lilith went her way, and I... well, I went to discover hell. You see, the world down below is more fun. I transformed, or maybe I was always like this. That thing the believers call 'sin'? It’s just freedom by another name.

Dr. Yanca: You call yourself Satan, but was that ever something literal? Or is it just a title you took on?

Jack Caipira: (shrugs) Oh, doc, it’s all the same in the end. Satan, Adam, Jack Caipira. Names are just names. In the end, I am what I am. But I love watching people try to figure out what the hell that means. It’s part of the fun. The important thing is, after Eden, I wasn’t going to bow to anyone anymore. I went to hell with my heart wide open.

Dr. Yanca: And Lilith? Is she still with you?

Jack Caipira: (his smile fades for a moment) Lilith... she’s different. She has her own path, her own power. It’s been a long time since we crossed paths, but I know she’s out there, free, like she always was. A woman like her doesn’t get tied down. Not even to me.

Dr. Yanca: That would explain why you seem to have so much disdain for anything related to God or heaven. It seems like this rebellion is more personal.

Jack Caipira: (laughs loudly) Oh, now you’re starting to get it! All that talk about God, about heaven, that’s not for me. I tried it, I went there, did what I had to do... But in the end, what’s left? An eternity of boredom, surrounded by annoying believers. I prefer the heat of hell and the company of fire.

Dr. Yanca: (pausing to write) So, do you feel like you were... wronged?

Jack Caipira: Wronged? (laughs again) That’s for people who believe in justice. I don’t give a damn about that. I did what I wanted, and I’m still doing it. But they kicked me out because I refused to play their game. I didn’t want to be the obedient man, you know? The rest is just history.

Dr. Yanca: Jack, this view... it seems like your relationship with God and hell is more complicated than just simple rebellion.

Jack Caipira: Complicated? Maybe, doc. But in the end, what matters is freedom. Lilith understood that before anyone else. I just followed the path. The difference is, I have more fun with it.

The heat in the room seems to rise as Jack talks about his expulsion and Lilith. The smell of sulfur intensifies.

Dr. Yanca: You seem to take pride in what you’ve become.

Jack Caipira: (with a devilish grin) Oh, lady, of course I do. In hell, we don’t apologize. We party. That’s where I belong. And you know, one day, the heat’s coming for everyone, I just speed up the process.

Dr. Yanca: Thank you for sharing your story, Jack. I’m sure it will help us understand you better.

Jack Caipira: Anytime, doc. I’m always here if you need me, and I’m especially hotter in bed, by the way…

Dr. Yanca slowly exits, feeling the increasing heat as the door closes behind her.

Interview 135-XK-3: Researcher Yohan-san and ANM-135-XK

Date: 10/15/2024

Location: Containment Chamber D-11, MOTHRA Institute

Interviewer: Dr. Yohan-san

Interviewee: Jack Caipira

The containment chamber feels more oppressive than in previous interviews. The heat is nearly unbearable, and the smell of sulfur saturates the air. Jack is restless, tapping his feet on the floor, eyes fixed on the wall. He’s clearly not in a good mood. Dr. Yohan-san, a middle-aged researcher with a calm and reserved demeanor, cautiously enters the room.

Dr. Yohan-san: Good afternoon, Jack. Are you in the mood to talk today? We've noticed your behavior through the cameras.

Jack Caipira: (growling, not looking at him) Haven't I said enough already? What the hell do you guys want now? And goddamn it, there are cameras in here! I can't even take a break without being watched!

Dr. Yohan-san: We don’t mean to bother you. We just need to understand better what you mentioned in the last interview. About other gods… and perhaps something bigger than you.

Jack Caipira: (turns sharply) "Something bigger"? (laughs sarcastically) Oh, that’s what this is about, huh? You all want to understand what’s beyond my little bonfire. You want to know about the 'devourer.' But I don’t know if you’ve got the stomach for it… Also, man, you're uglier than Lucifer after he fell from heaven, buddy.

Dr. Yohan-san: Take it easy. We’re here to listen. Can you tell us more?

Jack Caipira: (visibly irritated) Just more of God’s sick games trying to screw me over! Kicking me out wasn’t enough—he had to call in others. Other gods, creatures, entities… call them what you want. All of them trying to meddle and screw with what's left. But that’s where the devil steps in. Someone’s gotta help, right? Otherwise, I’d have been done for a long time ago.

Dr. Yohan-san: What other gods? Can you name any?

Jack Caipira: (shakes his head disdainfully) Name them? Oh, like you’d believe me. There’s the old man with the thunder, the woman of war, that one who lives in the sea… they’ve all got their games. But in the end, they’re just waiting for the real one. The one who’s coming to devour everything. 'Devourer of Worlds.' An entity that knows only hunger. Doesn’t matter what you do—it's coming. And the rest? They’re just parasites living in the belly of the beast.

Dr. Yohan-san: Are you saying that humans are like… parasites?

Jack Caipira: (angrily) Worms! That’s right. Living in the belly of that thing. Humanity thinks it’s in control, thinks it can save itself… but you’re all already living inside the monster. The only thing left is to be digested.

Dr. Yohan-san: And this 'Devourer of Worlds'… have you seen it? Is it coming?

Jack Caipira: I’ve seen it. Felt it move. Volcanoes explode in fury, spewing blood from this earth in misery. You think the fire I make is dangerous? Wait until that thing wakes up. Everything you know will be swallowed in an instant. There’s no salvation, no prayer that’ll work. Colossal beast, the union of all deep fears. It’s coming. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Dr. Yohan-san: (pausing) You seem… afraid, Jack.

Jack Caipira: Afraid? No. I am the fire, doc. But even fire goes out when that thing shows up. It’s the primal hunger. No fun, no joke. Just destruction. Even demons tremble when they talk about it. Me? I just wait. Because I’ve seen what it can do. And I know neither God, nor the devil, nor anything can stop it.

Dr. Yohan-san: So you believe that the 'Devourer of Worlds' is inevitable?

Jack Caipira: (laughs, but without humor) Inevitable? It’s already here, right above us, just waiting for the right moment to swallow everything. While you lot are sitting around trying to figure me out, it’s growing. You’re just little flies, thinking you’re big while it prepares. When it wakes up, there won’t be anything left. Not even you.

The heat in the room intensifies, and the metal floor begins to glow with heat marks from Jack’s feet. He stands up, staring directly at Dr. Yohan-san.

Jack Caipira: You know what’s funny? You guys are trying to control me, thinking I’m the problem. But I’m just the warning. A joke before the tragedy. And when everything’s burning, when 'Kruzvisk' comes, you’ll remember what I said.

Dr. Yohan-san: We’ll conclude the interview here for today. Thank you, Jack, for sharing your insights.

Jack Caipira: No need to thank me, doc.

Yohan-san quickly exits the room, the heat nearly unbearable as Jack continues to radiate intense heat and energy. The door closes with a metallic clang, leaving Jack alone, muttering softly: "Destroy them all, Devourer of Worlds."

End of Interview.

Final Interview: Dr. Öctavio Kalev and ANM-135-XK

Date: 10/28/2024

Location: Containment Chamber D-11, MOTHRA Institute

Interviewer: Dr. Öctavio Kalev

Interviewee: Jack Caipira

The atmosphere in the chamber is dense. The air feels heavy, and the heat is constant, but much less aggressive than in the previous interview. Dr. Öctavio enters the room. Jack is relaxed, his signature mocking smile on his face as he watches the interviewer with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: Good afternoon, Jack. How are you feeling today?

Jack Caipira: Feeling? Well, doc, I’m feeling mighty fine! How 'bout you? Wanna play some Russian roulette?

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: I play Russian roulette every day, with a bullet called life. Let’s get straight to the point. I’ve heard you deal with contracts. Things involving souls.

Jack Caipira: (raising an eyebrow) Ah, so we’re finally getting to the good stuff, huh? Souls, contracts… those are always fun. People wanting to sell what’s most precious for a little edge here and there. Selling your soul is a classic. But you know what I always say? Always read the fine print before signing anything with me.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: Let’s say I were interested in such a deal. What could you offer me?

Jack Caipira: Well, doc, you sure don’t waste time, do you? You wanna sell your soul to ol' Jack, huh? Well, I could offer you… (looks around theatrically) everything your little heart desires… (slowly rises from his chair, building suspense) Power, wealth, women, men too—why not? Wisdom… or maybe something even more interesting. But there’s a tiny problem.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: And what would that problem be?

Jack Caipira: Your credit’s in the red, partner. Trying to pull a fast one on the devil? What’s this about you trying to cheat me?

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: (frowning) No soul? What are you talking about?

Jack Caipira: You didn’t know, big guy? You’ve been walking around without a soul, and you didn’t even notice. You’re trying to sell me air!

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: (irritated) That doesn’t make sense. I’m human. Of course I have a soul.

Jack Caipira: Voodoo’s for amateurs, my friend. A man’s soul ain’t as simple as it looks. But yours? Yours is long gone. You’re walking around, rotten on the inside, thinking you can strike a deal with me? Get real!

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: (trying to stay calm) So what happened to my soul, then?

Jack Caipira: Who knows? Maybe you lost it somewhere along the way. Made the wrong choices, followed some dark paths, and now you’re just a shell without the filling—worse than a cheap cookie from Paraguay. I’m not the one to tell you where it went. But I can guarantee it ain’t here, and it sure ain’t inside you (points at Kalev).

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: Do you have any idea how I could get it back?

Jack Caipira: (with a sly grin) Ah, doc, now that’s the tricky part. Once a soul’s gone, it’s a real pain to get it back. But I’ll give you a freebie, just 'cause I’m in a good mood: never sign anything without reading the fine print. Especially with me. You’re so desperate you didn’t even realize what you’ve already lost.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: So there’s nothing I can do?

Jack Caipira: (shaking his head disapprovingly) Well, there’s always a way out, big guy. But are you willing to pay the price? Some things are irreversible. And if you’re without a soul, maybe that’s for the best. Look at you—you’re still here, standing, doing your work with all your machines and research, without that burden the rest of humanity carries. Why complicate things further?

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: You really don’t care about what happens to the souls you buy?

Jack Caipira: (shrugging) I care about them about as much as a butcher cares about cows in the pasture. I do my job, give what I promise, and in the end, someone always loses. But it ain’t me. The funny part is watching how humans will do anything for a contract, for a little bit of power. But when the bill comes due, it’s all tears and gnashing of teeth.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: You mentioned "fine print" in your deals… how many have fallen into that trap?

Jack Caipira: More than I can count. Every deal’s got a catch, a little twist. I’m clever, doc. No one gets one over on me. And the best part? They always come running, thinking they’re making the best deal of their lives. Voodoo, spells, magic… it’s all for those who want to play god. But anyone who thinks they can outsmart me? Well, they’re already being stupid, friend.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: I think I’ve understood enough.

Jack Caipira: I’m much more than you think, and you’re much less than you believe. Now get outta here, before the heat consumes you. And remember: next time you think about selling something, make sure you’ve still got something to offer.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev: Thanks for the chat, Jack.

Jack Caipira: (with a casual wave) Always a pleasure doing business. Too bad your credit’s still shot.

Dr. Öctavio Kalev exits the room. The door closes with a heavy click, and the heat in the room seems to ease as Jack smiles to himself, still radiating a dark, sinister power.

End of Interview.

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