#and probably feels like the tradeoff was worth it and has reinvigorated her

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

Woke up this morning thinking about how interesting it was how Taylor processed her masters being sold and the fallout with her split from Scott Borchetta and BMG on folkore from a storytelling perspective.

On folklore, we've got my tears ricochet, mad woman and hoax dealing with the situation from sort of a "woman scorned" perspective. In my tears ricochet, she's the injured party, metaphorically dead from the knife the guilty party has lodged in her back and haunting them in the wake. In mad woman, she unleashes her anger at being boxed in and the unfairness of being tarred and feathered for feeling hurt.

Hoax is a little different, a little more esoteric, but the general feeling is that it's the fallout from the shock and anger from the previous songs. E.g. when the initial fury has subsided and the lashing out loses steam, what are you left with? Evidently, devastation, if not hopelessness. (There are shades of this too in the lakes, where she feels like she should be over it, but admits that she isn't, and muses that the only relief is to escape the world for a little while.)

The "love triangle" songs get a lot of attention for how their fictional setting creates this through line in the album, but for some reason the emotional weight of the masters/music songs is really grabbing at me today. They're not diaristic in that they're a factual retelling of events, but they certainly are in the emotions they convey. Once again it's amazing how she's taking a hyper specific situation to her extraordinary life (fighting with her former mentor and having her life's work sold to a man who played a role in her public downfall which felt like it may end her life) and inserted them into an allegory about love lost and betrayed.

If you didn't know the inspiration of the songs, they would stand on their own, depicting the breakdown of relationships and the messy (and valid) emotions that come along with that, feeling the character's rage, despair, etc. But knowing that they were about the BMG situation makes them even more powerful, and it's interesting to me that MTR was the first song she wrote for folklore, before folklore was even a glean in her eye. folklore may have given her license to explore fictional world building to tell her stories, but obviously her brain was already heading into that space before the pandemic hit.

I know a lot of the other themes have overtaken the discussion about folkore/evermore, especially recently (and for good reason), but it is striking just how devastating the SB/BMG situation was to her, not just in losing the chance to own her work but in the betrayal she felt from people she felt were family. That pervasive sadness I think also influences the mood of the album, and it's no wonder it bled into evermore too. We know now that there was more going on behind the scenes, and it just had to have been such a painful confluence of events over those stretch of years, but how incredible that she turned it into some of her most haunting work.

If I had to guess, I'd bet TTPD would take a page out of some of these songs and frame her next chapter in these kinds of allegories, but that remains to be seen next month