Folklore
Memory, myth, and narrative voice
A turn inward — into story, memory, and imagined lives. The boundaries between narrator and subject begin to blur, as recurring imagery and layered perspectives create a world shaped as much by storytelling as by experience.
From the Folklore prologue: "It started with imagery... Pretty soon these images in my head grew faces or names and became characters... A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around."
17 tracks
Motifs & Symbols
Alcohol · Door / Threshold · Water · Cars · Party · Digital Life · Ghosts · Flying
Themes
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss memory as a defining thematic element across the folklore trilogy and by extension the album. Uncle Jerry asks: 'What's the nature of memory? How do we sift through our memories based on time, perception, emotion, or based on our need?' He identifies this as one of the 'really complex thematic elements of these three songs' and extends it to 'the rest of the album,' mentioning The Last Great American Dynasty as another folklore song where 'we're looking at her life from the outside and people in the town are judging her', another perspective-dependent memory structure.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss whether folklore qualifies as actual folklore. Uncle Jerry concludes that the multi-voiced split narrative across the love triangle creates a 'collaborative narrative because of the multi-ity of voices,' qualifying it as folklore. He identifies the album's narrative architecture, the Rashomon effect, disnarration, split narrative, non-linear narrative, and dramatic irony, as defining features of the album as a whole, not just individual songs. He states: 'what I came to when I started looking at them cumulatively is that there are a series of collective themes that all three share and supplement.'
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss folklore as an album where Taylor Swift steps out of autobiographical songwriting and into constructed characters and narrative voices. The entire episode frames the folklore love triangle (august, betty, cardigan) as a split narrative / Rashomon-effect structure where Taylor voices three distinct characters at different points in time, examining the same events from multiple perspectives. Uncle Jerry explicitly connects this to literary traditions of fractured narrative (Spoon River Anthology, Winesburg Ohio, Flipped) and disnarration.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss the folklore album as fundamentally about storytelling, multiple voices creating collective narratives. Uncle Jerry states: 'I ask, is this folklore? I think this is one of the things that makes it folklore. It's a collective story. We have stories together that we share.' He identifies dis-narration, split narrative, the Rashomon effect, and non-linear narration as album-level techniques, not just song-level ones. He extends this to The Last Great American Dynasty as another example of the album's multi-perspective storytelling approach.
Uncle Jerry reads the folk-song simile in seven ('Passed down like folk songs') as 'central to the album since it's titled Folklore,' connecting the song's argument about love surviving through retelling to the album's broader project of oral tradition and narrative construction. He discusses folk tales where seven is a symbolic number meaning community, tying the numerological reading to the album's interest in communal storytelling. Angela notes that this is one of several folklore-era songs where Taylor inhabits a child's perspective or a constructed character rather than writing autobiographically.
Uncle Jerry explicitly discusses the album title 'folklore' as a narrative framing device at the album level: 'if you take that apart and make two words out of it, it's folk lore. So who's talking about Rebecca? It's the townspeople. It's all the gossip.' He characterizes the album as the era where Taylor's writing became 'a little looser' and 'not a straight pop album,' with more narrative experimentation. Angela notes this is the era where Taylor stepped into invented characters and constructed scenes, and that folklore won Album of the Year at the Grammys.
Angela explicitly frames Folklore as a departure from Taylor's usual confessionalist and diaristic mode, noting that the album 'plays with other characters' and that the songs 'aren't as confessionalist and diaristic as some of her previous ones.' She also describes the album as 'pared down production-wise' and notes Taylor used the pandemic period to experiment with fictional characters, positioning the album's use of folk-tale personas and ambiguous narrators as a defining characteristic. Uncle Jerry, approaching from folklore scholarship, confirms this reading by noting the album title prompted him to look immediately for folklore elements.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss the Long Pond sessions and how Taylor heard Aaron Dessner's track and said 'I have to write this song over this track.' Uncle Jerry notes the song begins in medias res and functions as a dramatic monologue, both narrative techniques that foreground storytelling architecture. He also suggests he'd like to see Taylor 'work outside of the confessionalist mode' with this material, implying folklore as an album operates in a storytelling register that the biographical elements of this particular song pull against.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss folklore as an album of introspective, character-driven songwriting produced during COVID isolation. From the Long Pond session they watch, Taylor describes it as 'an album that allows you to feel your feelings and it's a product of isolation. It's a product of all this rumination on what we are as humans.' Uncle Jerry approaches mirrorball through its placement on the album titled 'Folklore' and considers the folkloric traditions of mirrors specifically because of the album context.
Uncle Jerry's summative discussion frames permanence as an album-level question, 'What lasts? Is anything eternal? Is it just a ghost? Does it just haunt you in the grocery line? Is it just smoke? What lasts? What is the nature of permanence?', anchored in the Ovid quote ('All things do change, but nothing eternal ever changes'). Folklore as an album repeatedly tests what endures: love (cardigan, peace, invisible string), pain (my tears ricochet, hoax, mad woman), narrative authority (the last great american dynasty, betty, august), childhood self (seven). The trilogy stages the question most concentratedly through Betty's adult retrospective; the album more broadly returns to it across genre and narrator.
Uncle Jerry's summative discussion of cardigan explicitly extends the truth question from the trilogy to the album as a whole: 'What's the nature of truth?... where is the truth? Well, the truth is subject to your opinion, your impression, your remembrance. It's subject to the passage of time. It's subject to immediacy. It's subject to distance.' He generalises the Rashomon-effect framework, three or four narrators each holding partial truth, beyond the love triangle to folklore's wider architecture, pointing to The Last Great American Dynasty as another example of multiple-perspective truth-claims. The album is built around the proposition that truth is perspectival and unstable, with the love triangle as the most concentrated demonstration.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss escapism as characterising folklore as a whole, not just the lakes. Angela explicitly notes: 'it was 2020. We couldn't go anywhere. Nobody was travelling. And so you had to like build up this escapism in your mind. You had to like go there in your brain.' Uncle Jerry connects this to the Romantic tenet of 'the inward turning of the mind' from the Lyrical Ballads, and Taylor herself says in the Long Pond Sessions that she 'goes there in her head.' The album-level escapism is framed as culturally produced by the pandemic era.
Across the songs
Storytelling · Female experience · The nature of permanence · Memory · Business or Industry · Infidelity · Ambiguity · Defiance
Literary Devices
Rhetorical Device · Figurative Language · Sound Device · Language & Diction · Narrative Device
71 references