Album: folklore
year: 2020
In February 2020, a musical artist was ready to go to the next phase of their career, a phase which had been in the works for months.
That artist, of course was my band Sedan Delivery. We had completed our first album, and was just about to get it mastered and released, after which we’d planned to play some shows and even sell a few copies. But you know what happened next: the pandemic, which trashed everything we’d hoped to achieve.
To me, outside of the death toll or the folks who have had their health forever altered, that’s the true legacy of the pandemic: it quite literally created an alternate universe where quite literally, almost nothing that anybody thought was going to happen in the spring and summer of 2020 actually happened. Trillions of plans got altered. Even now it’s hard to understate how much didn’t actually happen. For pretty much everybody. Yes I know, there were the deniers and the holdouts and the folks who had no choice. But I would argue that even their 2020 reality was different from what they had envisioned.
And so, almost instantly, we got to work on producing music: because the pandemic happened in 2020, not 1990, everybody had mics and computers and the internet, we spent much of the year recording songs not together in a room — it would be 14 months before it felt safe enough to do that, and thanks to omni, that was a cruel cheat — but alone in our homes. Joseph sent a couple of mics to record my drums, and we spent most of the year sending files back and forth, resulting in about a dozen recordings of varying sound quality that I dubbed Exile on Messenger which I’m hoping to eventually release on Bandcamp.
Of course, we weren’t alone. Musicians all over the world were doing the exact same thing: making their art under extraordinary, unprecedented, (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime circumstances. It was a way to keep sanity during an insane circumstance. All up and down the totem pole, from us at the bottom to Taylor Swift at the top. The release of her lockdown album, folklore, in July 2020. folklore was made by Swift trading files back and forth with a pair of collaborators, Jack Antonoff, whom she had worked with before, and Aaron Dessner of The National, whom she hadn’t. And I should point out that musicians using technology to build asynchronously build songs long long predated the pandemic, but for awhile, it became the necessary default.
Unlike the bigger pop productions that had dominated Swift’s 2010s, folklore was more organic and acoustic. And for those people who loved Swift first and foremost as a pop princess, it might have been a bit of a letdown, but for others who had basically ignored or disliked her — you know, cool indie folks — it was a potential entry point, especially with some of the story songs that weren’t necessarily about her. Like “The Last Great American Dynasty,” which was about a woman called Rebekah Harkness.
Rebekah rode up on the afternoon train, it was sunny
Her saltbox house on the coast took her mind off St. Louis
Bill was the heir to the Standard Oil name and money
And the town said, “How did a middle-class divorcée do it?”
The wedding was?charming, if a little gauche
There’s only so far new money goes
They picked out a home and called it “Holiday House”
Their parties were tasteful, if a little loud
The doctor had told him to settle down
It must have been her fault his heart gave out
While the drum machine — a necessary evil — obscures things a bit, the music for “The Last Great American Dynasty” isn’t so far off from a song like The National’s “Bloodbuzz, Ohio,” especially if you focus on Dessner’s piano parts. And Dessner has also said that there a bit of Radiohead in there as well. But the chorus, the hook, that’s all Taylor Swift, as she focuses on the aftermath of Harkness becoming a widow.
And they said
“There goes the last great American dynasty
Who knows, if she never showed up, what could’ve been
There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen
She had a marvelous time ruining everything”
As the song moves on, Swift details the “scandalous” things Harkness does with her life: holding parties, feuding with neighbors, hanging out with her friends who she dubbed “The Bitch Pack,” and hanging out with Salvador Dali. As you do. Of course, Harkness eventually died, and Holiday House went dark. All of which leads to the punchline, and the inspiration for the song.
Fifty years is a long time
Holiday House sat quietly on that beach
Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits
And then it was bought by me
After that, she hits the chorus even harder, going from third person to first person, almost joyously singing “I had a marvelous tiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmme . . . ruining everything” during the outro, while equating the sexism — and ongoing criticism for not acting “properly,” whatever the fuck that means — that Harkness faced with the sexism Swift faces.
As for folklore, I don’t have to tell you that it was a smash hit album, actually outselling Lover. But I’ll tell you anyways: folklore was a smash hit album, actually outselling Lover, and topping a lot of critics polls at the end of 2020.
“the last great american dynasty” (Official Lyric Video)
“the last great american dynasty” Live in the Studio, 2020
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