Taylor Swift has made the first great pandemic art

Her new album, Folklore, is a refreshing journey inward

Taylor Swift.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Taylor Swift/Twitter, iStock)

While the rest of us were learning to make sourdough, ill-advisedly texting our exes, and reorganizing our junk drawers for the 17th time since mid-March, Taylor Swift was quietly working on an album. "In isolation my imagination has run wild and [Folklore] is the result," she wrote in the surprise announcement on Thursday. "[A] collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory."

Folklore is notable not just for coming out so soon after Swift's 2019 album Lover, but because it is also the first major work of popular culture to emerge that is almost exclusively a product of the quarantine. Due to the circumstances of, well, all of 2020, it would have been easy to lean too heavily on the novelty of the moment, or veer too far toward making the album a self-indulgent — or worse, opportunistic — distraction. But Swift sets a high bar for pandemic art going forward, because Folklore is none of those things, instead taking an approach that is quiet, introspective, and reflective.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.