Dissecting Taylor’s “folklore” Prologue, Line by Line (Full Text)
Taylor Swift’s album prologues are so helpful in understanding the meaning of her lyrics, and are even more insightful once you’ve listened to the entire album.
She’s always included a prologue, and over the years they’ve evolved from a simple thank-you note to a detailed, easter-egg filled essay to her readers.
folklore is – musically and lyrically – the biggest transformation Taylor has ever made (at least up until now, in 2024). But how does the prologue stack up against all the others, and what is she trying to tell us within the album’s introduction?
Here’s the full text of Taylor’s folklore prologue: what it says, what it means, and how it informs the album and her career.
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Context: The folklore Era
Prior to the pandemic, Taylor had been hit with catastrophic grief: ownership of her first six albums was sold from her ex-manager (Scott Borchetta, whom she considered “family”) to her arch nemesis, Scooter Braun.
Swifties refer to this situation as “the masters heist,” and it devastated Taylor personally and professionally (for more context on this situation, watch the Miss Americana documentary for a first-person account).
The masters heist had already put a kink in her planned tour for Lover (as she couldn’t perform any of her past songs), and then when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, every plan she had went out the window.
Taylor – like the rest of the world – was in isolation, and folklore is a product of isolation, both sonically and lyrically. Many of the themes, stories, characters and imagery are informed by her deep rumination during this time.
What was she ruminating on? Let’s find out.
folklore Prologue: Full Text (2020)
“It started with imagery. Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.
Stars drawn around scars. A cardigan that still bears the scent of loss twenty years later. Battleships sinking into the ocean, down, down, down. The tree swing in the woods of my childhood. Hushed tones of “let’s run away” and never doing it. The sun drenched month of August, sipped away like a bottle of wine. A mirrored disco ball hovering above a dance floor. A whiskey bottle beckoning. Hands held through plastic. A single thread that, for better or for worse, ties you to your fate.
Pretty soon these images in my head grew faces or names and became characters. I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t. An exiled man walking the bluffs of a land that isn’t his own, wondering how it all went so terribly, terribly wrong. An embittered tormentor showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of obsession. A seventeen-year-old standing on a porch, learning to apologize. Lovestruck kids wandering up and down the evergreen High Line. My grandfather, Dean, landing at Guadalcanal in 1942. A misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out.
A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.
In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, 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. I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve.
Now it’s up to you to pass them down.
-Taylor”
-Taylor Swift, folklore Album Prologue, 2020
Analyzing the folklore Prologue
We’ve read it, but what does it really mean? Here’s my full English teacher analysis of Taylor’s 8th album prologue, and what it means in the context of her songwriting, eras, career, and creative life.
On The Contents of folklore
“In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness.”
Taylor has always used songwriting to cope with difficult situations in her life, and process change and growth. The pandemic was no different, and it led her to pouring out her heart in “a stream of consciousness.”
But it’s important to remember that much of folklore was also likely inspired by grief: losing her life’s work, losing her tour, losing her rhythm.
In her previous prologues, she’s credited the romance of life, wedding moments of truth, the colors of love, and moving to New York as inspirations for her albums. While not all of these are external muses, they all do involve being out in the real world, and being with other people.
While she was no longer out experiencing things in the physical world, her inner life blossomed and provided inspiration of its own. While many of us took up sourdough baking for a creative outlet, Taylor delved into her imagination, creating stories and songs that allowed her to express herself while in isolation.
You might say that her inspirations for this album were…herself. And maybe that’s why this is such a contemplative album.
On The “Why” of The Album
“Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”
We all felt like running away during the pandemic, didn’t we? But since we couldn’t escape physically, we all turned to our vices to burn off steam. We can see that Taylor’s vices are healthier and more productive than most.
She escaped into her imagination, and with three words lays out the central theme of the album: “fantasy, history, and memory.”
These three themes intersect and weave together to create the folktales of the album. While some of the tales might be fantasy, they’re always informed by Taylor’s own “history and memory.” In other words, she’s expressing real emotions she’s felt, even if the characters of the songs don’t tell her own real life story.
The central conversation around folklore has always been: ‘is this a true story?’ Or, ‘what man is this song about?’ But that shouldn’t be the central query (as she’ll go on to tell us this in other parts of the prologue, too).
What we should ask is, ‘what emotions inspired these lyrics?’ That’s the heart of the issue. Imagination is, after all, always informed by emotions. If you’re scared, you have a nightmare. If you’re in love, you dream about the object of your desire.
And if you’re Taylor, you capture these dreamscapes, nurture them, interrogate them, and set them to music.
On Her Muses
“It started with imagery. Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity….Pretty soon these images in my head grew faces or names and became characters.”
This album was, at least initially, inspired by imagery. As she said, “my imagination has run wild,” and we can see that inside Taylor’s imagination, visuals are key.
folklore is, indeed, Taylor’s most potent use of imagery up until this point in her career (and maybe ever, but that’s up for interpretation).
But while many of us dream about faces or places, we wake up and forget. Taylor, however, takes those dreams and runs with them. The images evolve into “faces or names”, and slowly “became characters.” But what does this really mean for the album?
She’s creating an internal world. Her external world may have not been especially inspiring at the time, being sat in isolation with the world shut down. So she created a new one for herself.
Inside this new world, there are mirror balls glimmering over the dance floor, strings of thread tethering her to her destiny, dusty cardigans sitting under the bed, and funerals full of resentment and revenge.
Prolific readers and writers will tell you that sometimes, their imaginary worlds are more rewarding than the real world. And that’s exactly how Taylor must have been feeling, as she created not one but two albums worth of imaginary worlds, complete with characters, settings, plot lines, imagery, and vivid emotions.
On The Meaning of “folklore”
“A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible.”
It’s easiest to think of folklore – oral histories – as a game of telephone. One farmer tells his children a story about a flood, and how all the crops died. That child grows up, and goes on to tell his children about the same flood. But this time, the details have changed and become dramatized, warning his children what to do – or what not to do – if a flood happens again.
The following generation may add more: a deity caused the flood, or some culturally inappropriate behavior caused the flood, and so on and so forth. The great flood becomes legend: something to fear, something to prepare for, something to pray against, and – above all – an important story to pass down like breaking news.
Taylor’s own oral history is the story she’s been telling from the beginning of her career: a uniquely talented girl with an open heart gets slowly crushed by the patriarchy, betrayed by lovers and friends. Her power is envied, and her stories are questioned and criticized.
In Taylor’s world, up until this point, the media and the public created her folklore, playing the game of telephone with her lyrics until the truth is fiction and fiction is truth.
What she’s doing with folklore (the album) is yanking the license away from the wider world, and beginning her own game of telephone. She adds her own fictional and fantastical elements to her story.
What does this do? It obscures the truth, making “the lines between fantasy and reality blur.”
But why did she turn to fiction, when she never had before? Because the trajectory of her diaristic songwriting was unsustainable.
As her life grew larger, and the spotlight grew brighter and hotter, she couldn’t keep writing the truth without it ruining her life, or the lives around her. Like folklore, her truth was always twisted into something indiscernible.
Imagine this: In 2020, Taylor writes a trio of songs about a love triangle, without the caveat that these stories are fiction. The tabloids would run out of ink, social media would hijack the conversation, and soon the public’s game of telephone would – inevitably, as it always has in the past – paint her as a villain and a maneater.
Calling her album folklore, and saying outright that some of the stories are true and some are fiction, gives her control of her own narrative. She’ll determine her legacy, because only she knows what really happened.
The tale is now hers to tell, and hers to twist.
On The Imagery of folklore
“Stars drawn around scars. A cardigan that still bears the scent of loss twenty years later. Battleships sinking into the ocean, down, down, down. The tree swing in the woods of my childhood. Hushed tones of “let’s run away” and never doing it. The sun drenched month of August, sipped away like a bottle of wine. A mirrored disco ball hovering above a dance floor. A whiskey bottle beckoning. Hands held through plastic. A single thread that, for better or for worse, ties you to your fate.”
The imagery of folklore is remarkable, and paints detailed portraits of Taylor’s inner world and stories. But what she’s getting at here isn’t just imagery: it’s symbolism.
A star drawn around a scar isn’t just a pretty visual; it represents healing, acceptance of imperfections, and finding solace amidst trauma.
“A cardigan that still bears the scent of loss” represents memory and regret. “Battleships sinking into the ocean” represent the end of a war where no one wins.
While the imagery may have been the first thing to pop into her head, what the images represent is the meat of the story. These symbols paint a larger picture, and it’s important to dissect their significance when trying to discern the central themes and emotions of the album.
On folklore‘s Point of View
“I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t.”
Taylor is always our author and narrator, but she’s not always our protagonist. As she admits here, the stories of folklore are not all from her perspective.
She knows that we will try to dissect each song and attribute it to one muse. But adding a layer of fiction – essentially creating her own folklore – distances herself from the narrative. She won’t tell us which songs are from her perspective, and which ones aren’t.
This is purposeful: it gives her license to tell stories that – if they were perceived as true – she would be relentlessly criticized for.
But what else does it do? It makes her an unreliable narrator, which is her intent. If we don’t know what’s true and what’s fiction, we (the media, social media, the wider world) can’t accuse her of the actions portrayed within her lyrics.
It’s a brilliant game of chess, where she’s always one move ahead.
On folklore‘s Characters
“An exiled man walking the bluffs of a land that isn’t his own, wondering how it all went so terribly, terribly wrong. An embittered tormentor showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of obsession. A seventeen-year-old standing on a porch, learning to apologize. Lovestruck kids wandering up and down the evergreen High Line. My grandfather, Dean, landing at Guadalcanal in 1942. A misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out.”
Though we don’t know all the protagonists of the album, Taylor introduces a few of them.
She says that the male protagonist of exile is “wandering the bluffs…wondering how it all went so terribly, terribly wrong.”
The subject of my tears ricochet is an “embittered tormentor, showing up at the funeral of his fallen object of affection.”
The protagonist of betty is “a seventeen year-old…learning to apologize.” The protagonists of cardigan are “lovestruck kids.” One of the protagonists of epiphany is Taylor’s “grandfather Dean” in the midst of WWII. The protagonist of the last great american dynasty is “a misfit widow getting gleeful revenge.”
But given that Taylor has been a strictly diaristic songwriter up until this point, this list of protagonists only makes us more curious. Do any of these protagonists represent her own point of view?
As she tells us, she’s “writing about or from the perspective” of other people, and we don’t get to know which is which.
We’ll likely never know what is real and what is fiction in folklore and evermore, and it’s one of Taylor’s most masterful storytelling devices: being an unreliable narrator, and always keeping us guessing.
The truth is buried somewhere in that haystack, and it’s the size of a needle. ‘Try to find it now,’ she smiles.
On Fact vs. Fiction
“Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold.”
“Speculation, over time, becomes fact” could be a sentence straight out of the reputation prologue, and it’s essentially saying the same thing: ‘you’ll try to attribute these songs to some particular person, but that’s not the point.’
Like she says in the rep prologue, “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.”
In folklore, she’s telling us “myths, ghost stories, fables, fairy tales, parables, gossip and legend.” She’s obscuring the truth with fiction, making one indiscernible from the other.
She’s not pulling back the curtain like she did in reputation, showing us a version of her we’ve never seen. Instead, she’s putting more curtains up. She’s showing us a version of herself, and then pulling a bait-and-switch.
Which version is the real Taylor, and which one is Betty, or James, or Rebecca? We’ll never know, and that’s the point.
To Her Reader
“I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. Now it’s up to you to pass them down.”
Taylor truly steps into the shoes of the narrator in this album, distancing herself from playing the protagonist. She then washes her hands of the narratives, passing them along to us to do with what we will.
But what does it mean that Taylor wants us to take in these stories, and then “to pass them down”?
You might imagine sitting around a fire, telling your grandkids the story of a rebellious widow dyeing her neighbor’s dog green. But that – although it’s hilarious to think about – isn’t exactly the point.
I’d argue that in her final sentence of the prologue, she’s inviting us to play our own game of folklore: our own game of telephone. She’s welcoming all the speculation, and all the “gossip and legend” that will inevitably follow the album’s release.
But this time, she’s clad herself in armor: the disclaimer that these stories may or may not be true. If we don’t know what’s true and what’s fiction, we can’t label her lyrics with the “paternity test” that has followed every other album…right?
We’ll still try. We still chatter about whether James is Taylor, Betty is Joe Alwyn, and August is Matty Healy (or some combination of these theories). We still theorize that mad woman and my tears ricochet are directed at Scott Borchetta and/or Scooter Braun.
But what she has done – very successfully – is taken away some of our ammunition: the belief that her lyrics are always based on real life. And – most importantly – from here on out, in every album to come, we will never be able to see her as a reliable narrator again,
This gives her a creative buffer to continue to work, with a smaller chance that her personal life – and her reputation – will crumble if she does.
folklore Prologue: Final Thoughts
What this prologue does – very effectively – is points away from the narrative and points to the narrator. ‘These are just stories I’m telling’, she says, and “the story isn’t mine anymore,” and these tales will evolve and change like folklore.
So what is Taylor’s legacy? What is her folklore? When the age of Taylor Swift is over, what stories will we tell about her?
We’ll tell our grandkids about a powerful woman, constantly fighting for her place in a man’s world. We’ll tell them of a girl in love, constantly portrayed as a slut. We’ll tell them of a talented musician, whom people didn’t believe was capable of such ingenuity.
These are the central stories of Taylor Swift’s larger folklore: cautionary tales, stories of struggle, the madwoman in the attic. But they’re also the hero’s journey: how she kept rising up, time and time again, like a phoenix from the ashes.
But whether we’ll tell our children about the madwoman or the mastermind, the central narrative – the definitive folklore of Taylor Swift – will be determined by the narrator herself. She let her folklore get hijacked once, and went into hiding.
She’ll never need to do that again, because now we’ll never know what the truth is.
Analysis of Songs From folklore:
- the 1
- cardigan
- the last great american dynasty
- exile
- my tears ricochet
- mirrorball
- seven
- august
- this is me trying
- illicit affairs
- invisible string
- mad woman
- epiphany
- betty
- peace
- hoax
- the lakes
More Album Prologues
- Debut Album Prologue
- Fearless & Fearless TV Prologues
- Speak Now & Speak Now TV Prologues
- Red & Red TV Prologues
- 1989 & 1989 TV Prologues
- reputation Prologue
- Lover Prologue
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