Review: ‘Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions’
Taylor Swift dug deep into those feels to give us exactly what we needed following the release of her surprise eighth album Folklore in July. Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions is really the only way this album could have been performed: in a cabin in the woods with just her collaborators.
The film documents their first time performing the album all together after recording it separately in isolation. It opens on a confessional filmed on Taylor’s phone, telling us how the album came about. She talks about how she started writing songs while in lockdown and how they all ended up having similar themes, and that an album was being formed before her very eyes. She shows us the studio that was built in her house, all the while so excited to document the process.
The album is performed in the order that the songs are found on the Folklore album, interspersed with conversations with her infamous co-writer and producer Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner of The National who came in to collaborate on this album. The three discuss the meaning of each song and how Folklore is not necessarily an album about the pandemic, but it is an album that was the result of an artist sitting in their home with nothing to do but daydream.
Taylor tells Antonoff and Dessner that this is the first album where she felt like she did not need to make all of her writing autobiographical, hence the title for the album. If you have not heard yet, the major plot of the story follows three young people: Betty, August, and James, who find themselves in a love triangle, and Taylor comes to convey all of their sides of the story. She wanted to give her listeners an experience of creating stories, not ones that we would find in the tabloids about herself. It’s really in these moments where Taylor sheds her skin, specifically the snake one she has been attributed to for so long, and gives us raw lyrics about ideas rather than specific moments in her own life.
Considering all of our positions being locked inside, where life does not exist in the way it usually does outside, the only real occurrences we have are the ones in our brains, or the ones from our past that we are reflecting on. Taylor has reproduced these experiences in a whole new way, as she says in Sessions, when she explains that she purposefully opens the album with the lines “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit. Been saying yes instead of no.” She wanted to tell her listeners exactly what this album was about: being forced into new situations and saying yes to rediscovering how to live our lives within these new stipulations.
The story that sticks out the most in this film is her conversation with Jack about the meaning behind “this is me trying.” She says that she had been thinking about how people who deal with mental illness or addiction of any kind are always fighting some kind of internal battle that others never really acknowledge them for, and that trying to get through the day is an accomplishment in itself for these people. This rings incredibly true, especially in isolation when we are separated from our support systems, or thrown into situations that are not safe.
The way Taylor explains her thought process behind every aspect of this album, and the fact that she had the ability to create her best work that was completely unexpected, even to herself is somewhat of a miracle. She says in the film that “we all needed a good cry,” and she was right. This album, these performances, and the narratives that created them are sad. Our lives right now are sad. People are dying at an astronomical level, combined with unemployment and housing crises. We needed a good cry to release this emotion, that maybe a lot of us do not know how to deal with.
Stripping all of these songs back to their basic shape and making a film out of the process was as cathartic for the viewer as it was to the artists. Like she says, it needed to be played to feel real. We needed to experience this art to feel like something was being made and time was passing while in such a liminal space in history.
Every performance and every story Taylor told was emotional and came from a place of honesty, set in the most comforting, yet unsettling of places. She could have made a flashy album and performance to cheer us up, but instead she stuck to the truth of how the world feels right now. Most of everything around us feels lost, but Folklore: The Long Pond Sessions feels like it found its right moment in time to give us all, in the words of Swift herself, “a good cry”. – Taylor Hunsberger
Rating: 5/5
Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions is now streaming on Disney+.