reputation by Taylor Swift
"Reputation" is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was released on November 10, 2017, through Big Machine Records. The album was primarily produced by Jack Antonoff, Max Martin, Shellback and Swift herself, who also serves as the executive producer. Guest features include English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and American rapper Future. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 75, based on 16 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
A mere 11 months passed between the release of <i>Lover</i> and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, <i>folklore</i> finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new s**t,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channelled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan”, which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile”, a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven”, the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation. This <i>long pond studio sessions</i> Deluxe Edition also includes live versions of each of <i>folklore</i>’s tracks, performed with Dessner, Antonoff and Vernon.
