“Scraps of You”: Fabrics of memory in Taylor Swift’s folklore & evermore

Swift’s 2020 and 2021 sister albums Folklore and Evermore articulate a particular materialisation of romantic nostalgia. Swift’s incantations to grief are expressed through a measured lyricism that is both deeply private and universal in its appeal. Mapping the shape-shifting terrain of 21st century Feminist love and loss, these most recent albums revisit and redraft a central idea from the earlier release Red, summarised by the titular refrain: ‘cos I remember it, all too well.’ What is at stake in Evermore and Folklore is exactly this act of remembering – of reminiscing and fantasising so that the romantic nostalgia becomes itself intoxicating, even temporally immobilising (‘I’m right where you left me’). In this essay I will explore what the contemporary poet Peter Gizzi terms this ‘being in loss,’ as Swift gives voice to intimate suffering. The violence of that loss is ubiquitous (‘the smell of smoke would hang around this long’); it is at once spectral (‘I knew you’d haunt all of my what ifs’) and corporeal (‘Marked me like a bloodstain’). Following in the American Feminist tradition of poets like Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich, Swift materialises this grief through the everyday domestic object: the ‘scarf’ and ‘cardigan’ of unforgotten entanglements. Romantic presences are felt and ‘held’ through their physical manifestations, as visible remnants of psychic traumas. These material traces are woven throughout the fabric of Folklore and Evermore, as the songs give space to Swift’s altercating patterns of grief. Through a Dickinsonian sense of redrafting and reshaping, the lyrics speak through and across one another; heightened moments are re-worked and re-appraised as Swift attends to this ‘insurmountable grief.’ However, I argue that it is in the very act of reconstruction that Swift locates herself, unpicking the ‘invisible threads’ of such intimacies. Thus, it is through the act of self-archiving – in (re)working the fabrics of loss – that Swift reconstructs 21st century female romantic memory.