Taylor Swift
"betty"
New single from Taylor Swift "betty", from her latest album folklore!
Folklore stands out as the top selling album of 2020 with global sales over 2 million worldwide and over half a billion total streams on audio and video in just one week. What’s even more impressive, it is the biggest album debut by an artist since Taylor Swift last released her award-winning album, Lover, just 11 months ago!
'Betty' has the recognizagle work of Taylor Swift's vivid storytelling of her earlier days with the plucking guitar and hermonica. The storytelling offers a about what love looks and feels like are crumbling. It's like looking into a different time and place to the present tense (''I showed up at your party/Will you have me?'') at the stories climax. The fairtale is replaced with more realistic feelings of sadness, an understanding that joy is inevitably interwoven with love with loss.
“Betty,” a story of fraught young love, showcases the maturity and nuance that Swift has gained since she was a teenager herself. In the past, she has sung about regretting a breakup and unfairly blowing fights out of proportion. But “Betty” is the rare truly apologetic Swift song. It takes place in the height of the action, just after the narrator—referred to in passing as James but speculated to be a woman—has cheated on their high school sweetheart. This is a song about sitting with what you did, wondering if it is too late to fix it, and then stumbling, sloppily, towards accountability.
In typical Swift fashion, the songs and narratives on folklore weave together. References to a porch and a cardigan at the end of “Betty” echo the imagery in “Cardigan,” which seems to tell the same story from Betty’s perspective. The narrator of “Betty” searches for absolution in their naivety: “I’m only 17/I don’t know anything.” But recalling the same incident on “Cardigan,” Betty speaks with insight, suggesting that youth does not always make one so clueless: “I knew everything when I was young/I knew I’d curse you for the longest time.” By pairing the two songs together, Swift asks us to question our allegiances to any one narrator. She empathizes with the difficulty of apologizing even while she criticizes those who are oblivious to their power to hurt. Swift used to write as her own main character, a protagonist on a quest for a knight in shining armor. But on folklore, we see her disavow heroes and fairytales—and, implicitly, the heteronormative ideals they instill—for the more complicated daily work of acknowledging your own shortcomings and trying to heal.
‘Folklore,’ the pop star mixes stories from the perspectives of other people with her own and delivers a stripped-down album delivers some of her best work yet, better than even Red, if that's possible. Simply brilliant! - NOW and THEN Magazine
''betty''
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''cardigan''
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