‘Before Folklore a lot of my music was very like dear diary today I felt a feeling…’ Taylor Swift tells Eras Tour crowd why her eighth album is so important

Taylor Swift told fans at her ‘Eras Tour’ concert at London’s Wembley Stadium that her album ‘Folklore’ transformed her songwriting.

The 34-year-old pop superstar took to the stage at the iconic soccer venue on Friday night (21.06.24) and before playing her track ‘Betty’ she spoke about how she reinvented her music on her acclaimed 2020 LP.

Taylor told the sell-out crowd that ‘Folklore’ will always be a record that is special to her because it helped her grow as an artist.

She said: “‘Folklore’ is an album that I’m always going to be so proud of. When I play favourites with albums it tends to be the ones where I change things up, because that’s always the most exciting thing for me.

“‘Folkore’ was really unlike anything I’d had made before that, not just in the way that it sounded but also in the stories that I was telling. Before ‘Folklore’ a lot of my music was very like dear diary today I felt a feeling for, like, four seconds, here’s an entire song about it.

Which is very fun to do, it’s very fun to write like that but it’s also fun to write the way I started to write on ‘Folkore’ which is creating fictional characters, make them go through stuff and feel things and have drama unfold and they have that happen to them and I write as the narrator, that’s a blast it turns out.”

Taylor – who worked on her eighth studio album with The National’s Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff – also told fans that writing the album helped her get through the COVID-19 pandemic and cope during the imposed lockdowns.

She added: “I think for me one thing that is very important about this album is that I started writing it two days into the pandemic and I think we were all looking for escapes during lockdown, we were so confused about what was going on in the world. We would just escape into either movies or books, TV or endless bottles of wine, or all of the above.

One of the things I did to escape was to write ‘Folklore’ and this wasn’t just an album where I wrote songs, I had a whole aesthetic image of what the album was. It was like an imaginary word where I, like, lived in this cabin and in my imagination I was like a woman wondering through the woods at night holding a candle wearing a Victorian night gown, that was like my whole aesthetic.

So I would just pretend that that what was going on instead of what was really going on and I was writing stories about different characters and this is a song I wrote about a girl named Betty.”
During that section of her staggering set, Taylor also performed ‘Cardigan’, ‘August’, ‘Illicit Affairs’ and ‘My Tears Ricochet’ from ‘Folklore’, as well as ‘Champagne Problems’, ‘Marjorie’ and ‘Willow’ from her follow-up album ‘Evermore’.

The 90,000-plus crowd at Wembley Stadium contained a host of famous faces, including Taylor’s American football player boyfriend Travis Kelce, her supermodel friend Cara Delevingne, ‘Bridgerton’ actress Nicola Coughlan, Prince William and his three children Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, nine, and six-year-old Prince Louis and fellow royals Zara and Mike Tindall