Taylor Swift Releases Surprise folklore Live Album

Taylor Swift Releases Surprise folklore Live Album

Yesterday, Taylor Swift pulled another surprise attack. This past summer, Swift released her quarantine album folklore with only a day of advance notice. Yesterday — the same day that folklore was nominated for a buttload of Grammys — Swift announced the impending release of Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a new live-concert movie that Swift made with her folklore collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon. That film is up on Disney+ today, and Swift also went ahead and made a whole live album out of it.

In the concert film, Swift performs every song from folklore with her three collaborators,. Today, Swift has also released a bonus edition of folklore that features all those live versions. (Swift didn’t release the live folklore as a separate album. Instead, this version will almost certainly juice up the numbers of her own already-huge LP.)

Given that folklore was already basically an acoustic album, it’s still striking to hear Swift and her collaborators stripping those songs down even further, giving them a different level of intimacy. Below, you can stream the expanded version of folklore, with all those live tracks.

During the film portion of The Long Pond Sessions, Swift confirmed the identity of folklore co-writer “William Bowery” as her boyfriend Joe Alwyn, which had been speculated at the time the album was released. He has credits on “Betty” and “Exile.”

“Joe plays piano beautifully. He’s always just playing and making things up and kind of creating things,” she said during the movie. “And ‘Exile’ was crazy because Joe had written that entire piano part. He was singing the Bon Iver part. […] And so I was entranced and asked if we could keep writing that one. It was pretty obvious that it should be a duet.”

And in a new interview with Good Morning America, Swift talked about the process of re-recording all her old songs. She said the one she’s had the most fun revisiting is her 2008 single “Love Story.” “Because [on] the older music, my voice was so teenaged and sometimes when I hear my older music and my older, young teenage voice, it makes me feel like I’m a different singer now,” she said. Here’s that interview:

Right now, you can watch Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions on Disney+.

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