Taylor Swift and the Sad Dads

So some listeners have been surprised to see the two emerge, in recent years, as close collaborators. After the pandemic interrupted Swift’s promotional plans for her 2019 album, Lover, she reached out to the multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner to help produce two new albums, Folklore and Evermore, the latter of which featured all five members of The National—whom she called her “favorite band”—in some capacity. The albums easily could have amounted to a credibility-chasing costume change: pop star goes coffee shop. Instead, they refreshed Swift’s style by pairing sophisticated, moody arrangements with a new lyrical approach. Rather than once again mine her own life for lyrics, she imagined fictional scenarios: a teenage love triangle, a murder conspiracy among friends, a romance between two con artists. Swift was availing herself of the freedoms, even imperatives, that men in rock and roll had long enjoyed—projecting moral ambiguity rather than wholesomeness and virtue.