【搬运】【译】滚石杂志Rolling Stone评Taylor Swift 2020年专辑《folklore》
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Lynn Liu/Ryan-Chopin
校对：Ryan-Chopin
排版：Ryan-Chopin
Taylor Swift从没听起来如此放松或自信，从没听起来如此与世无争
So here we are again. The world was in the middle of the cruelest summer ever, just staggering through late July, when Taylor Swift decided to make it all so much messier — her specialty. In a move that nobody saw coming, she announced a surprise album on July 23rd, less than a year after her career-capping smash Lover. (A year to the day after she dropped “The Archer.”) Like the rest of us, Swift had to cancel her summer, including her LoverFest shows, which would have been next week. Instead, she spent the quarantine season throwing herself into a new, secret project: her eighth album, Folklore. But the real surprise is the music itself — the most head-spinning, heartbreaking, emotionally ambitious songs of her life.
Taylor又发专了，而世界正处于有史以来最残酷的夏天。好不容易快熬过七月下旬，可Taylor Swift决定发挥她的专长，让这个七月再燥一点。离她上一张专辑《Lover》发行不到一年，Taylor在7月23号出人意料地宣布即将推出一张空降专辑（在她发行单曲“The Archer”的整整一年后）。Swift和我们所有人一样，不得不取消她的夏日计划，包括原定下周启航的Lover Fest巡演。相反，她在疫情期间投入到了这个秘密项目之中——她的第八张专辑《folklore》。但真正让人惊讶的却是其音乐本身——她有史以来最令人思绪万千、伤心欲绝且情感饱满的歌曲。
It’s a total goth-folk album, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, largely in collaboration with the National’s Aaron Dessner. No pop songs at all. It’s as far beyond Lover as Lover was beyond Reputation. She’s always relished her dramatic creative zigzags, but this is easily her most audacious move, full of story-telling depth she’s never come close to before. Some of us have spent years dreaming Taylor would do a whole album like this, but nobody really dreamed it would turn out this great. Her greatest album — so far.
这是一张完全哥特式民谣风格的专辑，主要使用了木吉他和钢琴来伴奏。同时，Taylor也与The National的Aaron Dessner共同创作了大部分曲目。这张专辑一首流行歌都没有，它远远超越了《Lover》，就像《Lover》超越了《Reputation》一样。她非常喜欢戏剧性的曲折创作，这无疑是她最大胆的举动，这样的故事深度是她之前从未到达过的。我们中的部分人多年来一直梦想着Taylor能做一张这样的专辑，但是没人能想到这张专辑会这么棒。可以说，《folklore》是她有史以来最好的专辑。
Lover self-consciously summed up the first 30 years of her life, bringing all her musical passions together. But on Folklore, she leaves her comfort zones behind. It sounds like she figured she wasn’t going to be touring these songs live anyway, so she gave up on doing anything for the radio, anything rah-rah or stadium-friendly. She just made some coffee, sat at the piano, and let her mind wander into some dark places. You can picture the candle on her piano flickering as the wax melts over her copy of Wuthering Heights and another song rolls out.
《Lover》不知不觉地为我们总结了她人生的前30年，汇集了她对音乐的所有热情。但是在《folklore》中，她勇敢地迈出了舒适区。这张专辑听起来像是她觉得自己永远不会在巡回演唱会上表演这些歌曲，所以她放弃了为迎合电台而创作，也不愿做任何吸引人或是适合在体育场表演的音乐。她只是煮了一些咖啡，坐在钢琴前，让她的思绪游离到暗处。你可以想象到，钢琴上烛光闪烁，蜡慢慢滴在《呼啸山庄》之上，就在这时，一首新歌被创作出来。
Her sonic chemistry with Dessner is right in every detail; she also teams up with her longtime wingman Jack Antonoff, and duets with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on “Exile.” The vibe is close to “Safe and Sound,” the rootsy gem she did with the Civil Wars for The Hunger Games soundtrack in 2013. As she explains in her Prologue, “In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”
Taylor与Dessner在音乐上的化学反应在每个细节上都显得妥当，她与长期的音乐伙伴Jack Antonoff再次合作，也与Bon Iver的Justin Vernon合唱了“Exile”。这首歌给人的感觉很像“Safe and Sound”，她与the Civil Wars合作创作了这首热单，收录在《饥饿游戏1》的电影原声带中。正如她在序言里解释的那样，“在隔离中，我灵感爆发，这张专辑就是最好的证明，音乐与故事像意识流似的流淌着，而《folklore》就是它们的合集。提起笔来创作就是我逃向幻想、历史和记忆的最好方法。”
Folklore really feels like the debut album of a whole new Swift — her narrative scope has opened up, with a wide-ranging cast of characters for 17 songs, without a dud. Yet you can still hear that this is the same songwriter who dropped “Last Kiss” on the world 10 July-9ths ago. Here’s a Swift progress report on her quarantine: “I’ve been having a hard time adjusting/I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting/I didn’t know if you’d care if I came back/I have a lot of regrets about that.” The power of her mind.
《folklore》就像是全新Swift的首张专辑——她拓宽了叙事范围，17首歌中的角色各不相同且处处合适。但是，你也可以从中感受到，她依然是那个大家熟悉的、在10年前的7月9号发行“Last Kiss”的Taylor。以下歌词仿佛是Swift在疫情期间的进度汇报：“我经历了一段自我调整的艰难时期/我本有着最闪耀的齿轮/而现在它们布满了锈迹/我不知道如果我回头你是否还会在乎。（歌词翻译摘自网易云）”这便是她心灵的力量。
It’s amusing, in retrospect, how people actually worried that being happy in love might mean Swift would run out of things to write songs about. Not a chance. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories: A scandalous old widow, hated by her whole town. A scared seven-year-old girl with a traumatized best friend. A ghost watching her enemies at the funeral. Recovering addicts. A fumbling teenage boy. Three of the highlights — “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” — depict the same love triangle, from all three different perspectives. Other songs tell both sides of a story: “The 1” and “Peace,” or “Invisible String” and “The Lakes.”
回想起来有趣的是，人们实际上很担心沉迷于幸福的恋爱中的Taylor Swift可能会没有写歌的素材了。想都别想，事实证明情况正好相反，她让这些角色讲述他们自己的故事:一个可耻的遭到整个城镇憎恨的老寡妇；一个吓坏了的七岁女孩和一个遭到创伤的好朋友；一个在葬礼上看着她的敌人的鬼魂；一些正在康复的瘾君子；一个笨手笨脚的少年。其中最突出的三部曲——“Cardigan”、“August”和“Betty”——从三个不同的角度描绘了一段三角恋。其他的歌曲则分别讲述了一个故事的两面:“The 1”和“Peace”，或“Invisible String”和“The Lakes”。
Folklore hits overdrive halfway through, when it reaches a trilogy of heavy hitters. “August,” the album’s most plainly beautiful ballad, is a summer romance gone wrong: “I can see us tangled in bedsheets/August slipped away like a bottle of wine/Because you were never mine.” “This Is Me Trying” is the disturbingly witty tale of someone pouring her heart out, to keep herself from pouring more whiskey. “Illicit Affairs” is another tale of infidelity: “Take the words for what they are/A dwindling mercurial high/A drug that only worked the first few hundred times.” The tension explodes when she sings, “Don’t call me kid/Don’t call me baby/Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me.”
《folklore》在序曲过半时达到了高潮，三部曲由此牢牢地抓住人心。“August”是这张专辑中最具有平铺直叙之美的民谣，宛若夏日情愫错付他人：“我望见我俩在床上缠绵/八月就像酒瓶里的红酒转瞬即逝/因为你从未属于我。”“This Is Me Trying”中故事的诙谐感让人烦闷，是一次个人的倾吐心声之旅，只为止住她倒更多威士忌来解愁。“Illicit Affairs”又是一个讲述不忠的故事：“那些动情时的甜言蜜语/是一种变化莫测的刺激、渐渐退却的快感/是一次性的致幻药物，即使它首次效果就给你带来无数刺激。”（歌词翻译摘自网易云）紧张感爆棚伴随着她的歌声而来：“别再叫我乖孩子/别再叫我宝贝/你可以轻松脱身而去，而我陷入卑微情绪。”
It’s going to take weeks if not decades to puzzle out all the intricately interwoven narrative details of these songs. “Mirrorball” is about the same nervous dance-floor poseur of “New Romantics,” six years later, except tonight she feels like the disco ball that reflects everyone’s most desperate insecurities. “Mad Woman” expands on the familiar topic of witch hunts, but it also sharpens the feminist rage of “The Man.” “The Last Great American Dynasty” satirizes the upper-crust milieu of “Starlight” when she sings, “There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen/I had a marvelous time ruining everything.” (Taylor uses the word “marvelous” twice in her career, and both times it’s in songs about the Kennedys? No detail is too tiny for her to plan eight years in advance.)
要解开这些歌曲错综复杂的叙事细节，不用上几十年，也需要几周的时间。“Mirrorball”和“New Romantics”两首歌中描写舞池里搔首弄姿的人都差不多，只是在“New Romantics”发行的六年后，除了今晚，她都觉得自己就像一颗迪斯科球灯，反射的光芒中充斥着每个人最绝望的不安全感。“Mad Women”再唱人们熟悉的猎巫主题，但也加剧了“The Man”里传达的女性的愤怒情绪。“The Last Great American Dynasty”讽刺了“Starlight”中描写的上流社会，她唱道:“这个镇上有史以来最吵的女人来了/我用一段美好时光专门来毁掉一切。”(Taylor在她的职业生涯中两次使用“marvelous/不可思议”这个词，但好像两次都出现在和肯尼迪家族有关联的歌曲中？对她来说，不管细节有多微小，她都能提前八年计划清楚。）
“Betty” is a first — she sings in the voice of the 17-year-old boy in a Taylor Swift song, reckoning with the fickle behavior detailed by the girls in “Cardigan” and “August.” It takes off from the harmonica solo in Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” — which feels appropriate for the only tale on the album where she goes back to high school. “The Lakes” is a bonus track for vinyl, CD, and (what a flex) cassette, but it’s a must-hear: Taylor walks in the footsteps of William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet who essentially invented the kind of introspective writing she does, wandering the Windermere Peaks of the Lake District.
“Betty”是Taylor的首次尝试——她在这首歌中扮演了一个17岁男孩来演唱，对“Cardigan”和“August”中的女孩们浮躁的情感态度作出回应。整首歌是以Bruce Springsteen的“Thunder Road”中的那种口琴独奏开始的——作为专辑中唯一一个她再访高中的故事，这样的处理是最好不过了。“The Lakes”是黑胶唱片、CD和盒式磁带中的一首加曲，但这首歌是必听之曲:Taylor步上William Wordsworth（著名诗人）的后尘，这位浪漫主义诗人实际上开创了Taylor这首歌里的自省式写作，仿佛她漫步于英格兰湖区的温德米尔山峰之间。
Remember when she was threatening to spend this year rerecording all her old albums? She does the opposite here — she refuses to repeat her most reliable tricks. So many of the world’s favorite Swift-ian trademarks are missing. No country moves, no synth pop, no first dates, no “Taylor visits a city” song, not even a laugh. The references to fame are few and far Between, although they’re tasty when they do show up, as in “Invisible String”: “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to L.A.” She can’t resist adding: “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.” Touché.
还记得她下决心说今年要录制她所有的旧专辑吗？而她实则反其道而行之——她拒绝一直走在最有把握的路上。世界上许多最受欢迎的和Swift有关的标签都消失不见了。没有乡村音乐，没有合成器流行音乐，没有和谁初次见面约会，没有“Taylor到访一个城市”而创作的歌曲，甚至没有任何泰式小品。提及Taylor名气的歌词少之又少，尽管相关内容出现时依旧惹人眼球，就像她在“Invisible String”中唱到:“你第一次去洛杉矶时出租车上放着Bad Blood那首歌，”她又忍不住补充道:“我把斧子磨得闪寒光/为的是那些伤我心的男孩/而今我会给他们的孩子寄礼物。（歌词翻译摘自网易云）”有内味儿了。
If Lover was the last album of her twenties, Folklore is the first of her thirties. Lover was styled as a well-rounded musical autobiography, with everything from Nashville twang to electro-disco. Folklore takes a completely different approach, yet feels even more intimate, simply because it’s the sound of an artist with absolutely nothing to prove. She’s never sounded this relaxed or confident, never sounded this blasé about winning anyone over. It makes perfect sense that the quarantine brought out her best, since she’s always written so poignantly about isolation and the temptation to dream too hard about other people’s far-away lives. (“Last Kiss” is usually a summer favorite, but this year, “Hope it’s nice where you are” feels a little too close to the bone.) On Folklore, she dreams up a host of characters to keep her company, and stepping into their lives brings out her deepest wit, compassion, and empathy. And it sounds like for Taylor Swift, her best is yet to come.
如果《Lover》是她三十岁之前的最后一张专辑，《folklore》便是她三十岁过后的第一张。《Lover》设计成了一部全面的音乐自传，风格多样，从纳什维尔的乡村音乐到电子迪斯科曲风。《folklore》采取了一种完全不同的制作方式，但让人感觉更加亲切，仅仅因为这是一位熟悉艺术家的歌声，且完全没必要拿什么来证明这一点。她从没听起来如此放松或自信，从没听起来如此与世无争。要说是疫情隔离使她将才能发挥至极，这也说得通，因为她的创作总是深刻而尖锐，不管是她笔下的一人独自生活，还是人心受到诱惑——即羡慕别人遥不可及的生活而做着黄粱美梦。(“Last Kiss”通常是夏天里人们最爱听的一首歌，但是今年，这首歌的歌词“希望有你在的地方都美好”听起来就有点太极端了。）在《folklore》中，她虚构了一系列人物来陪伴左右，她走进了他们的生活，这展现出她最深刻的智慧、同情心和同理心。这张优秀的专辑听起来像是在暗示Taylor Swift的无限潜能：她最好的一面都还在后头。
