【搬运译】滚石Rolling Stone评Taylor Swift 2020年专辑《Evermore》（恒久传说）

翻译：出自微信公众号【RollingStone大水花】（若有侵权自删）https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/RCj9sNRNJRc8fsfBQ01vxQ

So here we are again…again. And honestly, we should have seen this one coming. Of course, Taylor Swift, stuck in quarantine like the rest of us, decided to release a whole new collection of 17 songs as a sequel to her outstanding Folklore, unleashing it unto the world with as little warning as the last one. Evermore may be its own album, but it’s also very much an extension of Folklore – a “sister record,” as Swift calls it. And what better way to give such a songwriting-heavy project a second life? In lieu of the endless coordinated music videos, live shows and photoshoots that have tied each of her last five or so albums under one giant aesthetic umbrella, Swift has doubled down on Folklore’s themes of storytelling and contemporary mythology by, well, writing more songs.

泰勒·斯威夫特又出专辑了！不过说实话，我们应该料到这一次的。当然了，她是泰勒·斯威夫特，她和我们一样隔离在家，于是她决定发行17首新歌作为《Folklore》的续集，并且和《Folklore》一样毫无预告。《Evermore》既是自成一体，也是《Folklore》的延伸——用斯威夫特的话来说，是一张“姊妹专辑”。这其实也是上张专辑的丰富创作获得第二次生命的最好方式。无数MV，现场表演，写真照片的通力合作，构建了她此前至少五张专辑的统一风格，但在这张专辑里，斯威夫特选择通过更多的歌曲，将《Folklore》中的说书和当代神话继续到底。

With Evermore coasting on its older sibling’s tidal wave of success, Swift and her team had even more freedom to do whatever they wanted, and it reflects back in the music. She’s working here again with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and although Folklore’s moody, “indie”-inspired sound is still the dominant feature of Evermore, there’s room for more variety and experimentation this time around. The wicked country murder ballad “No Body, No Crime,” guest-starring Este and Danielle Haim, rubs elbows with the twinkling chamber-pop track “Gold Rush.” Swift warmly sings against honky-tonk piano in “Dorothea” and then, in the complete opposite direction, artificially distorts her voice on the seething “Closure,” using Bon Iver’s Messina vocal modifier to turn her soft timbre into a barely-contained robotic growl. It’s a refreshing change of pace: Swift’s usual approach to dabbling in new genres or sounds is to go balls-to-the-wall, but on Evermore, she’s just as good at curating these more detailed production flourishes, all with the same contouring and meticulousness as she does with her best lyrics.

随着上张姊妹专辑的成功，斯威夫特和她的团队在《Evermore》上有了更多的创作自由，这在音乐上有所体现。她再度和Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Bon Iver的Justin Vernon合作，尽管《Folklore》独立范儿的忧郁声线依然主导《Evermore》，但后者允许了更多的变化和尝试。讲述残酷乡村杀手的歌谣““No Body, No Crime”由Este Haim和Danielle Haim客串，和室内流行乐风格的“Gold Rush”相映成趣。斯威夫特在杭基汤克钢琴曲的伴奏下温暖献唱了“Dorothea”，然后又风格陡变地刻意扭曲嗓音，带来愤怒的“Closure”，Bon Iver的Messina声音处理器将她柔软的声线变成几欲发作的机械低吼。这是她的突破：斯威夫特以往尝试新的类型和风格，从来是一以贯之，但在《Evermore》里，她精选搭配制作上的吉光片羽，一如她此前打磨歌词的工整细致。

Story songs are still the heart of the matter on Evermore, and Swift has a whole new cast of characters to join betty, James, Rebekah and the rest from her prior Long Pond sessions. “‘Tis the Damn Season” introduces Dorothea, a Hollywood actress who returns to her hometown and reunites with a high school flame in a very adult tryst. We get to hear his side of the story in “Dorothea,” as he yearns for her to close the distance between them: “You got shiny friends since you left town/A tiny screen’s the only place I see you now.” But unlike the teenage love triangle that ran through the center of Folklore, there are few neat conclusions to Evermore’s tales. A woman breaks up with her college sweetheart the night he planned to propose; two con artists fall in love and promise an impossible life of stability to each other. On “Tolerate It,” one of Swift’s most damning relationship vignettes to date, one person’s love is met with cruel indifference from their other half. “I wait by the door like I’m just a kid/Use my best colors for your portrait/Lay the table with the fancy shit/And watch you tolerate it,” Swift warbles, making the situation sound, convincingly, like a fate worse than death.

故事歌曲依然是《Evermore》的核心，全新人马加入了《民间传说：长池录音室》(Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions）中的betty，James, Rebekah等人。“’Tis the Damn Season”中，Dorothea是一位回到家乡的好莱坞女演员，和高中时代的男友有了一段成年人的约会。在“Dorothea”里，我们听到男方的版本，他希望她不要那么遥不可及：“你离开家乡后有了光鲜亮丽的朋友/小小的荧幕是我现在能见你的唯一地方。”

Granted, none of these stories are executed with more or less finesse than the ones on Folklore. Whether by design, or simply by which songs she decided to put on which album, Evermore’s most revelatory moments come when Swift turns the mythmaking back around to herself. “Marjorie,” the closest thing the album has to a centerpiece, is a brilliant and devastating piece of songcraft, an instant classic in the Swift canon. Anyone familiar with the charity track “Ronan” is aware that Swift can write a damn good eulogy, and here she paints her own grandmother Marjorie Finley as an indelible force, a woman so much like herself yet whose complete story she’ll never be able to tell. “What died didn’t stay dead/What died didn’t stay dead,” Swift sings, steadfast. “You’re alive, you’re alive, in my head.” It’s hard to think of another song that so perfectly captures the delayed tragedy of losing a loved one when you’re too young to see their full worth.

但和贯穿《Folklore》的青春三角恋不同，《Evermore》的故事大都没有明确的结局：在大学男友准备求婚的夜晚与之分手的女人；两个相恋的骗子彼此承诺的镜花水月。“Tolerate It”是斯威夫特迄今对恋爱最负面的描绘之一，讲述一方的爱遇到了另一方的冷酷对待。“我在门口像是小孩一样等待/为你的画奉上我最好的色彩/看着你容忍我用堂皇摆盘，”她唱着，唱到人相信那是生不如死的命运。诚然，这些故事的讲述手法没有比《Folklore》更高级，但也没有比《Folklore》更低级。或许是精心设计，或许只是她刚好把把哪首歌放在了哪张专辑，《Evermore》最袒露内心的时刻，来自她为自己创作的神话。整张专辑最接近主打歌的“Marjorie”，作曲强大而精彩，可以直接跻身斯威夫特的最佳之一。熟悉慈善歌曲“Ronan”的人，都知道斯威夫特完全有能力创作出好的颂歌，在“Marjorie”里，她将外婆Marjorie Finley描绘成一位坚强的女性，一位像她一样的女性，但她却永远不能完整讲述外婆的故事。“逝去的并不就这样死去/逝去的并不就这样死去”，泰勒坚定地唱着。“你还活着，你在我心里活着。”很难找到另一首歌，如此完美地诠释了迟来的悲剧：太年轻时失去所爱的人，直到后来才明白他们的珍贵。

If Swift seems hesitant to give her characters happy endings, or endings in general, it may be because she’s still figuring out her own next chapter right on the page. “I was dancing when the music stopped/And in the disbelief/I can’t face reinvention/I haven’t met the new me yet,” she sings on “Happiness,” a track she recorded just a week before the album dropped. It’s a gorgeous, ambient song, reminiscent of Chromatics without the four-on-the-floor beats, and while she’s ostensibly singing about divorce, Swift touches on so much more – nuanced acts of forgiveness, complex personal histories, the ability to visualize and know how a person can look in different shades of light. No doubt Swift is still the master of writing a spiteful kiss-off, but the songs of Evermore are a welcomed step in a more mature direction, the result of months and months of her getting lost in the woods and questioning her way forward. By the time you’re reading this, she may have already found the answer.

如果说斯威夫特不愿给歌中人物幸福的结局，或给他们任何结局，大概是因为她创作之时也在探索自己的下一步。“音乐停了我仍在跳舞/将信将疑/无法直面重塑/我还未见识过我的新面目“，她在“Happiness”里唱到。这是她在专辑发布一周前才录制的单曲，优美的氛围音乐像是没有Four On The Floor节奏的Chromatics乐队，尽管表面唱的是离婚，她触及的远不止于此——隐忍的宽恕，复杂的经历，一个人的不同面向。斯威夫特无疑很擅长分手后来写歌报复，但《Evermore》的歌曲迈向了更成熟的方向，这是她在森林迷路数月，找寻自己方向的结果。当你读到这篇文字的时候，她或许已经找到了答案。