Evermore
by Taylor Swift (featuring Bon Iver)

Album: Evermore (2020)
Charted: 57
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Songfacts®:

  • This meditative piano ballad finds Taylor Swift singing of her depression, which she perceives may last "evermore." She explained to Apple Music her sadness came from two different situations.

    First, Swift wrote the song and lyrics just before the 2020 presidential election. She was "almost preparing for the worst to happen and trying to see some sort of glimmer at the end of the tunnel."

    Second, she went through a bunch of bad experiences in the second half of 2016, including the public condemnation following her spat with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian over the rapper's "Famous" lyrics.

    Motion capture
    Put me in a bad light
    I replay my footsteps on each stepping stone
    Trying to find the one where I went wrong


    Kim Kardashian posted on her Snapchat account an edited recording of a phone call between Swift and West, which seemed to show her approving a "Famous" lyric that she had scorned in public. Swift was widely portrayed her as a manipulative liar.

    There were several other incidents that damaged her reputation, including a fall out with Calvin Harris following the end of their relationship. Swift struggled with her public downfall and the whole experience took a toll on her mental health. She said: "All those times were just sort of taking it day-by-day to get through, trying to find a glimmer of hope, all of that."
  • The song is not all doom and gloom. The redemptive ending finds Swift starting to feel better as she thinks fondly of someone close to her. She concludes that "this pain wouldn't be for evermore." Again, this ties in with Swift singing of her "Cruel Summer" in 2016 as that tough period coincided with the start of her relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn.
  • The song is a duet with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. While he sings on three Evermore tracks, this is the only one where he features. On the other two, "Marjorie" and "Ivy," he is credited as a backing vocalist. Vernon previously duetted with Swift on the Folklore track "Exile."
  • Swift and Vernon penned the track with "William Bowery," the songwriting pseudonym of Joe Alwyn. Swift's beau is also credited as a songwriter on two other Evermore songs, "Coney Island" and "Champagne Problems." She told Apple Music's Zane Lowe the story of the song:

    "Where Joe wrote the piano, I based the vocal melody on the piano, and we sent it to Justin, who then added that bridge. And Joe had written the piano part so that the tempo speeds up, and it changes. The music completely changes to a different tempo in the bridge. And Justin really latched onto that, and just 100% embraced it and wrote this beautiful sort of... The clutter of all your anxieties in your head, and they're all speaking at once, And we got the bridge back, and then I wrote this narrative of, 'When I was shipwrecked, I thought of you.' That sort of thing, where there was this beacon of hope, and then in the end, you realize the pain wouldn't be forever."
  • This is the title track of Swift's ninth studio album, which she described as a "sister record" to Evermore's predecessor, Folklore. Evermore finds Swift walking deeper into the Folklore forest, expanding on its folk and chamber-pop sound. This song, for instance, features a rare mid-song tempo change.
  • The National's Aaron Dessner co-produced the track with Swift. Dessner and Justin Vernon are good friends and have also released music together as Big Red Machine. It was Dessner who first enlisted Vernon for Swift's "Exile" track.
  • William Bowry plays the piano on "Evermore." Dessner told Rolling Stone: "That was really important to me and to them, to do that, because he also wrote the piano part of 'Exile,' but on the record, it's me playing it because we couldn't record him easily. But this time, we could. I just think it's an important and special part of the story."
  • A Utah theme park named Evermore Park sued Swift in early February 2021 for trademark infringement, claiming the Evermore online merchandising confused people, as they assumed there was some connection between the record and their fantasy park.

    Three weeks later Swift's people countersued the theme park for allegedly using several of her songs in their performances without a proper license. Swift and the theme park agreed the following the month to drop their respective lawsuits against each other without any money changing hands.
  • Evermore broke the record for the biggest vinyl album sales in one week in the US since MRC Data began electronically tracking sales in 1991. The vinyl edition of Evermore racked up 102,000 vinyl copies in its first week of release between May 28 – June 3, 2021, overtaking Jack White's Lazaretto, which sold 40,000 copies over seven days in June 2014.

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