In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. As Scott explains here, the column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Evermore was never its own era. That was a laughable fiction. Just a few months after Taylor Swift surprise-released Folklore, an album of delicate chamber-folk songs that she recorded with Aaron Dessner from the National, she released Evermore, another album of delicate chamber-folk songs that she recorded with Aaron Dessner from the National. I don’t care if Swift and Dessner recorded the two LPs at different times. I don’t care if she had different moods or color palettes in mind for the two records. One of those records is an album, and the other one is a collection of bonus tracks, or maybe one of those sequels like Scream 2 that gets greenlit during the opening weekend and comes out less than a year after the first one.
When Swift headed out on her Eras Tour a couple of years after she released Folklore and Evermore, she presented those two albums as separate Eras, putting them in different places on the setlist and acting like they represented completely different chapters of her career. I guess she had distinct stage sets in mind for the two records — a cozy cabin for Folklore, some mossy woods for Evermore — but it’s not like those settings were incompatible. When the tour kept going forever and eventually had to make room for yet another Taylor Swift record, she finally collapsed the Folklore and Evermore parts together. To the best of my knowledge, nobody complained. The Swiftie base is vast and forbidding, and I’m sore some obscure corner of it was upset that she stopped giving Evermore its own spotlight, but I don’t hang out with those people.
The distinctions between album eras is a pretty arbitrary thing, and it doesn’t even properly apply to a lot of pop stars throughout history. Maybe I shouldn’t even bother caring how Swift presents these things. They’re her albums, right? She should do what she wants with them. But it’s hard for me to detect too many ways in which “Cardigan,” the first of Taylor Swift’s #1 hits in 2020, is particularly different from “Willow,” the second. They’re the same song, more or less. It’s a perfectly OK song, but I don’t appreciate being told that it’s two unique songs. Tell the truth.
I’m exaggerating for effect here. “Cardigan” and “Willow” are obviously not the exact same song. They’re just two songs made by the exact same people that radiate the exact same vibe and have the exact same effect. Just like “Cardigan,” “Willow” started off as an instrumental that Aaron Dessner put together for his band the National. Later on, National singer Matt Berninger said that he’d tried writing songs to both of those instrumentals and struck out with both of them. (The National don’t have any Hot 100 hits of their own, but they’re credited as featured guests on “Coney Island,” the Evermore deep cut that Swift sang as a duet with Berninger, and that song peaked at #63.)
It’s not like the National could’ve had back-to-back #1 hits if Berninger had managed to find his way into those tracks. It’s not like Britney Spears passing on “Umbrella” or TLC saying no to the “Baby One More Time” demo. “Cardigan” and “Willow” were both chart-topping hits because they were the ostensible singles from Taylor Swift’s two surprise indie-folk albums, not because of anything particular to the songs themselves. Those two tracks are nowhere near Swift’s most popular, but their chart impact is further evidence that she’s just way, way bigger than any of the people who might’ve once been her peers. Nobody else could repeatedly take sleepy acoustic lullabies to #1 in this decade. That is completely and entirely a Taylor Swift thing. She’s playing a different sport from everyone else.
The story goes like this: Folklore came out in July 2020, the deep pandemic-summer dog days, and became an immediate sensation. It earned the best reviews of Taylor Swift’s career, and it quickly took its spot as the year’s biggest album. It wasn’t as though Swift’s career needed any kind of reset, but Folklore served as one anyway. It solidified Swift even further. She loved making the album and reveled in its success, and she kept the experiment going. Swift and Dessner kept talking after the album came out. A few months after its release, she finally visited Long Pond, the upstate New York studio where Dessner recorded his Folklore backing tracks. She, Dessner, and Jack Antonoff all met up there for the first time, and they filmed a Disney+ special called The Long Pond Studio Sessions, which was basically some MTV Unplugged shit minus an audience.
While all this was happening, Swift and Dessner were also talking about potential collaborations between her and Big Red Machine, Dessner’s side project with Bon Iver guy Justin Vernon. Swift ultimately did appear on a couple of songs from Big Red Machine’s 2021 album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? She basically sang lead on the single “Renegade,” which put Big Red Machine onto the Hot 100, something that would’ve otherwise been unthinkable unless they won some random TikTok lottery. (“Renegade” peaked at #73. Pretty song!)
Apparently, “Willow,” like “Cardigan” before it, was the song that kicked off the album process. In 2023, Dessner told People, “I think she wrote the entire song from start to finish in less than 10 minutes and sent it back to me. It was like an earthquake. Then Taylor said, ‘I guess we are making another album.'” He also told Sound On Sound, “It almost felt like a dare or something. We were writing, recording and mixing all in one kind of work stream, and we went from one record to the other almost immediately. We were just sort off to the races. We didn’t really ever stop since April.”
When Dessner sent Swift the instrumental track for “Willow,” it was called “Westerly,” which is the place in Rhode Island where Swift owns a house. That was a pretty smart thing for Dessner to do. We know exactly how Swift’s “Willow” demo sounds because she ends up releasing all those things on special album editions. In voice-memo form, “Willow” already sounds pretty much complete. I like the bit where Swift suggests that maybe a choral bit should go in one part.
Swift recorded “Willow” and most of the other Evermore songs at Long Pond when she was up there to film the Disney+ special with Dessner. (They’d put together the Folklore tracks remotely.) Maybe that’s why Swift sinks a little deeper into the National’s pillowy sound on Evermore, leaving her pop instincts just slightly more muffled. The Folklore songs mostly sound like big stadium-pop jams that have been recorded more quietly. Evermore, I find, tends to blur into the background more.
Swift might’ve written the song in 10 minutes, but “Willow” went through a bunch of versions before Swift and Dessner were happy with it. Dessner told Sound On Sound that it was the hardest track on the album to finish: “There were so many ways it could’ve gone. Eventually, we settled back almost to the point where it began. So there’s a lot of stuff that was left out of ‘Willow,’ just because the simplicity of the idea I think was in a way the strongest.”
Is the idea really all that simple? I guess the melody is simple. The lyrics are vague to the point where they’re almost meaningless. On the Genius annotation for “Willow,” fans have added in lots of explanations about how “Willow” lyrics might refer back to lyrics or imagery from previous moments in Swift’s career, and that’s a little too convincing. Swift often talks about how she loves throwing in Easter-egg references for her superfans to catch, but “Willow” feels like one of those cases where the references obscure the text itself.
“Willow” is love song, or maybe an infatuation song. Swift has used to word “witchy” to describe it more than once, so there’s a non-zero chance that it’s at least partly named after the Alyson Hannigan character in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There’s also an obvious metaphor about willow trees bending but not breaking, but I’m trying to have some fun here. I’m doing what I can. According to Swift, “Willow” is all about desire and about people trying to cast metaphorical love spells on one another. I mostly hear it as a collection of mixed metaphors and similes that don’t make sense together.
Look: Taylor Swift is a very gifted and successful writer and I’m just some guy, but I feel like the opening line on a gigantic pop record should be a little cleaner than this: “I’m like the water when your ship rolled in that night/ Rough on the surface, but you cut through like a knife.” So wait, she’s the water and he’s the ship, and the ship is also the knife that cuts through the water? Then there’s this, from the bridge: “Life was a willow, and it bent right to your wind/ But I come back stronger than a ’90s trend.” I feel like I need to get the corkboard and the string out here. I was an English major, OK? I should be able to figure this shit out.
Taylor Swift can be a remarkably clean lyrical storyteller when she wants to be, but this isn’t one of those cases. Swift lyrics always get a whole lot of scrutiny, partly because they can be awkward and ungainly and partly because critics like me always have to publish our reviews of her albums right away, immediately. (My Evermore review dropped at 5 p.m. on its release date, which is a little slow for me.) I probably focus too much on the lyrics, at least at first, since they can be easier to parse out than whatever she’s doing musically. She does some nice musical things on “Willow.”
Aaron Dessner played a whole mess of instruments on “Willow” — acoustic and electric guitar, bass, piano, keyboard, percussion, drum machine programming. He recorded Swift’s vocal, too. Some of his National bandmates also had a hand in it. Dessner’s twin brother Bryce did the orchestration. Drummer Bryan Devendorf did some percussion and programming, too. That guy is a beast, but you can’t really tell from “Willow.” The song is a soft, reassuring jangle-chime thing. Swift’s multi-tracked vocal is conversational and evocative, and I like her sighing harmonized backups. But you can almost hear her holding herself back. Her songs often peak with huge, thundering bridges. The bridge on “Willow” is structurally sound, but it doesn’t crank the song up to another level, and this song could really stand to be cranked up to another level. Same goes for the chorus, really.
It’s the classic Taylor Swift first-single syndrome. She’s had all this world-historical success, but she’s also got this incredible history of releasing some of her blandest, least exciting songs as the tracks that introduce these records to the world. Evermore doesn’t have bangers, and that seems to be an intentional decision. But it has a bunch of song that are way prettier and grabbier than “Willow”: “Happiness,” “Illicit Affairs,” “Tolerate It,” “Cowboy Like Me.” I don’t know if any of them would make my list of Swift’s best, but those are some really, really good songs.
It ultimately didn’t matter, of course. Swift was beyond the point where she needed a lead single to really sell an album. Evermore sold itself, simply by existing. Maybe “Willow” was the song that gave Swift the most visual ideas for a video. As with “Cardigan,” Swift directed the “Willow” video herself. As with “Cardigan,” the video fucking sucks.
Swift starts off the “Willow” video at the same attic piano, with the same magical glowy rope, that she used in the “Cardigan” clip. Again, she climbs inside the video and gets magically whisked off to a different place and time. Here, she’s some kind of old-timey carnival attraction, trying to connect to her childhood crush from the inside of a glass display case. I know what Swift is trying to say here. Being mega-famous makes her feel like a freak who’s been put up on display for the public. But some of us look like actual physical freaks, and buddy, Taylor Swift is not one of us.
I’m not going to sit here and complain about being outlandishly tall all day — it’s mostly a good thing — but the ladies who sat behind me and my daughter at the Eras Tour tried to get us literally kicked out of the show for being too tall. We had to have a huddle with the security guards and figure something out. (The guards were cool.) Taylor Swift is tall, too, but she’s regular-people tall. She’s not a freak, and being famous is just not the same as that. Ultra-famous and successful people shouldn’t get to appropriate freak iconography just because they’re ultra-famous and successful. Leave that to us actual freaks, OK?
Wow, I got off on a tangent there. Anyway. “Willow” video. Swift puts on a hooded robe and does some witchy stuff around a bonfire, and then she’s back in her attic, wearing some kind of pioneer dress, except now her childhood dancer crush guy is there with her. The spell worked, I guess. There’s a whole lot of smudgy CGI imagery straight out of a second-rate young adult bestseller movie adaptation. It’s ugly, and it’s boring. Swift is starting to get way better and directing her own music videos, but that early stage was rough.
“Willow” and its video came out alongside the rest of Evermore, which Swift announced the day before its release. The song got enough attention to debut at #1, even though we were right in the middle of the peak holiday season. During a week when the rest of the top 10 was made up almost entirely of Christmas songs, Swift stole a week away from Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” That’s a power move. But “Willow” didn’t stick around.
Much like the BTS Army, Swifties will reliably lift up a new single and make damn good and certain that it debuts at #1. Some Taylor Swift songs stay on top for way longer than one week, and some do not. “Willow” did not. Instead, the song fell off a cliff, dropping all the way down to #38 in its second week. At the time, that was the biggest fall from a #1 debut in Hot 100 history. It might still be the biggest fall-off, but I don’t keep up with obscure chart statistics like that. Somebody in the comments can say for sure.
Evermore didn’t have any other chart hits on it, either. This wasn’t one of those situations where a new Taylor Swift album completely chokes the Hot 100 out for weeks on end. We’ll get to those later. All 15 Evermore songs did debut on the Hot 100, but most of them were in the chart’s lower reaches. The album’s second-highest debut was “Champagne Problems,” way down at #21. Not coincidentally, that’s track two on the album, which tells me that lots of people probably streamed the first few Evermore songs out of curiosity and then got bored and stopped. “Champagne Problems,” though? That’s a good song.
Taylor Swift performed “Willow” for the first time as part of a three-song Grammy-night medley, and she kept performing it all through the Eras Tour. For those “Willow” performances, Swift and her backup dancers had lit-up orbs, sort of like what the witches use in the video. They looked very cool onstage. In the New Heights podcast episode where she announced her new album earlier this year, Swift talked about looking out into the crowd and seeing all these homemade orbs that fans brought out during “Willow.” I don’t remember seeing any at my show, though.
At this point, Evermore has gone platinum four times, which is two less than Folklore. “Willow” has gone platinum once, just like “Cardigan.” Folklore was an actual pop event that cast Taylor Swift in a new light. Evermore, by contrast, was just another Taylor Swift album. But I maintain that the worst Taylor Swift album is still pretty good and that Evermore is not the worst one. Well, it might be the worst one, depending on my mood. It’s in the lower tier of Swift’s albums, but I’m never sorry to hear it. It’s not especially fashionable for rock critics to say nice things about Taylor Swift at this exact moment, but she’s simply very good at her job.
In 2021, Taylor Swift embarked on her big project of re-recording her old albums so that she’d get control of her masters. She started it all off with Fearless, which is probably still my favorite. As with all her Taylor’s Versions, she included a bunch of songs that she wrote around the same time but didn’t include on the original LPs. With Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the biggest hit was the re-recorded “Love Story,” which reached #11. (The OG “Love Story” peaked at #4. It’s a 10.) But the bonus track that was positioned as a single was “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” and there’s a reason that song got left off of Fearless. It’s fine, but it’s not really worthy of that album, and it peaked at #30.
Later Taylor Swift re-recordings would become much bigger pop events, and they’d have much bigger impacts on the Hot 100. In fact, virtually everything that Swift has done in the past five years has been a pop event and made an impact on the Hot 100. We’ll see plenty more of her in this column.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: I had a hell of a time finding anything that I could use in this section, so I turned to the Stereogum Discord for help. Shout out to Discord user SGreenwell, who helpfully informed me that folk-pop singer Passenger posted a “Willow” cover on YouTube in 2022. It’s not a super-interesting cover or anything, but this is at least a semi-prominent figure singing that song:
(Passenger only has one Hot 100 hit, but it was a pretty big one. He reached #5 with 2013’s “Let Her Go.” I said it was a 6 once, and I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s maybe a 4.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Treat it as if it were a mythical thing, like like it was a trophy or a champion ring, and there was one prize you’d cheat to win. Or alternately, just buy a copy.
