“Before Folklore, a lot of my music was very much like ‘Dear Diary’, today I had a feeling …” Taylor Swift tells the audience at the Eras Tour why her eighth album is so important

Taylor Swift told her fans at her “Eras Tour” concert at London’s Wembley Stadium that her album “Folklore” had changed her songwriting.
The 34-year-old pop superstar took the stage at the legendary football stadium on Friday night (21.06.24) and spoke about how she reinvented her music on her acclaimed 2020 LP before performing her song “Betty”.
Taylor told the sold-out crowd that “Folklore” will always be a special record to her because it helped her grow as an artist.
She said: “‘Folklore’ is an album that I will always be so proud of. When I have favourite albums, they are usually the ones where I change things up, because that is always the most exciting for me.”
“‘Folkore’ was really different from anything I’d done before, not just in the way it sounded but in the stories I was telling. Before ‘Folklore,’ a lot of my music was very much like ‘Dear Diary Today.’ I had a feeling for about four seconds, here’s a whole song about that. That’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of fun to write like that, but it’s also fun to write the way I started writing on ‘Folkore,’ which is to create fictional characters and have them go through things and feel things and have dramas happen and this happens to them and I write as a narrator, which is a lot of fun, as it turns out.”
Taylor, who worked on her eighth studio album with Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff of The National, also told her fans that writing the album helped her get through the COVID-19 pandemic and cope during the imposed lockdowns.
She added: “I think for me one thing that’s really important about this album is that I started writing it two days after the pandemic started. I think we were all looking for an escape during lockdown, we were so confused about what was going on in the world. We just took refuge in films or books or TV or endless bottles of wine or all of the above. One of the things I did to escape was to write ‘Folklore’ and that wasn’t just an album where I wrote songs, I had a whole aesthetic image of what the album should be. It was like an imaginary world where I lived in this cabin and in my imagination I was like a woman wandering through the woods at night in a Victorian nightgown with a candle in my hand. That was kind of my whole aesthetic. So I just pretended that was happening instead of seeing what was really happening, and I wrote stories about different characters, and this is a song I wrote about a girl named Betty.”
During this portion of her stunning set, Taylor also performed “Cardigan,” “August,” “Illicit Affairs,” and “My Tears Ricochet” from Folklore, as well as “Champagne Problems,” “Marjorie,” and “Willow” from her follow-up album Evermore.
Among the more than 90,000 spectators at Wembley Stadium were many famous faces, including Taylor’s boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, her supermodel girlfriend Cara Delevingne, “Bridgerton” actress Nicola Coughlan, Prince William and his three children Prince George (10), Princess Charlotte (9) and six-year-old Prince Louis, as well as fellow royals Zara and Mike Tindall.