Just In time for Thanksgiving celebrations, Taylor Swift has released Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions on Disney+. It is a behind-the-scenes look at her eight album Folklore. She briefly mentioned the project on social on Tuesday, and surprised her fans with its debut the following day. The medium is a concert/documentary regarding her new music.
The film features studio sessions where Taylor performs several songs including “Cardigan” and “August”. Her producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff also star in the documentary.
“There’s something about the complete and total uncertainty of life,” she explains in the film. “If we’re going to have to recalibrate everything, we should start with what we love the most first.” Taylor hints that Folklore has an intentionally, emotional tone that she created for the people suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation.
Folklore has been nominated five times for the 2021 Grammy Awards: Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance, Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, and Best Pop Vocal Album. At the start of this week, Taylor won Artist of the Year at the 2020 American Music Awards.
According to Rolling Stone, there is currently a dispute over who owns the master recording of Taylor’s previous albums. She wants and deserves to own all her masters and she has stated that if the parties involved will not grant her access to them, she will be going into the studio to re-record all of her previous albums.
Hopefully they can settle this matter legally rather than Taylor having to start back to the very beginning. She is in a very creative, emotional, striking place right now in her new music and I think the fans really want her to explore it further with more new songs. However, that will not be able to happen if she has to go back and re-record. The reason why she deserved to win the Artist of the Year Award is because her new music takes how emotional the world is right now into account when she’s making her new songs. Folklore has a simple concept: just feel the music.
Taylor is fearless and will do some re-recording if she has to, but that’s a tall task for any artist to undertake. She should be applauded because very few artists own the master copies of their music. This conflict reminds me of Prince, who had legal battles with Warner Bros. to gain access to his master recordings and to be released from the label. Prince was one of the few artists who actually owned all of his masters. Pink, who is one of the most talented pop singers and performers today, met Prince and asked if he would be willing to record a duet with her since she’s been a longtime fan. Prince asked her if she owned her masters, and Pink said no. Prince said to contact him when she gets her masters so that they could make that track. When this initially happened, many people thought that Prince was acting like jerk and was being insensitive; however, when you really think about it, he was telling Pink that ownership of her own music is more important than any collaboration that she could think of at the time.
Taylor Swift’s Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions is now live on Disney+.
