evermore by Taylor Swift (2020) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Five months after folklore turned Taylor Swift into an indie-folk songwriter almost overnight, she quietly did it again — evermore, surprise-released a fortnight before Christmas 2020, made…
Five months after folklore turned Taylor Swift into an indie-folk songwriter almost overnight, she quietly did it again — evermore, surprise-released a fortnight before Christmas 2020, made in the same lockdown with the same crew around Aaron Dessner of The National. Where folklore had the singles and the Grammy, evermore is the one the die-hards keep coming back to: woodsier, stranger, lower on drama and higher on craft. It still went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, and its green vinyl later became the fastest-selling record of the modern era in America.
Taylor Swift's ninth studio album, surprise-released on 11 December 2020 — the 'sister record' to folklore, made in the same pandemic lockdown with the same core collaborators, chief among them Aaron Dessner of The National. Fifteen songs of hushed, woodsy folk-rock and alt-country character study, written under a self-imposed cloak of pseudonyms and guest voices — Bon Iver, HAIM, The National. It arrived with far less fanfare than folklore, sold and charted almost as hugely anyway, and has become the album Swift's most devoted listeners quietly rate highest.
In July 2020, with the world shut indoors, Taylor Swift released folklore with a single day's notice and rewrote the terms of her own career: gone were the pop-machine rollouts, replaced by a muted, literary, indie-folk record made remotely with Aaron Dessner of The National and Jack Antonoff. It won Album of the Year and became the biggest-selling album of 2020. The expected move was to spend a year touring the idea. Instead, Swift and Dessner simply kept writing — and five months later, on 11 December, they did the whole thing again.
evermore was announced the day before it arrived, framed by Swift as folklore's 'sister record': the two albums shared a lockdown, a studio ethos, a palette and a crew. Where folklore had felt like a discovery, evermore is the sound of a partnership settling in. Dessner is its centre of gravity — writing or co-writing and producing the bulk of it, layering the guitars, pianos, brushed drums and chamber textures that give the album its autumnal, woods-in-December feel — with Antonoff returning for a handful of tracks and the mysterious 'William Bowery', later confirmed as Swift's then-partner Joe Alwyn, credited as co-writer on 'champagne problems', 'coney island' and the title song.
If folklore was folk, evermore drifts further out — into alt-country, chamber-pop and something close to Americana short fiction. 'no body, no crime' is a full murder ballad with HAIM riding shotgun; ''tis the damn season' and 'dorothea' trace the same fictional small town from opposite ends; 'cowboy like me' is a con-artist romance in a minor key. The guests are chosen like harmonies rather than headliners: HAIM, The National on 'coney island', and Bon Iver returning from folklore's 'exile' to duet on the closing title track. It is a writer's album, dense with named characters — Dorothea, the marrying kind, the grandmother Marjorie — and light on the autobiographical spotlight.
Commercially it should have suffered from arriving so soon, and didn't. evermore debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with about 329,000 equivalent units in the week ending 17 December — Swift's eighth consecutive number-one debut — and went straight to the top in the UK as well. 'willow', released the same day as the album, gave her another Hot 100 number one. The album was later certified multi-platinum on both sides of the Atlantic and named the RIAA's best-selling alternative album of 2021, all without a tour, a traditional single campaign, or much of the noise that had surrounded every prior Swift release.
Then came the vinyl. The physical LP wasn't issued until 28 May 2021, on green wax, and when the sales week landed it broke a record: roughly 102,000 copies in the week ending 3 June, making evermore the first album in the MRC Data era to sell 100,000 vinyl copies in a single US week — obliterating the previous mark, Jack White's Lazaretto at around 40,000 in 2014 — and knocking the album back to number one on the Billboard 200 months after release. In a year when vinyl was surging, evermore became the number the whole industry cited.
evermore is not in our hundred, and the reason is simply that the hundred is closed. But it has quietly become the connoisseur's Taylor Swift album — the one without the trophy folklore took home, without the singles of the pop records, cherished instead for its craft, its restraint and its faith that an audience of millions would sit still for character studies and murder ballads. It is folklore's woodsier, less-decorated twin, and for a great many of her fans it is the better of the two.
Because evermore sold in huge numbers, the game here is condition and variant, not scarcity. The standard object is the 2021 green 2×LP (the very pressing that set the US weekly vinyl record) — common, affordable, and the one most people mean by 'the evermore record'. The deluxe edition adds two bonus tracks ('right where you left me', 'it's time to go') and is the version completists want. The genuinely limited item is the Target-exclusive red variant, which is the one that carries any real premium. Pressings came from several plants — Precision Record Pressing (Canada), MPO (France), GZ Media (Czech Republic) — which collectors distinguish by runout and label detail rather than by the near-identical green colour; opaque vs translucent green varies by plant. Two cautions: there is no official 'evermore (Taylor's Version)', so any listing claiming one is false or bootleg; and beware plain-black or picture-disc 'evermore' LPs, which are not the official standard pressing.
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