closure

Taylor Swift's Folklore album found her stepping away from her electropop and guitar pop songs of the 2010s towards a more folky sound. Its follow up, Evermore, found her going deeper into the folklorian woods. This industrial folk kiss-off song is probably her most experimental one on the project and also one of the first she wrote.

Evermore's primary producer, The National's Aaron Dessner, explained to Rolling Stone it originated with him and Swift collaborating remotely on possible material for Big Red Machine, his folk-rock project with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. "I think I'd written around 30 of those instrumentals in total," Dessner recalled. "So when I started sharing them with Taylor over the months that we were working on Folklore, she got really into it, and she wrote two songs to some of that music. One was 'Closure,' an experimental electronic track in 5/4 time signature that was built over a staccato drum kit. The other song 'Dorothea.'" The more Dessner listened to the songs, the more he realized that rather than using them for his project, they were in fact extensions of the tales Swift told in Folklore. The pair then came up with "Willow," which started a flood of potential material for Evermore.

Lyrically, this song finds Swift laying into someone wanting to apologize for wronging her. She suspects the person is not genuine and is only reaching out to relieve their guilty conscience. Yes, I got your letter Yes, I'm doing better I know that it's over, I don't need your Closure, your closure So who is this person that is looking to absolve themselves from blame for hurting Swift? There are three possibilities: 1) It's one of Swift's scorned boyfriends. Swift is notorious for writing songs about her past beaus and has a long list of ex-lovers. She appears to sing the chorus in a fake English accent, which hints she could be addressing Tom Hiddleston or Harry Styles. 2) Swift is airing a music-industry grudge. She may be addressing her former label boss, Scott Borchetta, who sold her masters, or music manager Scooter Braun, who bought them. 3) The song is entirely fictional. In her accompanying notes for Evermore, Swift referred to the tracks as "17 tales," where she tapped into story lines removed from her own life.