In 2020, Taylor Swift introduced us to an unseen side of herself, and her music.
In July, she released Folklore, a hopeful, eclectic-folk album that departed from her previous pop sound, and only eight months later the songstress released Evermore.
While Swift has always been known for her heartbreaking lyrics, Evermore as an album introduced her audience to a more cathartic, magical side of that sadness.
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Included on Evermore was a track she co-wrote with Aaron Dessner titled Marjorie, written as a tribute to her late maternal grandmother Marjorie Finlay.
Finlay was an opera singer who died in 2003 when Swift was a teen.
“I think it was when I was on a trip to Nashville to try and make it, to try and hand out my demo CD to labels and things like that, so there were pretty insane coincidences like that” Swift told Zane Lowe of her grandmother’s passing in an interview for Apple Music.
“The experience of writing that song was really surreal because, you know I was kind of a wreck at times writing it, I would sort of break down sometimes,” she continued.
“It was really hard to actually even sing it in the vocal booth without sounding like sort of a break, because it just was really emotional.
“I think that one of the hardest forms of regret to sort of work through is the regret of being so young when you lost someone that you didn’t have the perspective to learn and appreciate who they were.”
Swift sings about living with the death of her grandmother as she grows older, coming to understand more about her life and learn from what she remembers.
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Her most gut wrenching lyrics come in the bridge, where she reflects on her regrets having lost Finlay so young.
“I should’ve asked you questions / I should’ve asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / ‘Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me.”
Marjorie is the sister song to Epiphany from her previous album folklore, a song about her paternal grandfather Dean and his experience in the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II.
Both songs are placed at track 13 on their respective albums, widely known as Swift’s favourite number.
When she announced the surprise release of Evermore in December of 2020, Swift referred to it as “one starring my grandmother, Marjorie, who still visits me sometimes…if only in my dreams.”
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Speaking with Zane Lowe, Swift revealed that Finlay’s voice is actually featured alongside her own on the track.
“One of the things about this song that kind of still rips me apart when I listen to it,” she said. “Is that she’s singing with me on this song.
“My mum found a bunch of her old records, a bunch of old vinyls of her singing opera and I sent them to Aaron [Desner] and he added them to the song.
“So it says, “if I didn’t know better I’d think you were singing to me now,” and then you hear her, you hear Marjorie actually sing, my grandmother.”
The singer also released a lyric video for the track, featuring vintage photos of Findlay with a toddler-aged Swift, and old newspaper articles detailing Finlay’s success as an opera singer.
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Growing up in Mexico, Missouri, Finlay was classically trained and won a talent contest in 1950 to go on the radio show, Music With the Girls.
Her career soon took off in Puerto Rico where she sang with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and also hosted her own TV show.
In a newspaper clipping shown in the music video, Findlay is quoted as having said, “My Spanish was bad enough to be funny, and the audience loved it. I became a sort of straight man for the show’s M.C.”
While Finlay achieved fame and success in her own right, Swift’s track also alludes to her personal feeling of living out her grandmother’s dreams of music success, even though she is not there to see it.
“Watched as you signed your name Marjorie / All your closets of backlogged dreams / And how you left them all to me,” she sings in the bridge.
On the night that Swift dropped the album, she wrote to a fan on YouTube saying that although she has many favourite lyrics from the album, her current favourite is “Never be so kind you forget to be clever / Never be so clever you forget to be kind,” the opening line of Marjorie.
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When the Eras Tour began, fans were surprised to see that Swift has included Marjorie on her setlist, due to it’s personal and painful nature.
But Swift has spoken widely of the song, explaining that it’s poignant disposition is what makes her feel so close to not just the song itself, but the album as a whole.
Speaking of the song-writing process with Lowe, Swift said: “It’s just, it’s moments like that on the record that make you feel like your whole heart is in this thing that you’re doing. It’s all of you that you put into these things.”
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