Taylor Swift's music video for 'willow' is a romantic sequel to 'cardigan'

Time to climb into the piano and enter the parallel universe again.
 By 
Rachel Thompson
 on 
Taylor Swift's music video for 'willow' is a romantic sequel to 'cardigan'
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She's here and she's perfect! Today we awoke to a world with a brand new Taylor Swift record, evermore. With the surprise release of her ninth studio album, Swift also dropped the music video for lead single "willow," which might look a little familiar to those who were paying attention to her last album folklore (evermore's sister album).

The video begins with Taylor Swift wearing a cardigan, which is something of a not-so-subtle hint. "willow" resumes where "cardigan" left off, and brings the same level of folksy romance brought to us by the video for folklore's lead single. As with "cardigan," Swift climbs inside her piano and clambers into a magical foresty underworld that's rather akin to Narnia.

And like "cardigan," Swift directed the music video herself, revealing the meaning behind the video in a YouTube chat ahead of the album’s premiere. "One scene represents how I feel about fame. There’s a scene to represent each season throughout the journey of the video," she wrote.

Wherever Taylor strays, we follow...

Topics Music

Rachel Thompson, sits wearing a dress with yellow florals and black background.
Rachel Thompson
Features Editor

Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.

A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.

Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.


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