ICYMI, the queen of quarantine Taylor Swift dropped a *surprise* sixteen track album on Friday. folklore is TS8, and so much more, equally a departure from the processed pop that made Taylor a princess and a return to her stripped-down Pennsylvania roots. Swift is a storyteller above all else with iconic lyrics from "Tim McGraw" to "Daylight", but on folklore, these stories become legends, the kind that are passed down in hushed tones for decades. Continued are her tales of heartbreak, growth and falling back in love, but the true story of the album—and of this moment—is track 13: "epiphany".

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A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 23, 2020 at 5:03am PDT

With the crescendo of a symphony, "epiphany" begins. The burst of Swift's voice crashes us into the song's story, a portrait of wartime with lines like, "Just a flesh wound / here's your rifle / crawling up the beaches now." Her grandfather is likely the inspiration for this, whose landing at Guadalcanal in 1942 is detailed on her folklore introduction post.

As the song moves on, verse two transitions to medical struggles, no doubt a gesture to the global pandemic of coronavirus, during which the album was written. Swift's words are hauntingly rooted in reality; "Something med school did not cover" and "Holds your hand through plastic now / Doc I think she's crashing out" are paintings of emergency rooms across the country. This track has whispered, lilting vocals, a quiet and strong tribute to nurses and doctors working through the pandemic, the soldiers of our modern day.

However, the pain and senselessness of the pandemic is not glorified. The common refrain "Some things you just can't speak about" and the outro "Only twenty minutes to sleep" show an almost equal devastation in the mental and physical toll taken on the frontlines. The victims of coronavirus are "someone's daughter, someone's mother," but so are the medical professionals.

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A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 23, 2020 at 5:00am PDT

Taylor Swift writes something devastating and beautiful, a contribution in the only way she knows how. The significance of "epiphany's" spot on the album is not unintentional, as 13 is widely known to be her lucky number. She sings, "With you I serve", and she serves as best she can.

The track's title is taken from the outro, a dream for "Some epiphany / just one single glimpse of relief / to make some sense of what you've seen." The death and destruction of the coronavirus pandemic, like that of war, is incomprehensible in our earthly world. In search of answers and in place of prayers, Taylor Swift engineers an ethereal sound, nodding to the ethereal places that we can only hope for sense from.