“Betty” has the markings of an early Taylor Swift anthem: plucky guitar and harmonica, vivid storytelling, a dramatic shift from the conditional (“If I just showed up at your party/Would you have me?”) to the present tense (“I showed up at your party/Will you have me?)” at the song’s climax. But folklore, Swift’s surprise new album, isn’t like anything she’s made before. The narratives she’s offered about what love looks and feels like are crumbling. Feelings and memories are expansive and obscured here, as if seen through a snowglobe. Swift’s usual poignant indignation is replaced with a more mundane sadness, an understanding that joy is inevitably interwoven with melancholy, love with loss.

“Betty,” a story of fraught young love, showcases the maturity and nuance that Swift has gained since she was a teenager herself. In the past, she has sung about regretting a breakup and unfairly blowing fights out of proportion. But “Betty” is the rare truly apologetic Swift song. It takes place in the height of the action, just after the narrator—referred to in passing as James but speculated to be a woman—has cheated on their high school sweetheart. This is a song about sitting with what you did, wondering if it is too late to fix it, and then stumbling, sloppily, towards accountability.

In typical Swift fashion, the songs and narratives on folklore weave together. References to a porch and a cardigan at the end of “Betty” echo the imagery in “Cardigan,” which seems to tell the same story from Betty’s perspective. The narrator of “Betty” searches for absolution in their naivety: “I’m only 17/I don’t know anything.” But recalling the same incident on “Cardigan,” Betty speaks with insight, suggesting that youth does not always make one so clueless: “I knew everything when I was young/I knew I’d curse you for the longest time.” By pairing the two songs together, Swift asks us to question our allegiances to any one narrator. She empathizes with the difficulty of apologizing even while she criticizes those who are oblivious to their power to hurt. Swift used to write as her own main character, a protagonist on a quest for a knight in shining armor. But on folklore, we see her disavow heroes and fairytales—and, implicitly, the heteronormative ideals they instill—for the more complicated daily work of acknowledging your own shortcomings and trying to heal.