Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’ Makes Its Return to Familiar Spot on Billboard Charts

Taylor Swift‘s quarantine project Evermore is back on the top of the Billboard 200, ascending the all-genre chart for a fourth non-consecutive week. Billboard shares that the project earned 202,000 equivalent album units in the United States in the week ending June 3, marking the biggest sales week of 2021. The 2021 record was previously set by Swift with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which sold 179,000 in its first week in April.

After the album officially returned to No. 1, Swift reacted to the news on Twitter. “This one hit me hard. I’m so in my feelings (more so than usual!) over what you all did here for evermore,” she wrote. “Blown away by how much you care, and how long we’ve been caring about each other. Love you, so very much.”

Evermore was released on Dec. 11, 2020 and opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, making Swift the first female artist in history to earn eight consecutive No. 1 debuts on the chart. In addition to the album’s return to No. 1, Swift’s fans also helped her mark another achievement when purchases of the vinyl edition of the project broke the record for biggest vinyl sales week, which helped the album make it back to the chart’s top spot. With her latest week at No. 1, Swift’s cumulative total weeks atop the Billboard 200 across all of her No. 1 albums is now 53, breaking a tie with Garth Brooks (who has 52 weeks at No. 1) as the artist with the third-most weeks at No. 1.

Evermore was the second album the 31-year-old released in 2020, following July’s Folklore, which won Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammy Awards. Evermore was a result of the successful collaboration between Swift and Aaron Dessner, with whom she worked on Folklore. “To put it plainly, we just couldn’t stop writing songs,” Swift wrote on Instagram at the time. “To try and put it more poetically, it feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in.”

“I’ve never done this before,” she continued. “In the past I’ve always treated albums as one-off eras and moved onto planning the next one after an album was released. There was something different with folklore. In making it, I felt less like I was departing and more like I was returning. I loved the escapism I found in these imaginary/not imaginary tales. I loved the ways you welcomed the dreamscapes and tragedies and epic tales of love lost and found into your lives. So I just kept writing them.”