(The Swiftening Series: 1. folklore | 2. Lover | 3. reputation | 4. 1989 | 5. Red | 6. Speak Now | 7. Fearless | 8. Taylor Swift
Bonus: evermore | Red TV | Midnights | Speak Now TV | 1989 TV | evermore revisited | THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT)
If you know anything at all about Taylor Swift, you know she writes songs about the men she’s dated. Or, maybe more accurately, she is known for writing songs about men she’s dated. After all, if you’re a fan, you know that the reality is something a little more complex.
Fans of Taylor Swift know that her confessional and brutally honest brand of autobiographical song writing persists even for those songs that are decidedly not about her “ex of the moment”, and that those songs arguably have become a lot more present in her recent projects.
This is partly due to Taylor’s evolution as an artist, but also practical factors. From 2016-2023, she had no recent exes. She spent that time dating British actor Joe Alwyn, a relationship she wrote about so extensively that the symbols and imagery she used to describe it became a vocabulary of sorts. But in that time she also wrote a lot about herself: her anxieties, her career, her image of herself. And she wrote about others – her family and friends sometimes, but very notably, she wrote about fictional characters and worlds on her wildly successful eighth and ninth albums, folklore and evermore.
The sense I’ve always gotten is less of a disinterest in the kind of writing that people knew her for, but rather an interest in expanding her horizons. Even when she arguably returned to autobiography in Midnights, she took extensive inspiration from her past, seemingly inspired by her recent project of rerecording her first six albums, to craft an overall narrative about the complexity of memory and its reverberations on the present.
But then, in 2023, news of Taylor and Joe’s breakup went public. Suddenly, the queen of writing about her own heartbreak had a fresh heartbreak to write about. Public discourse from those both in the know and not in the know turned to the question, “What’s she going to write about him?”
Earlier this year, Taylor announced THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, her 11th studio album. Just about everyone – fans and the general public alike – knew that this would be the album where she talked about it. When the first revealed snippet of the album’s prologue said, “My muses, aquired like bruises… All’s fair in love and poetry”, everyone knew who the muse would be.
But, as we’ve come to find out, the reality is something a little more complex.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (TTPD) is a 31-track double album reckoning with the relationship between Taylor and her own artistry. It’s a sad, angry, introspective, brutally honest examination of, ultimately, herself alone. Certainly, Joe is there, as is Matty Healy, the man she briefly dated that summer. Even Travis Kelce, her current partner, appears in small ways. But, contrary to expectations, more of the songs explore feelings more tangibly than they do specific people.
Take, for example, the album’s penultimate track, “The Alchemy”. The details of the song suggest a number of different muses. The sport and trophy imagery suggests her current football player boyfriend, while the pointed line apparently spoken by the muse, “it’s like heroin but this time with an e” calls to the particular substance habits of Matty Healy. But the song itself is not about either man, really. Instead, it explores the chemical and seemingly inevitable feeling of magnetic attraction she has felt in her past. Even as I’ve seen fans arguing and speculating over who the song is “truly” about, whatever answer they come to doesn’t exactly matter for the meaning of the rest of the song.
With this choice, Taylor seemingly dissects the idea of the muse and makes the listener contend with the idea that, perhaps, the real people who inspire her music ultimately don’t matter as much as her own artistic decisions. Whereas Taylor’s previous treatment of her muses was up front, written in such a way that her listeners knew immediately who she was talking about, TTPD‘s intentional obscuration of the muse creates its own kind of murky, uncertain feeling which pervades the entire album. What rings clear throughout are the feelings, which are sharp and poignant and often painful.
Its opening track and lead single, “Fortnight”, opens with Taylor’s low, disaffected voice singing about her alcoholism and poor mental health. It’s a wake-up slap, a clear sign of the tone of the album to come. “All this to say, I hope you’re ok, but you’re the reason” she states. But who is the “you”? Ultimately, again, it doesn’t matter. The answer is both, all of the above, and what comes to take precedence is her frustration and anger and desperation over her situation. And that desperation is set to a swirling, hypnotic synthetic beat – a truly classic Jack Antonoff/Swift collaboration.
What is most astonishing about TTPD is just how solid it is throughout. Each song has such a shockingly beautiful emotional hook, but I particularly responded to “So Long, London” on my first listen. The customary track 5, a song that is traditionally one of the emotional lowpoints of each Taylor Swift album. Aligning with the overall pattern of the song to focus on an emotion rather than a person, Taylor reckons with the fact that her dual heartbreaks with two British men has soiled her ability to live happily in the city she had lived in for years at this point. The pounding backbeat of the song rapidly increases in tension over the course of the song, creating this really devastating atmosphere.
Even in the album’s more upbeat moments, it’s delivering emotional punches. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” has this really fun backbeat built out of the distant audio of a dance practice going on, an obvious reference to the preparation that had to go into the massive Eras Tour. But then, of course, we have Taylor’s tragic boast that she can remain professional and at the top of her game while dealing with depression and some of the most painful heartbreak she’s ever experienced.
The influence of the Eras Tour is also explored on “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”. This cutting ballad is a confused barrage of questions for the man who “rust[ed her] sparkling summer”. This is another song with a massive build into the bridge, where Taylor shows off another major strength of this album – the vocal delivery. I’ve felt a lot of Taylor’s recent work has been really vocally strong, with an increased focus on the beauty of her lower range, but in this album there’s so many moments where its ability to communicate rage, sadness, and bitter humor are on full display. That big vocal emotion is also the reason I love “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
But I think my favorite of the album right now, to no one’s surprise, is her collaboration with Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. “Florida!!!” intrigued me from the moment its title was revealed for more than just the collaboration (those three exclamation points were definitely of interest to me), and the song itself delivered. It’s a masterclass in driving the energy throughout, with the chorus being this big exclamation worthy of all the punctuation. Florence’s influence on this track is such a fun addition – they’re a fantastic duo. The symbol of Florida itself is so interesting and unique, too, a place where the narrator feels she can reinvent herself and leave all the pain behind.
The first half of the double album ends with “Clara Bow”, a truly pointed finale for this first half. Taylor explores the intense pressure faced by women in the public eye through the lens of two women she has been compared to in the past. First, it’s Clara Bow, the silent-film “it girl” who was one of the rare few to successfully make the jump to talkies. Then, it’s Stevie Nicks, the songwriter who made her name on writing revealing songs about her own life and relationships. But then, in one of my favorite lyrical moves of the whole album, she ends the song with an imagined future star getting compared to herself – “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it / You’ve got edge she never did / The future’s bright, dazzling.” The transient and impermanent nature of fame is so powerfully explored, as the artist herself considers her own future impact and her own impermanence in the same song.
In classic Taylor fashion, she surprised fans at 2 a.m. on release night with an entire 15-track bonus. This leads me to a common criticism I’ve seen pointed at the album – it’s too long. Similar to Midnights, though, I’m of two minds about this criticism. It is true that the original album’s 16-track run is well-constructed and cohesive in a way the entire double album isn’t. On the other hand, this is the kind of album that feels like the length and broad exploration is earned. Plus, there’s even more fantastic music on this bonus side, and I never want to turn up my nose at more music.
I particularly love “The Black Dog”, a track focusing on Taylor watching her ex on location sharing as he enters a bar and imagines a situation where he feels her absence when a song he and Taylor once loved together comes on. The song is punctuated with the repetition of “Old habits die screaming” shouted throughout. The way the guitar ramps up during those lines makes it feel like a scream.
One moment of levity on this side is “So High School”. The music evokes the kind of track that would play during a teenage rom-com, as she explores her new relationship. It has a sense of humor about it, with lines like – “You know how to ball / I know Aristotle” or “Touch me while your boys play Grand Theft Auto“. It’s giddy and fun and sweet and a lovely little moment of joy on an album that is as heavy as this one is.
Its own track 5 on the new side, “How Did It End?” joins one of the album’s overall themes exploring the toxic effects fame can have on a person’s relationships. Taylor explores how it felt to go through one of the worst breakups of her life at the same time that the public gossiped and speculated about just how that relationship ended. Bitterly, Taylor reports that it was a confluence of things, but ultimately seems more interested in exploring how it felt to be the topic of fascination during such a dark time. As a fan, listening to this track felt just a bit like being scolded, but then, I get it. It’s a painful and potentially unpopular thing to explore on an album like this, but this is one of the biggest things I love about this album.
Taylor Swift is at the very top of the game right now. She’s the biggest she’s ever been. It would have been easy for her to ride the momentum she has with the Eras Tour to a fun, easily sellable album of fun love songs or standard heartbreak songs, similar to those expected of her. Instead, though, she seems interested in continuing to challenge herself artistically and emotionally, with a sprawling and confronting album that I’ll likely continue to gain insights from for years to come.
Absoludicrous 