In the 18 months between 2022’s Midnights and Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift managed to grow into an even bigger cultural force, releasing three deluxe reissues of Midnights, as well as Taylor’s Version re-recordings of 2014’s 1989 and 2010’s Speak Now. Between records, she embarked on the ongoing Eras Tour, a three-hour career retrospective that’s boosted local economies, grossed over a billion dollars, and attracted the level of media attention usually reserved for the deaths of well-liked presidents. Swift was already one of her generation’s biggest musicians when Midnights dropped, but everything that’s happened in the interim has cemented her as an astronomical superstar.
The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th original studio album, is billed as a concept album exploring the five stages of grief. She produced the album with regular collaborators Jack Antonoff, who produced Midnights, and the National’s Aaron Dessner, with whom she worked on her intimate pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore. True to those credits, its muted aesthetic vacillates between Midnights’ downtempo pop and the delicate pop-folk of Folklore. It’s also a “secret double album” as Swift announced in the early hours of Friday morning; the complete 31-song set, subtitled The Anthology, clocks in at a whopping two hours and two minutes.
Given this is Swift’s first album since breaking up with boyfriend of six years Joe Alwyn, briefly dating the 1975’s Matty Healy, and entering into a headline-grabbing relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, there’s heartbreak and new love aplenty across Tortured Poets, as well as the kind of acidic self-loathing that’s noticeably crept into Swift’s songwriting since 2017’s Reputation. Here are eight big takeaways from The Tortured Poets Department.
The Anthology
As was the case with Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department was boosted with a deluxe reissue mere hours after its release. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology runs at over two hours long and includes “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” “The Manuscript,” and “The Black Dog,” four songs that were previously available only on four variants of the album’s vinyl release. It’s the first extension of The Tortured Poets Department, but if Midnights is anything to go by, likely not the last: after that record’s 3am Edition we also got a Til Dawn edition and the Late Night Edition. Antonoff and Dessner produced all of the Anthology tracks, with Charli XCX collaborator Patrik Berger contributing to “I Look in People’s Windows.”
Still in the Folklorian Woods
With the release of 2020’s Folklore, Taylor Swift drew a line in the sand, making clear that the songs on that record were all rooted in fiction. That may not have been entirely true—“The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Swift’s Rhode Island summer house, through to her purchase of it, and other songs seem to allude to her personal life—but it felt like a signal to fans not to read so deeply into everything she writes. (Swift describes this zone of her songwriting as “the folklorian woods.”) She seems to take a similar tack with Tortured Poets: opening track “Fortnight,” featuring Post Malone, spins a tale about exes who end up living next door to each other. Its placement as track one on the record suggests that we should accept Swift as a songwriter, not just a confessionalist.
Talkin’ ’Bout My Reputation
As on Reputation, Swift addresses her own public perception on Tortured Poets—understandable, given all the media attention she’s received in the past year. On the late album barnstormer “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” Swift sings about becoming callous in the face of speculation about her private life (“I was tame, I was gentle/Til the circus life made me mean”). On “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” she contrasts the cheery demeanor she adopts for fans on the Eras Tour with the abject sadness she feels post-breakup. In a moment that recalls the most memorable scene of Katy Perry’s Part of Me documentary—in which Perry finds out her husband has filed for divorce, bawls her eyes out, then resets to a cold smile as she rises to the stage—Swift cheerily exclaims “I’m miserable!/And nobody even knows!”
A Brief Inquiry Into Past Relationships
The Tortured Poets Department is sure to provide near-endless fodder for fans and rubberneckers hoping to glean insight into Swift’s personal life. Her lyrics are often assumed to be about real-life boyfriends, and many of the songs on this record seem to reference Healy (she refers to one partner as a “tattooed golden retriever” on the title track) and Alwyn, seemingly the subject of “So Long, London.” “The Alchemy,” which is heavy on football references, nods to her relationship with Kelce, with Swift singing about being “on a winning streak” with a new love. And it’s not just romantic relationships Swift addresses: The Anthology track “thanK you aIMee,” with its unsubtle title stylization, is widely rumored to be about longtime Swift nemesis Kim Kardashian.
Stuck Behind Bars
Allusions to prisons, asylums, and general ill mental health abound on Tortured Poets: On the album’s title track, she sings, “Everyone we know understands/Why it’s meant to be/’Cause we’re… crazy,” while on “But Daddy I Love Him,” she tells a disapproving father, “I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one I want.” “Fresh Out the Slammer” casts a maudlin relationship as a prison—Swift’s new crush is the first person she’s calling when she gets out—while she tells the titular character on “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”: “You deserve prison, but you won’t get time.” On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” the most vicious track here, she references gallows and likens her childhood to an “asylum,” and opening track “Fortnight” features the line, “I was supposed to be sent away/But they forgot to come and get me.” These references, a shade darker than the turns of phrase Swift is usually drawn to, seem to be in service of the album’s “tortured” vibe.
Taylor + the Machine
One of the highlights of Tortured Poets is “Florida!!!,” a collaboration with stalwart British pop musician Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine. Swift may have been dinged for relegating Lana Del Rey to backing vocalist status on Midnights’ “Snow on the Beach” (which Del Rey later said was her own choice), but there’s no way the same will happen with “Florida!!!”—Welch gets two full verses here, and later trades lines with Swift. Featuring a doomy aesthetic and huge, window-rattling drums, it feels more like a Welch track that Swift accidentally wandered into. Which is no knock: It’s the loudest, most theatrical moment on an album that otherwise trades punchy showstoppers for quieter, more meditative moods.
Track Five—Again
In recent years, fans have established that Swift saves her biggest emotional gut-punches for track five. “All Too Well,” an enduring classic from her fourth album, Red, was a track five, as were “My Tears Ricochet,” Folklore’s brutal rejoinder to former label boss Scott Borchetta, and “Dear John,” Speak Now’s absolute evisceration of ex John Mayer. Tortured Poets’ fifth track is “So Long, London,” a dejected synth-pop track that serves as the album’s emotional core and finds Swift singing with uncharacteristic weariness about trying desperately to save a failing relationship. After writing a love letter to the city with Lover’s would-be tourist guide “London Boy,” “So Long, London” feels like a definitive end to the Anglophile portion of Swift’s career, and raises one question: Is Swift about to enter her Missourian era?
Swiftisms
- “You wouldn’t last an hour/In the asylum where they raised me” (“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”)
- “‘You’re not Dylan Thomas/I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/We’re modern idiots’” (“The Tortured Poets Department”)
- “Lights, camera, bitch smile/Even when you want to die” (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”)
- “Old habits die screaming” (“The Black Dog”)
- “Everything comes out teenage petulance/‘Fuck it if I can’t have him’” (“Down Bad”)
- “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” (“The Tortured Poets Department”)
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