My Thoughts on Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poet's Department, and My Favorite Tortured Poet

taking Taylor Swift's latest album apart like a book

Apr 23, 2024

Taylor Swift has progressed past her perfectly packaged pop star era. The tight, concise artistic statements of Fearless, Red, 1989, Reputation, and Folklore are in the rearview in the post-re-recording era. As a fan willing to dig through the mass of thirty-one songs on The Tortured Poets Department and twenty-one songs on the extended version of Midnights to find the essential threads, this era of volume isn’t a bad thing. Swift no longer needs to produce concise bodies of work or showcase only the best songs. Realizing her fans loved the alternate versions of the track lists of her prior albums presented through the vault songs, even if they were ultimately weaker, seemingly offered her the freedom to simply give fans everything she’s got.

There’s been a lot of conversation in the wake of The Tortured Poet’s Department about what Swift’s “Imperial Era” looks like. She’s elevated herself beyond being a pop star or even the pop star of the moment. To many, she’s become god. Rolling Stone will call every album she puts out a classic, anyone who wants to criticize her will consider forgoing a byline to escape doxxing from a fringe group of Swifties (a blight, somehow, Taylor can even relate to, which we’ll get to later). Many feel this album is a show of creative stagnation staying with Jack Antonoff and his synths, rehashing many similar themes to her previous works.

Does that even matter now? This Imperial Era means ultimate freedom from rulebooks and convention. Her albums will break records effortlessly, for the moment, each release always surpassing the insurmountable achievements set by the last. Because of that, I have to believe The Tortured Poets Department is the truest representation of the work Swift wants to do at the moment, which is make music with her trusted collaborators expressing her truth in her signature, wordy, confessional style without the constraints of an editor. And I’m not going to take issue with that.

A part of me does miss being handed a perfectly smooth, honed, effortful 12-15 songs bursting with intention and drive in every track, but I accept that’s not where Swift is in the artistic arc of her journey.

For as driven by accolades and commercial success as Swift is, The Tortured Poets Department is an inherently thorny, uninviting album. While it sonically feels like a natural continuation of Midnights with a swirl of Folklore and Evermore in the added Anthology section, there’s an unbridled anger, spitefulness, and moral gray that’s only ever presented as an undercurrent on Swift’s past work. One of the strongest thematic threads of this record is Swift seemingly begging to be seen as a full, flawed, complex person, a reality that many of her fans are desperate to deny her. So many Swifties have such a narrow view of who Taylor is, largely shaped by their personal values and projections onto her, that it’s hard to engage in Swiftie spaces anymore as a longtime fan. Swift will never, ever be the person that so much of her fanbase wants her to be, and that reality is painfully clear in these songs as well as the events that led to them.

Originally, for this review, I typed notes about each song as I heard them for the first time. I was going to offer first impressions and a song by song breakdown, but as the second half of the album dropped late into the night and I realized I needed more time with the music, I decided to let the album settle into my bones until I figured out what I needed to say about it.

There have been enough people expressing their shock that this turned out to be an album largely inspired by her short-lived (or was it?) relationship with Matty Healy, made clear by some pretty glaring reference for those of us who also like the 1975. If you want an article breaking down the lore, references, and connections, there are plenty that do that.

As a Tumblr girlie at heart who has spent this past semester entrenched in a project about the Tumblr music scene of 2013, this development thrilled my heart. I’d thought that they were a pretty adorable couple when everything went down last spring, a minority opinion among Swifties. If you know me, I’m happy to give a full powerpoint about all the connections between the two musicians (I’ve subjected my friends to enough of this already). But, in the name of separating Swift’s musical product from “paternity testing” as many online have been calling it, that’s the last I’ll (try to) specifically say about Healy or Alwyn or Kelece or anyone else who exists in the real world.

This is why I love The Tortured Department, meta narrative aside, and why it particularly speaks to my literary interests and particular Swiftie proclivities.

First off, I’m a Midnights Stan. I know it’s controversial. I cringed at a few of the more bubblegum songs at first, but eventually, I sank into their bubbling joy and decided to stop being so serious. I needed to let myself be “bejeweled.” It’s an indie pop record; it plays to what I like. It shared some DNA with Reputation, my all time favorite Taylor album. I feel like that’s essential background in explaining my love for TTPD. And, I think it’s because of that, that I might actually like the original first part of the album better than its second half. That, or my ears and brain are just always fatigued by the time I finally get to the other fifteen songs. I have yet to listen to them on their own.

Therefore, I don’t have many sonic complaints with this record. Honestly, there are some moments where the production saves certain songs. I find “Fortnight” unbelievably clunky lyrically and a weak opener, but something about that chorus melody has made it unskippable after a few listens. But this is a rarity among the songs as it’s the storyline that grabs me on this record. (Also, the music video is great, and I did not expect Post Malone to be such a good actor??)

I find TTPD to be the closest narrative cousin to 1989, especially the full Taylor’s Version with the vault songs. They chart a surprisingly familiar path when you strip them to their core elements past their aesthetic veneers. Both albums chronicle fragile, important, but ultimately unrealized love affairs that face heavy external pressure that lead to their implosion. While true to their packaging, 1989 finds a much more resolved note of self-discovery in the demise of the relationship while TTPD leaves Taylor and the listener in much more uncertain territory. They both dwell in unconventional romantic relationships, or, as the internet likes to call this messy, poorly defined, and ultimately cataclysmic sect of human connection, situationships.

Since 1989 is narratively my favorite Taylor album, a tragic yet indelibly important love story couched within a bright, poppy, self-discovery album, it makes sense that I immediately responded to the tortured love Swift spins on TTPD from the second track. It tells my favorite kind of love story–one of ultimate deep knowing, passionate connections, and an impossible forever. The kind of love where you find this person over and over through different phases of your life, never quite able to hold on. Right person, wrong time. From Ondaatje’s The English Patient to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I’m obsessed with this narrative arc.

This relationship unfolds in TTPD somewhat nonlinearly. We’re first introduced to it in “The Tortured Poet’s Department,” where the line “like a tattooed golden retriever” immediately alerted listeners that the album wasn’t necessarily going in the direction they expected. This song feels like the middle of the relationship. There’s a comfort, a knowing, and a history that allows a relationship that started and ended in a flash to have remarkable depth. Swift paints the picture of having loopy, high conversations declaring that “Charlie Puth should be bigger artist” after eating seven bars of chocolate (still not sure if this is an insult or the highest praise to Puth).

She hints at the trouble to come in the first verse remarking, “But you’re in self-sabotage mode / Throwing spikes down on the road / But I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show.” She knows this person well enough to see around the flags he’s throwing remarking “Who else decodes you?” and “Who’s gonna know you, if not me?” throughout the song.

The title track also establishes a few key details for the album overall. She hints that the overarching aesthetic of the album rollout is almost satire or a way of poking fun at this love interest she’s memorializing. “You left your typewriter at my apartment / Straight from the tortured poet’s department,”she sings in the opening lines, implying that while she casts herself as the chairman in album promo, he was the original tortured poet. She goes on to make fun of him in her head for carting around a whole typewriter. She doubles down in the chorus lines bringing the needed self awareness and humor to the record singing, “‘You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.”

Swift also starts the running theme of a yearning for marriage that is repeatedly unrealized for various reasons with her partners across the album (a topic that has been explored from different angles on past records like “Champagne Problems” and “Lavender Haze”). She paints an incredibly evocative scene in the bridge singing: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”

This song introduces the easy intimacy and history needed to contextualize this connection as it gets tested by the outside world. She gives the listener a first glimpse at it within her closed, protected world to allow the them to understand why this is a relationship she fought so hard for and that ultimately left such a mark.

The next significant stop in this arc is “So Long, London” where Swift bids goodbye to her longterm relationship that preceded the one primarily discussed on the album. While later songs hint at some overlap in these relationships and other motivations for its demise, “So Long, London” is really all you can say about a relationship that sputtered out due to misaligned priorities and changing personalities. It’s not a bang that can be extrapolated into a record full of songs but a whimper of being unwilling to go on in the same way.

The end of verse 2 holds the most significant lyric on a theme that Swift keeps coming back to, clearly, as her biggest bone to pick with her ex: “And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” She’s offered similar sentiments about not getting to fully live her life or wasting time in the interview she did for Time Person of the Year. “Fresh Out the Slammer” seems to be a response to recapturing that life she realized she wanted in the ashes of this long-dead relationship.

“But Daddy I Love Him” is where the album heats up. Please listen to this song on your own if you haven’t yet so I don’t spoil the pure shock that will course through you as Swift declares, “‘I’m having his baby,’” gives the listener a second to have their jaw hit the floor, then follows up with, “‘No, I’m not, but you should see your faces.’” This song has an infectious, unbridled joy fueled by rage that makes it undeniable.

In this song, Swift weaves an alternate universe where Twitter is a physical town square full of disapproving elders convening at the town hall to sabotage her newfound love. A similar trick to what she employed on Evermore and Folklore, I much prefer Swift’s alternate worlds to extrapolate internet discourse rather than taking it on literally as she sometimes does on Midnights.

Swift describes a town that raises girls just to shame and tear them down when they grow into fully realized people. In the second verse, she contrasts herself with her love interest casting herself as the “dutiful daughter” that she’s crafted her public persona around for over a decade (and also creating a parallel to “Mine” where she casts herself as “a careless man’s careful daughter” also getting swept up by a “bad boy”) against, “He was chaos, he was revelry.”

In the chorus, she basks in the high of this new union, “Running with my dress unbuttoned, screaming ‘But, Daddy, I love him.’” and “Telling him to floor it through the fences / No, I’m not coming to my senses / I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one I want.” Not only is she in love, she’s also finding joy in finally asserting her autonomy, a hard won fight. With someone as famous as Swift, so many of her choices even through her adult life were made for her. This is a first, delicious taste of rebellion that she doubles down on in the post-chorus and bridge. Some have found the themes or approach on TTPD immature for someone in their thirties, but as Swift herself acknowledges, so much of her life and development has been simultaneously slowed and accelerated, so while these discrepancies can be examined, there isn’t grounds to judge what she should or shouldn’t be writing about. Perhaps this is her first taste of true teenage-style rebellion.

It is impossible to talk about “But Daddy I Love Him” without acknowledging the real world events that clearly led to this song. In Spring of 2023, Swift debuted her relationship with the lead singer of The 1975, Matty Healy. While the band is generally quite politically progressive, Healy also likes to fancy himself somewhat of a provocateur and run his mouth when he really shouldn’t. In direct opposition to Swift, he could not care less about his reputation. A certain sect of Swifties didn’t even like her associating with Healy when she performed “Anti-Hero” live for the first time at one of their tour stops, so, of course, their heads exploded when, in the wake of the Joe Alywn break-up news, Swift was spotted out in New York City with Healy. They went to members’ clubs, and he hung out in the friends and family box for her hometown Nashville shows on the Eras Tour. They were clearly an item, and this sect of Swifties didn’t know what to do. If their perfect leader would be seen with him, let alone date him, she must not be the person they thought she was.

Instead of re-evaluating their parasocial relationships in light of this new information, deciding whether it was a dealbreaker for their fandom, and moving on, the hate campaign started with vigor. Petitions demanding Swift break up with him filled my timeline. Fans decried his past actions, some that made valid points and others that were clearly part of a blatant hate campaign, and fretted in Tweets. Some sent death threats to Healy and his family members. Though no stranger to controversy, he’d likely never experienced anything like this; and her fans wanted to force their own prophecy into reality by allowing his reputation to tank her hard-fought golden girl image. She must be a horrible person to associate with him, but if she breaks up with him and, say, dates America’s golden boy football player, all will be well again. Our underdog turned prom queen will be right back where she belongs. Or, at least, that’s what they thought.

With this chaos a weird, distant memory, Swift puts this song on the record to say that she did not, in fact, appreciate this sect of fans “saving” her. Actually, after years of getting attacked by her own fanbase for not being a person she never claimed to be, she’s clearly reached a breaking point. “I’ll tell you about my good name / It’s mine alone to disgrace / I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing,” she sings with daggers in her tone, taking a fun twist on her favorite snake metaphor. Except, this time it’s not Scooter, Scott, Kanye, or Kim getting the title but people who claim to be her own biggest supporters. This line continues to assert an independence she’s finally willing to fully claim from earlier in the record.

“God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what’s best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see,” she continues once again beautifying Twitter threads into a proper lyrical turn. And she has a point, they do not know her, as much as she has played a hand in convincing them that they do, and she’s not sitting by the internet waiting for approval. She’s past the stage of needing to please everyone. Part of the tragedy, though, is that while Swift isn’t scrolling through Twitter, the magnitude of her fanbase means that the vitriol does still touch her life and impact her relationships, even if she personally isn’t engaging.

By the end of the bridge, she’s back to celebrating the independent joy she’s found with this person, and her voice is infectious as she sings, “Me and my wild boy and all of this wild joy.” She finishes the bridge reasserting, “Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice.”

In the third verse, an anomaly for music today, she gives herself a happy ending, one of the small joys of creating a fictional work. “We came back when the heat died down / Went to my parents and they came around / All the wine moms are still holdin’ out, but / fuck ‘em, it’s over,” she declares. While I feel like her adversaries were more the 12-year-olds than the wine moms, it is interesting to see her take one zitgiesty dip here. “Time, doesn’t it give some perspective? / And no you can’t come to the wedding,” she snipes in the final chorus.

I have devoted way too much real estate to this song, but I think that’s what it deserved. I hope that it incited at least a small amount of self-reflection among those in need of a deep reality check; though, from what I’ve seen, denial runs deep with those that chronically online.

The next significant stop for the romantic arc lands at “Guilty As Sin,” which, chronologically, is the very beginning before Swift exists her prior relationship. This was my immediate favorite (along with “But Daddy I Love Him”) because of the delicious melody set to, “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh, only in my mind,” and the themes around becoming utterly obsessed with someone who only exists in your life in your head. In the context of the album, though, it’s also a song that contemplates the weight of an emotional affair and proves to be the wake-up point for ending the longterm relationship discussed in “So Long, London.”

Swift opens the song with, “Drownin’ in the Blue Nile / He sent me ‘Downtown Lights’ / I hadn’t heard it in a while.” I'll let you hazard a guess about whose favorite band The Blue Nile is; but, moving along, she goes on to say that the song and its sender awaken in her the realization that a relationship that was once comfortable has become a boredom inducing cage, an image she returns to many times on the record. The second verse reveals that she doesn’t, however, act on these feelings right away. Instead, she says, “I keep these longings locked / In lowercase inside a vault,” and she’s consoled by a friend that it’s her actions more than her thoughts that define the morality of the situation.

In the bridge, Swift returns to the religious imagery that she’s played with on records since Reputation, seemingly contemplating the public reaction to her ending her prior relationship to embark on a new one. “If long suffering propriety is what they want from me / They don’t know you’ve haunted me so stunningly,” she decides, hinting back at the idea that the public wanted to see her married and following conventional relationship stereotypes as she expressed on “Lavender Haze.” Even though Swift seemingly wants these things as well, she knows they won’t come from her current relationship. By the end of “Guilty as Sin,” she’s decided to commit to the messier choice.

Swift then goes on another run of songs that shade the rest of the world around the relationship. On “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” Swift starts with a confident vibrato about how she can handle herself in a relationship with the villain of the week because she can see his soft side underneath, but it slowly dawns on her that rehabilitating his image and reigning in his more rouge impulses will be more difficult than she realizes. Possibly wanting to remake his public persona for the sake of their relationship, she ends the song with the gut wrenching admission, “Woah, maybe I can’t.”

From there, the downward spiral deepens, “loml” gives insight into the ending, reconnecting with a small detail slipped into “Down Bad” that reveals the ultimate demise of the relationship. In “Down Bad,” baked in the groove of this infectious break-up song, she throws in a bombshell, “How dare you think it’s romantic / Leaving me safe and stranded.” This gets built on with the final chorus of “loml,” “Oh, what a valiant roar / What a bland goodbye / The coward claimed he was a lion / I’m combing through a braid of lies / ‘I’ll never leave,’ ‘Never mind.’” There’s something incredibly heartbreaking in the two bits of dialogue she gives at the end of the line. Contrasted with the lyric from the earlier song, he likely sees himself as being valiant for stepping aside, letting her have her good name, extinguishing the public heat by disappearing, while she sees it as an ultimate act of cowardice from someone with such a big mouth.

“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is the denouement, the hottest anger in the wake of getting ghosted after finally, for possibly the first time, putting herself on the line for something she, as a person, wanted more than anything. She establishes in the first verse that he ghosted her, gone as quickly as he appeared. In the bridge, she ruminates on all the possible motives he could have for leaving her in the lurch. “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? / Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? / Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In fifty years will this all be declassified?” she asks. As an aside, I find it hilarious that she suggests he was there on a bookish research mission. She thinks his motive for leaving wasn’t as altruistic as it could potentially be painted, “Cause it wasn’t sexy once it wasn’t forbidden / I would’ve died for your sins, instead, I just died inside.” This again goes to this lack of agency that plagues Swift’s life even as she appears to be the world’s most powerful person. She had that choice to go down with the ship taken away, and while that is devastating for the relationship built in the songs, it also is frustrating on a more personal, agency-related level.

While “The Alchemy” has been taken up as a song about her new relationship post the one primarily discussed on the album, I personally see it as a rekindling after the anger of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lives” simmers down. She makes a number of references to this relationship not being an entirely new one: “What if I told you I’m back?,” “Cause the sign on your heart says it’s still reserved for me,” “I haven’t come around in so long / But I’m making a comeback to where I belong.” Sports team metaphors are not restricted to the literal connection, and for the record, “touch down” is written like a plane landing not the football term “touchdown.”

In my reading of the progression of the album, this is the softening after the initial anger of the abandonment. The story didn’t have a neat ending. I also just, honestly, can’t see Travis Kelce making the joke, “it’s heroin, but this time with an ‘e’.” The conceit of the song is that this relationship is a vice they can’t get away from as she makes the comparison her white wine, his heroin. This just doesn’t feel like the beginning of something new to me, narratively. Especially paired with “imgonnagetyouback” from the Anthology (“Whether I’m gonna curse you out or take you back to my house / I haven’t decided yet”; “You’ll find you were never not mine"; “Small talk, big love, act like I don’t care what you did”), there’s a clear indecision and curiosity around revisiting this relationship after its first ending. It’s a story that doesn’t offer a clean finish, paralleling its murky beginning.

There are so many songs on this record, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of The Anthology, which I first listened to bleary eyed at 11 p.m. because I typically go to bed earlier than both my grandmas. This is the section of the album that is still murkier to me. It doesn’t follow as clean of an arc as the first half, and the songs are denser. Still, I find new delights in this layered, detailed storytelling each time I revisit it. Surprisingly, even though I tend to like folkier, less poppy sounds in my broader listening, I think I prefer the original album.

I do want to discuss a few of these Anthology songs that stick out to me in contributing to the overall romantic arc of the album. “The Black Dog” has to go down as one of Taylor’s best, most beautiful break-up songs. On the Anthology, she does seem to lose a lot of the anger that drives the first half of the record. These songs are softer, more contemplative, and, in that, sadder.

On the opening track of this second companion album of sorts, Swift tells the story of watching her ex go into a pub they visited together via the location sharing app on her phone he forgot to disable. This is one of the few instances of Swift leaning into a truly modern tech phenomenon and making something incredibly profound stem from it. Having watched his phone float in to the pub, she constructs this scene in her head in response to his new, young girlfriend. It’s utterly brilliant: “I just don’t understand how you don’t miss me in The Black Dog / When someone plays ‘The Starting Line’ / And you jump up, but she’s too young to / know this song / That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming / Old habits die screaming.” The song is expertly crafted with the perfect amount of remove to see it all clearly without lacking in the fresh emotionality. It’s more poised than many songs on TTPD, which doesn’t give it an inherent superiority but makes it stand out.

“Peter” is the last song I want to discuss in the context of this particular narrative thread. On this track, Swift takes on the Peter Pan story (Maisie Peters also has a great song, “Wendy,” that uses the same source material) to give a preamble to the preamble on the beginning of this romantic arc. She hints at a first try at a relationship that they realized they weren’t ready for years ago lamenting in the chorus, “You said you were gonna grow up / Then you were gonna come find me.”

“You said you’d come and get me, but you were twenty-five / And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired,” she sings in the bridge, hoping Peter knows that she tried to wait it out for him. Having reconnected, though, she’s realized that despite always holding a place for him in her heart, there are some things Peter Pan will never be capable of. I also liked the lyrics, “Are you still a mind reader? / A natural scene stealer? / I’ve heard great things, Peter / But life was easier on you / Than it was on me.” She acknowledges they both did their best with the worlds they were given; but I thought this was an interesting contrast to draw between two people in the same industry who are afforded different things by societal expectations. Women rarely get to lean into that “rockstar” persona in the same way.

Ultimately, Swift paints the picture of a conflicted, complicated relationship. Starting from a tenuous place, the relationship faces an onslaught of challenges from the moment it becomes public that it ultimately cannot withstand. She crafts a narrative of an incredibly deep and meaningful connection, at one point referring to him as a “twin,” that can’t counteract the external pressure despite her will. He’s simply too cowardly, per her repeated characterization, or altruistic, as he seems to see it from the glimpses she offers at his point of view, to allow it to continue. However, on songs like “Peter,” Swift highlights how it’s a relationship that is put to rest and rekindled over a decade, that it’s a story that is hard to definitively say is over. And those, for my own potentially toxic inclinations, are my favorite kinds of love stories; Swift spins a brilliant narrative on this record, independent of the celebrity meta-narrative and lore, that I want to consume like my favorite novels.

Lanie Land

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