The Tortured Poets Department That Could Have Been

thoughts on no longer being a swiftie and the rewriting of an album

Taylor Swift is in the midst of an authenticity crisis, and the treatment of her most recent release, The Tortured Poet’s Department, is emblematic of the deep pickle she’s both found herself in through Swiftie expectations but also created for herself. Swift made her name being a diaristic songwriter, and as she became more famous, for translating tabloid headlines into deeply personal songs that embodied moments fans had seen through paparazzi shots. Almost how viewers used to see the Kardashian’s drama unfold on social media then tune into their reality show to see how it played out internally (not to commit the blasphemy of putting Taylor and the Kardashians in the same sentence. Insert “thanK you aIMee”). But, as much as she’s a generational talent as a songwriter, the transparency was also part of the appeal. She made herself accessible in other ways. Buying fans presents, contributing to their GoFundMe’s, inviting them to her house. She was big on being a person not a pop star—or more specifically, your best friend.

And it worked for a while. But then she got too famous, rising above all the previous ceilings the world thought she’d finally hit. It became impossible to be a raw, bleeding person and stay sane. So she pivoted with the album that both saved her career and took it to implausible new heights. On Folklore, she blended personal experiences snatched through different points in her life with total fiction and even history lessons. She repeated the formula for albums afterwards. On Midnights, she returned to pop but stayed committed to the narrative that these songs were pulled from all throughout her life and were, therefore, untraceable. It felt like the happy medium for balancing the style that her fans listened to her for with a relative idea of privacy. Even as she became more removed as a public figure, she tried to maintain this sense of intimacy.

But, with The Tortured Poets Department, Swift took a hard turn towards the past and, in doing so, somewhat put an end to authenticity of the Taylor Swift project all together, at least in my eyes. On Tortured Poets, Swift returned to a form she hadn’t employed since the 2010s, releasing a diaristic album about the very traceable recent past. As she embarked on her groundbreaking Era’s Tour in 2023, she also started dating Matty Healy, an experience, likely due to their long history, that dug up a lot of feelings for Swift. So she wrote a 31 song album (mostly) about it and then proceeded to rewrite the album’s narrative in the backlash.

Here’s what gets me about the entire Tortured Poets situation. From the moment she stepped out with the 1975 frontman who’s known for trying to create shock value and running his mouth at inopportune times, her fans rebelled. Swifties turned the venom usually reserved for critics who dare to drag Swift’s meta-critic score down towards Matty but also Taylor herself. They didn’t agree with this personal choice she was making. Ironically, this was their moment of reconning on whether they wanted to stay loyal to Taylor Swift, and her actions since have soothed them as they’ve irritated me. They hated Matty, and they wanted Swift to know it. They questioned her integrity; they harassed him relentlessly. I’ll admit I’m a 1975 fan. I’m a Tumblr girl. I have spent way too much time watching and reading Matty’s interviews. He’s not a horrible person. He does things for stupid reasons that look really bad in a tweet trying to get someone cancelled but ultimately, he is not right wing or homophobic or most of the other accusations. Fairly the opposite. And while an over-privileged man who has a tendency to take his performance art too far or take it to places that escape the bubble of understanding could be seen as an issue, he is far, far, far from the biggest problem our actually crumbling world faces today. And it seems Taylor agreed with me.

Swifties’ negative opinions, per Taylor herself in the music, seem at least partially responsible for the demise of the relationship, and it seemed like she was pretty pissed for a while (read the lyrics of “But Daddy I Love Him”). And while weathering the negative public opinion was one thing while doing it in the name of love, it appeared to be another when she’d already lost that. A few months later, enter Travis Kelce, generally well liked, wholesome American football player, and his friendship bracelets, and suddenly, Swift was getting a PR lift. The Swifties liked Travis. He fit the narrative. And Taylor liked public opinion swinging back in her favor, so she attended all of his games and befriended Brittany Mahomes of all people.

While this tentative relationship with Travis was starting to unfold, she channeled her feelings about her 1975-dominated first half of the year (she performed “Anti-Hero” live for the first time at the 1975’s tour) into a new album that released almost a year to the date of her relationship with Matty going public. And Swift went all in on the packaging going with a Tumblr-core vibe that reminded anyone who grew up on Tumblr or became fascinated with its heyday later on of the aesthetics that dominated when the 1975 were one of the flagship artists on the platform. The content of the album was an unwelcome surprise for Swifties who’d rather forget the Matty fling ever happened. They wrote the album off as “exploring temporary insanity” and painted it as full of regret for the relationship. As far as I can tell, though, after a year of listening, there’s only one wholly negative song that feels written in a flare of anger and is softened by all the songs that follow on The Anthology section. It is hard to follow the emotional thread with a bloat of over thirty songs on the entire record, but they err towards tragic love story rather than a great mistake.

The songs feel visceral, pulled from fresh wounds and true diary pages. They’re more present than her records in recent memory, for better or worse. They’re certainly far more exposing in this old form. There’s a lot of messiness here and conflicting feelings and opinions. Listening gives the impression she is working through something in real time instead of crafting a composed narrative after the fact. There’s a lot of hyper-present hurt and confusion. There’s, what reads to me, as genuine anger at the stans for thinking they have a right to her personal life. There’s more interesting commentaries here on what it means to be Taylor Swift than she’s given us in a long time. How she’s the richest, most powerful woman on the planet, but she still feels restrained in all these different ways, some by an army of her own making. She also gets detailed with her references that tie explicitly back to certain people with little detective work. She wasn’t hiding anything. There’s songs that feel captured in immediate emotions and a few that feel more removed and considered like “The Black Dog” and “Peter.” As angry as she gets, though, she spends an equal amount of the album scrounging around for how to salvage the relationship, how to fix the guy, how to get him back.

This isn’t a record of Swift admitting to a dating mistake. This is grown up Taylor saying that she was exploring a missed possibility she’d wondered about for a decade. This is grown up Taylor grappling with whether she cares more about her relationship or her reputation. As she often talks about being abandoned on the record, it seems the choice is made for her, and still, for a time, she wants to double down. The album, in isolation, sounds like a stand against the naysayers. Taylor finally choosing Taylor after spending her entire career deeply obsessed with her reputation. It’s amazing.

So it becomes all the more crushing as a fan to see her try to take it all back. Stans did their best to recast songs or else forget them. To bandage over it all, Swift dedicated the Tortured Poet’s set to Kelce, using “So High School,” largely regarded as his track on the album, as the centerpiece and incorporating his football dances into her choreography. She picks only one song from the album about its central protagonist. The one where she angrily disavows him as, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” She even has Kelce make an appearance during the set one night.

Otherwise, Tortured Poets was quickly forgotten. She didn’t keep dressing in the style of the era after its release as she often did for other albums. It got a single video (not counting “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”’s tour footage, which ironically takes a song that is again somewhat critical of her fanbase and repackages it as the anthem of the tour) and was disposed of. Her PR strategy seems to largely revolve around making sure everyone forgets Matty Healy ever happened. And this album is an inconvenient artifact of that. If we could all just forget this one and move on… Oh, look, Taylor at a Chief’s game in a full Chanel outfit! Look over there!

I’m surprised she hasn’t released a new Taylor’s version simply so that Tortured Poets isn’t at the top of her Spotify. But, after releasing an album like that, her centering of Travis Kelce in the set (and her entire public life afterwards) felt like the least authentic thing she could do to honor the creative work—barring even the hypothetical muses. Just embody the world you’ve made for Tortured Poets. Play the album for the emotions it presents. Make music videos and keep releasing singles. Don’t make it about any man! And especially, don’t try to convince me that it never happened.

I guess that’s my sticking point with the evolution of the brand of Taylor Swift, which I truly feel is all that’s publicly left of her, and why Tortured Poets broke the illusion for me. Everything she does now is defined by Travis, down to wearing a T charm on her thigh at the Grammys that I took to stand for Taylor but her stylist had to say was for Travis, as reported on the E! carpet coverage. Her public appearances are almost exclusively at his games wearing eye-wateringly expensive outfits in red, white, and black. She goes out to dinner publicly with his friends all the time. She’s making pop tarts for the team. And if that’s what Taylor wants to do at this point in her life, more power to her. But I do find it disappointing that, through a lot of her own making, the new societal narrative around Swift is that of WAG. Which I just find depressing. All that and the best outcome anyone can think of for your story now is marrying a mediocre football player that’s obsessed with attention? Sorry, that sounded really bitter, but there’s something just gross about becoming the most successful woman in your industry just for people to applaud the loudest when you play supportive girlfriend to an all-American-as-apple-pie super sports star boyfriend.

It’s funny that it’s one of my favorite Taylor albums that broke my fandom. Really, it’s what came after it. I always looked up to Taylor. I admired her writing ability and her dedication to staying fragile even as she was strong. I bought into her inexplicable underdog framing even as she became a billionaire. I guess I always saw something of myself in her, and in a stupid way, I felt betrayed when she walked away from this piece of art she’d created so that she could pander to the lowest common denominator. It felt a bit cowardly. It certainly feels inauthentic to the Taylor I thought I knew (which, yes, is on me for having all of these feelings about a person I do not know, but in my defense, she has spent the last ten very impressionable years hammering it into my head that we are, in some strange galactic way, best friends).

Sure, pop stars at a certain level reach a point where they can’t afford to be a three dimensional person anyone. Instead, they drop records they never talk about and are occasionally seen in obscenely expensive outfits going to dinner. I don’t have these same complaints about Beyonce, the only possibly analogous person to Taylor’s level of fame. But the difference? Beyonce never promised to be my best friend. That’s not what she’s ever tried to sell, so as she faded to this glimmering place on high, it didn’t feel stark and strange.

With Taylor, it feels like she sold out herself to reach that next level of ungodly mass appeal. And, sadly, I don’t think it’s a move that will save her. She’s oversaturated herself with the public not even through her own projects but by becoming a glorified soccer mom. They’ll turn on her eventually, like they always do, even if she keeps trying to give them everything they could possibly want out of her. It’s hard to win catering to the masses, that fickle bunch, and it’s worth considering what you lose along the way.

I guess this was a lot of words to say… I wonder what would’ve happened next if Travis Kelce had never made that friendship bracelet on his podcast and she hadn’t had an obvious ship to jump to when the reception to her album was lukewarm and its subject poisonous. What if she’d had to stand behind it? What if she was willing to double down on what she must have felt at one time, that the stans had taken it too far? That they didn’t really know her or what was best for her. What if the answer hadn’t been becoming unreachable or folding her public image into someone else? I’ll never know the answer to that, but I certainly think about it a lot.