In 2024, there are few things as rare as a nuanced, measured opinion on Taylor Swift. Launched to a frightening level of superstardom not seen since Beatlemania and tearing across the globe on a monumental blockbuster live tour, the online echo chamber makes it feel like you're forced between two extremes; You’re either a diehard ‘swiftie’ who dismisses any criticism against her, doxes journalists who write less than glowing reviews of her work, thinks her impossible of failure or misstep and can’t accept the cynicism of corporate greed. Or you declare her a talentless hack unjustifiably boosted to icon status, who makes bad records and is undeserving of her success. It’s a continuously exhausting cycle of discourse.
But if I am firm about anything, it’s my own ability for nuance and my longing to be able to engage in complex cultural conversations about my interests. And so, as someone deeply invested in the work of Taylor Swift, who has gone from complete indifference to intense fascination with the record, I find myself feeling forced to justify a middle ground for Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album; The Tortured Poets Department; a sprawling, overwrought body of work that embodies the best and worst of Taylor Swift and everything that entails.
"We hereby conduct this postmortem"
Background
For most of my life, my relationship to Taylor was a sporadic and casual one. As a child, my sister, who is five years my junior, was infatuated by her early-career twinkling country ballads, having tracks from the self-titled debut album and sophomore record Fearless downloaded on an mp3 player, and getting the Red CD for Christmas in 2012. And so, through osmosis, I absorbed a lot of early Taylor second-hand, especially as Red saw her begin her transition out of country and into pop. But my personal relationship with her begins when I was freshly fourteen and 1989 came out, her transcendent maiden voyage into all-out pop.
For months, the so-called ‘modern pop bible’ was almost exclusively what I listened to on my way to and from school. I was infatuated. Years later after Swift’s long hiatus post-1989, I attended the Reputation stadium tour, though at the time I was not particularly crazy about that album and found its faux edginess a little off-putting. The next year, Lover similarly came and went with little impact on me beyond its grating singles ME! And You Need to Calm Down, which are among some of Taylor’s worst, and prevented me from wanting to delve into its tracklist any further. It felt like the star was spinning her wheels to try and unearth new ways to execute the same pop formula that was, at this point, becoming contrite.
"You see I was a debutant in another life but, Now I seem to be scared to go outside”
The Album That Changed Everything
But sometimes it takes the most unique and unpredictable of circumstances to birth a miraculous act of musical reinvention. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the meticulously calculated promotional rollout and tour/festival appearances of Lover had to be scrapped. As she explains in the Netflix documentary Miss Americana (2020), which premiered at Sundance only two months before the pandemic hit and is a fascinating portrait of her at that point in her career and provides a glimpse into her innermost insecurities and stifling pressures, Taylor had spent years on a fixed track, knowing on any given day which stadium she would be performing at in three years and two albums time.
And so, when all of that was ripped away, where did it leave her? It left her at home and for the first time in her entire career, having an undefined span of time in front of her to just exist freely. And to do that with her instruments and a makeshift recording studio she would make out of one of her spare bedrooms. In Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Swift recounts how she essentially made the entire album without even telling her label and only alerted them shortly before she intended on releasing it. With collaboration from longtime friend and producer Jack Antonoff, The National’s Aaron Dessner, whom she had been a fan of and always dreamed of working with, and Swift’s own longtime partner Joe Alwyn (credited at the time under the pseudonym William Bowery), folklore was born and gifted to us in July 2020.
Stripped of any artifice or commercial constraints, folklore is a raw, stripped-back indie/folk album, comprised of intricate and specific storytelling languidly expressed. Weaving both personal history and
fabricated characterizations with remarkably unvarnished reflections on the self, it is, to this day, my favourite album of all time. It’s an endlessly rich and textured body of work that only seems more miraculous with each passing year. It's was so strikingly different to anything Swift had ever released prior.
And it seems that once Swift was allowed this space, time and comfortability to write freely, she just couldn’t stop. Because only five months later, she announced that she was releasing a ‘sister album’ to folklore, titled evermore. And though I personally find evermore to pale in comparison to folklore, which is a perfect album start to finish, and to be a less cohesive and slightly more idiosyncratic body of work, the two records complement each other beautifully as a combined project and exhibit the very best of Taylor Swift as a transcendently effective storyteller and poet, as well as pop star.
Delving into these records during the pandemic, and in fact going back and re-discovering her prior work through new eyes, quickly transformed me from a sporadic listener into someone who found her music to be deeply embedded in the fabric of my life. In Miss Americana, Taylor, to paraphrase her, says that she believes all songwriters have a core identifying factor to their lyrical content. And she firmly states that hers is that, above all else, she is a storyteller. There is a specificity and authenticity to even the seemingly simplest of Taylor songs and she personifies singular emotional responses. She evokes these incredibly strong images of specifically sketched locations and characters that colour her work. On top of this, she has proven time and time again that she is a stylistic chameleon who can transfer her storytelling into a variety of genres and constantly evolve; from country, country-pop, synth pop, indie/folk, electro-pop, etc.
It seems that folklore and evermore, and subsequently re-discovering her earlier catalogue, had the same effect on many others as it did on me, as Swift’s popularity skyrocketed, largely aided by Tik Tok. It was also around this time that, following the controversy and legal battle surrounding the ownership of the masters of her first five albums, which were ruthlessly sold out from under her, she would begin re-recording and re-releasing each one, adding the subheading (Taylor’s Version), so that she would be in full ownership of these new masters. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) both released in 2021 hot on the tail of the post-folklore/evermore boom.
These re-recordings of the original albums were supplemented with various new-old tracks “from the vault”, which Swift had written around the time of writing the initial version of the album. These are songs that didn’t make the cut the first time around, but have now been reinvented and included on the re-release of their corresponding album.
"I was grinning like I'm winning, I was hitting my marks"
Midnights and Mega-Stardom
In 2022 Taylor Swift released her tenth studio album Midnights, her first wholly original album since folklore and evermore two years prior. And, as stated, it had been somewhere along the folklore and evermore to Midnights pipeline, with successful re-recordings of Fearless and Red coming out within that timeframe, that Swift, who was already one of the biggest artists in the world, was amplified to an unprecedented level of fame and exposure. Midnights broke a plethora of Spotify and charting records, including making Swift the first artist in history to occupy every spot on the Billboard top 10 concurrently. It was the first time that her popularity began to feel oversaturating, even for a fan of her music like myself.
But it was also Midnights that marked the first signs of trouble for Swift. Where she had previously worked with a variety of producers on each body of work, Midnights was solely produced and co-written by longtime collaborator and close personal friend of Swift, Jack Antonoff. Antonoff had a history of working with Taylor on many of her greatest pop and indie/folk songs, from Out of the Woods and Getaway Car to Lover, august and betty, and so many more. But this was the first time that it was solely Taylor and Jack working on an album, with nobody else to offer perspective or a different approach.
Midnights is a puzzling pop pursuit that sees Swift face an identity crisis when faced with re-entering pop for the first time in five years. It has a handful of standout tracks to offer, like the equally sexy and melancholy synth ballad Maroon, the raw career retrospective You’re On Your Own Kid and the silly but exuberant Karma. But it’s, at least by Taylor’s standards, a very mediocre and uninspired pop album with muddy production and not nearly enough sticky melodies or standout lyricism. It feels meandering and derivative, and like a pretty seismic step down from previous outings.
Three hours after its midnight release, Taylor surprised fans with Midnights (3am Edition); a deluxe version of the album which contained seven bonus tracks, many of which she thankfully worked on with Aaron Dessner, allowing some reprieve from the Jack Antonoff-fest of the standard edition. There are an additional few songs that I enjoy from this edition, including The Great War and Paris, and of course, one of the greatest songs Swift has ever penned in the absolutely devastating Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, a later in life reflection on being groomed as a nineteen year-old by an older man and the gutting, lingering effects it has had on her life.
However, generally speaking as someone who is a massive fan of Taylor and justifiably holds her to such a high standard of songwriting and innovation, because I KNOW what she’s capable of, I did and still do consider Midnights to be a massive failure.
"Isn't that what they all say? That I'll sue you if you step on my lawn”
Corporate Greed (Taylor’s Version)
The more sinister evolution in the Taylor Swift project brought on by Midnights, was a new era (no pun intended) in Taylor Swift-branded corporate greed. Taylor had been no stranger to a strategic merch drop or different vinyl pressings of the same album, but up until this point it had been pretty par for the course in terms of industry standard.
But between the endless Midnights vinyl and CD variants, with pressure to purchase them all and put them together to form a wall-mountable clock, the release of unique digital single versions of already available songs to aid her chart pursuits and the exploitative structure of Eras tour pricing, in which masses of people were left with no option but to spend hundreds of dollars on "VIP" packages, in which the tickets themselves bore no advantage over standard tickets, it's this vulturous, transparent and excessive approach to capitalizing on her success that would follow Swift going forward.
It's incredibly disheartening to see an artist whose work you love so wholeheartedly, and who pertains to lead her career so authentically for the service of her fans, resort to such greedy strategies with the sole purpose of adding to her already ludicrous wealth.
"All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting “MORE”
The Road to The Tortured Poets Department
The overwhelming commercial success, if somewhat dubiously achieved, but simultaneous huge qualitative failure of Midnights, at least to me and many critics, dovetailed into the most chaotic period of Taylor Swift's public and personal life imaginable.
Professionally, she embarked on the most successful live tour in music history, releasing two more re-recorded albums of Speak Now and 1989 along the way.
At the same time, she was mourning the extremely public breakup of her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, followed by the even more publicly sensationalised, supposed rebound situationship with controversial The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. This would see Swift be widely chastised by virtue-signalling fans, desperate to 'save' Taylor from Matty's perceived unsavoury character.
Once untangled from Healy, Swift entered into an instantly beloved public showmance with NFL champion Travis Kelce, broadcasted to the world from its first moments.
This all paves the path towards Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, coming at an emotional axis point in the star’s life.
“I am what I am ‘cause you trained me”
Bad Strategy
Taylor repeatedly shot herself in the foot with The Tortured Poets Department right off the bat, before the merits of its music even come into play. she announced its release during her acceptance speech for Album of the Year at the Grammys, in which Midnights frustratingly beat out superior competitors, including Olivia Rodrigo’s stellar sophomore album GUTS, Lana Del Rey’s Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd and Boygenius’ The Record.
Announcing a new album this way may have been thrilling if not for the fact that it was a repeat of a stunt she had already pulled, when she announced Midnights in an acceptance speech at the VMAs.
And this is only the first foreshadowing of Taylor seemingly taking all the wrong lessons from Midnights, blinded by its mammoth commercial success. And this time in fact, she upped the anti.
Because following the reception to the 3am tracks on Midnights and her aggressive marketing campaign, Taylor announced immediately upon its release, that The Tortured Poets was in fact a double album. With the sixteen-track standard edition, followed by the fifteen-track The Anothology, this totalled in a staggering 31 songs across over two hours on The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of the listening experience. Because one album being 31 tracks, spanning over two hours in total length, is ludicrous in any context. It’s counterproductive in having listeners becoming acquainted with the work. It’s excessive to the point of off-putting and excluding listeners and can make for an exhausting experience, whether you enjoy the music or not. Most frustratingly of all now, in retrospect, it sees stellar tracks be buried and lost in the shuffle, causing so many to miss out on their brilliance.
It’s an absurd structuring choice that’s very difficult to justify. Especially when, as I’m about to outline in my tracklist analysis, it could have easily been one fantastic album that would be among Taylor’s very best. Instead, it’s a double-length one that is ultimately a mixed bag of high highs and low lows.
I have never seen an artist shoot themselves in the foot so spectacularly off the jump with an album. I have since dedicated a lot of time to the album and came around on it, but initially it really pushed me and many other fans I know away from repeated listens, just being intimidated by the sheer scope of it and lack of cohesiveness.
But when I did begin to immerse myself in it bit by bit, burrowing under its artifice, my feelings on The Tortured Poets Department grew all the more complicated.
The Tortured Poets Department appears sprawling, meandering and largely inaccessible on a surface level. At its worst, it’s a chronicling of a woman who has become so strangled by her own celebrity, that the effortless authenticity of her earlier pages-of –a-diary storytelling has now become manufactured and sterile to the point of cold indifference.
At its best, it’s a fascinating chronicling of one of the most famous people on the planet suffering through a public identity crisis and is a gorgeously fractured portrait of her at war with herself in who Taylor Swift the person is versus Taylor Swift the artist.
On a first listen, and in fact the first few subsequent listens, I found myself feeling shut out from the album. Feeling disconnected from Taylor’s once crystal-clear point of view and struggling to grasp onto anything in this marathon of samey pop ballads, I experienced a moment of dire hopelessness in the most important songwriter of my lifetime.
However, I found myself increasingly called back to it as the weeks stretched on, and with slowly evolving familiarity upon repeated listens, I have found the album’s defences to lower for me, and its musings to wriggle their way into my thoughts.
Make no mistake, I still find the album to be indulgently and excessively long, completely unjustifiable as a mega 31-track double album, and think it has a lack of cohesiveness through sections. Taylor’s recycling of melodies, overworked lyricism that sounds like she’s just discovered the thesaurus and her lack of willingness to accept her maturation gracefully, lending her sound an arrested development quality, still win out on a fair amount of tracks.
And I remain offput and disappointed in the transparent greed of her corporate exploits, which have begun to cloud her work, especially as they are seen infringe on the success of other smaller artists.
However, The Tortured Poets Department, though deeply flawed, has revealed itself to me as an intensely fascinating body of work. There are more tracks than not which exemplify why Taylor continues to be one of the most remarkable storytellers and poets in history.
“I’m not Patti Smith”
THE BAD
In terms of outright bad tracks, there’s luckily only three that I strongly condemn and am honestly embarrassed to see as a representation of my favourite artist.
Even with the somewhat winking, tongue-in-cheek nature of Down Bad’s “everything comes up teenage petulance”, I still find its melody tired and its central lyrical framework painfully cringey and stilted even if masquerading as so-called teenage petulance. And the “waking up in blood “ lyric is still one of the most bizzare things I’ve ever heard. I laugh every time at the sheer absurdity of it.
I Look in People’s Windows is similarly as subtle as a baseball bat to the face and its “I look in people’s windows, like I’m some deranged weirdo” is one of the most insufferable and overwrought lyrics on the album with the misguided false grittiness of Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019).
And if we’re talking about false grittiness, the title track, though infectiously catchy to a fault, is probably the worst thing Taylor Swift has ever allowed to be publicly released. It’s a stain on her rich songwriting history.
In line with its subject matter, its clunky lyrics reek of a Matty Healy-inspired false sense of pretension that is insufferable to parse through. Yes, the
You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate, we declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist. I scratch your head, you fall asleep like a tattooed golden retriever.
feels like an AI-generated parody of the worst possible Taylor Swift lyric and will haunt her well into the future.
But the chorus’ Dylan Thomas/Patti Smith/Chelsea Hotel references are almost even more obnoxious. And to make matters even worse, its wordy, pretentious title was chosen as the title of the album itself, making this the title track and marring the entire body of work with its effect.
I will talk a little later about what I think the album could have alternatively been titled but calling it The Tortured Poets Department is another way in which she shot herself in the foot with the presentation of this album right off the bat. It immediately marks it with this overwrought pretension.
“Is that a bad thing to say in a song?”
THE MEH
Past this cursed trio, there is an additional handful of songs that I find inoffensive and mostly pretty, and which I won’t skip on most plays through of the album, but which I am just utterly unaffected by. They wash over me with so little impact that I can’t say much about them either way.
Robin, Cassandra, The Manuscript, How Did It End? and I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) (which boasts the worst case of chronic online gen-z-speak) fall into this category. I don’t dislike them, but am simply unmoved by them. They’re filler in an album which is already so absurdly long.
Then there are two swings and misses. thanK you aIMee is salacious in its subject matter as a retrospective takedown of Kim Kardashian, utilising the same small town/highschool mean girl framing as seen previously from Swift on Mean. But in execution, it sounds like a rookie producer trying to recreate the production style and tone of previous albums like evermore from memory. It doesn’t deserve to be in the bad category, but is also memorable enough to not be one of my immediate skips.
Florida!!! (Ft. Florence + the Machine) (exclamation points evidently necessary) is such a bizarre swing with booming vocals that sounds so different from anything else on the album, that I sort of have to appreciate it even if it doesn’t come together. It also helps that Florence Welch sounds stunning here.
“Put narcotics into all of my songs, And that’s why you’re still singing along “
THE GUILY PLEASURES
Then, there is the quartet of songs that fall under some sort of guilty pleasure labelling.
I find myself enjoying them and returning to them regularly, and they’re some of the most standout tracks on the record, despite the fact that I think they’re still at times painfully unsubtle and ripe with poor lyricism. I won’t defend their quality, but I also won’t deny that I enjoy them.
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived works when you allow yourself to indulge in its melodrama. Its digs at Matty Healy are fun, especially at his “Jehovah’s Witness suit”. And its absurdly over the top but undeniably fun bridge from
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 all this be declassified?
to
I would’ve died for your sins, instead I just died inside. And you deserve prison, but you won’t get time.
was written to be screamed at top volume. It’s by no means subtle, but it’s cathartic and massive in scope.
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? is an intriguing meditation on her celebrity that just pales in comparison to far superior offerings on the same theme that Swift has written, like The Lucky One and mirrorball from previous albums, or even The Prophecy and Clara Bow from later on this same album.
It also falls into the grand tradition of Taylor songs that are filled with interesting lyricism, which is then overshadowed by the fact that the central, on-the-nose lyric/metaphor doesn’t land (cardigan is one of my favourite songs of all time, but the central metaphor about “when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone’s bed, you put me on and said I was your favourite” still drives me insane).
But even sanitized as it is,
I was tame, I was gentle ‘til the circus life made me mean, Don’t you worry folks, we took out all her teeth.
is still one of the most effective reflections on fame we’ve gotten from Taylor.
imgonnagetyouback I’m actually a huge fan of sonically. It’s suave and sexy and I go back to it a lot. But it’s weighed down by its completely void lyrical content, which can only be characterised as an echoing of Olivia Rodrigo’s get him back!, only without the humour and self-aware teen melodrama which makes that song so fun.
And of course, So High School, which other than maybe “I’m down bad crying at the gym” or the seven bars of chocolate/Charlie Puth line in the title track, boasts the most laughable and indefensible lyrics perhaps of Taylor’s career, as she essentially implies that Travis Kelce is an idiot with “you know how to ball, I know Aristotle”, followed by the even worse (I struggle to even type these words out without physically cringing) “touch me while your bros play grand theft auto”. It’s an infectious track and I really enjoy the pre-chorus, but I cannot and will not defend it in the context of the quality she’s capable of.
So that’s 3 songs that I find difficult to defend at all and would go as far as to say are bad, a further 5 that I don’t dislike but am indifferent towards/bored by, 2 I think are at least interesting swings and misses and 4 that I enjoy as guilty pleasures and think are fun, even if they don’t have strong lyrical content.
So even if we include the guilty pleasure songs that I do enjoy, let’s say for argument's sake that’s 14 songs out of the 31 on the album that I don’t stand by. It’s not a great ratio, especially for someone of Taylor Swift’s musical caliber.
However, it means there’s still 17 songs, over half of this album, that I like, if not LOVE to varying degrees.
It’s these tracks that I have fallen deeply in love with and have found to really seep into me with continued listening, making me increasingly convinced that had this album been structured and presented differently, it would be widely considered one of Swift’s best.
”What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway”
THE GREAT
Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, though somewhat exhaustingly titled, is a gorgeous and somber ballad that chronicles the helplessness of having to watch the dissolution of a relationship, longing for some kind of peace or closure. Its delicate and hazy lyricism is centered around the devastating
If you wanna break my cold, cold heart, Just say “I loved you the way that you were
The use of past tense verbiage here is an example of Taylor’s deft handle in subtle writing choices that convey entire emotional chasms in so little.
The Alchemy is, to me, the infinitely better intoxicating Travis Kelce serenade that, using apt sports metaphors does successfully capture that youthful, untouchable feeling of falling in love again, far better than So High School does. it’s utterly exuberant.
Peter, though a fairly traditionally composed piano ballad, is an inverted fairytale which sees Taylor return to Peter Pan, which she has used before as a literary reference, in cardigan’s “Peter losing Wendy”. It’s a simple and melancholic ballad that sees one battling between nostalgia for an innocence in young love that’s hard to let go of, with the cynicism that comes from maturing and realising that not all promises can be kept. At its core, it’s about letting go. Where she sometimes overdoes it with aggressive referencing, I applaud Taylor here for her deft hand in subtly envoking elements of the Peter Pan story.
I was initially indifferent to My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys, and it does suffer again from some of that gen z buzzword effect. However, after watching the videos of her perform it as a surprise song on the Eras tour in the way it was originally written, as a stripped-back piano ballad, as opposed to its upbeat pop production, it becomes more tonally cohesive and allowed me become much more attached to it. It’s effective even if I think its lyrics are simplistic.
Fresh Out the Slammer is another track which I was initially not fond of but has since grown on me massively for its style and vocal performance. With breathy, high-pitched vocals, it’s a sexy incantation that allows Taylor to perform in a tone she doesn’t often get to.
I think having So Long, London and loml on the tracklist could be argued as another example of the unnecessary length of the album, because they ostensibly serve similar purposes and tones. However, I think both are deeply gorgeous.
I like loml a lot. The subversion of expectations in loml being assumed to stand for love of my life, but then being contrasted to stand for “loss of my life” is clever in itself. And its “You shit-talked me under the table, talkin’ rings and talkin’ cradles” is one of the more memorable lyrics on the album.
But it is So Long, London that comes out on top as the gutting eulogy to a once-beautiful relationship that has now turned almost parasitic. It’s one of the most raw and despairing songs of Taylor’s career.
Pulled him in tighter each time he was drift in’ away, My Spine split from carrying us up the hill. Wet through my clothes, weary bones caught the chill.
-There is a desperation as Swift recounts how it almost killed her to cling onto the remnants of this relationship because of the time and dedication put into it, even if it was slowly destroying her to do so. “My white-knuckle dying grip, holding tight to your quiet resentment” is another cutting evocation of this that is agonising on impact. But it's the resigned simplicity of “How much sad did you think I had in me?” that I don’t think I’ll be able to shake for a long time.
And another way in which loml and So, Long London act as companion songs is that So Long, London similarly has a twist in its double-meaning title. Taylor bids the relationship a goodbye with “so long, London, you’ll find someone...” But then, towards the end of the song, nostalgia begins to bleed through for the time dedicated to this relationship and all the joy she once gleamed from it, and also from this place she planted roots, twisting the meaning by showing how hard it is to let go of with
And I’m just getting color back into my face, I’m just mad as hell ‘cause I loved this place for so long, London.
I Hate It Here is, on paper, another instance of noticeably on-the-nose lyricism. But in execution, with a twinkling melody and melancholic/yearning tone that lends it an almost whimsical quality, with an explicit allusion to Taylor having grown up reading The Secret Garden, following its “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind” I think it’s successful (except for the awful “1830s without all the racists” line that is deeply misguided). There is something in the bluntness of “I’m there most of the year ‘cause I hate it here” that I really respond to.
The Black Dog is a sly powerhouse that I initially found a little flat, but now understand as one of her most sophisticated and well-written songs in years that oozes a matured bitterness with its chorus of
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.
It’s effectively spiteful.
The Albatross has slowly crept its way up the top of my rankings as a deeply textured, twinkling folk ballad with explicitly poetic imagery and literary incantations, laced with lazy, almost resigned malice. Swift personifies herself as the albatross, the figure of destruction and chaos in classic literature, and does so almost mockingly.
Cross your thoughtless heart, only liquor anoints you. She’s the albatross, she is here to destroy you.
might be one of my favourite lyrical refrains on the album.
But Daddy I Love Him initially confounded me, and it’s a little hard to overlook the almost assaulting nature of lyrics like “but daddy I love him” and the fourth-wall-breaking “I’m having his baby... No I’m not, but you should see your faces!” It can seem difficult at first to view it too sincerely.
But the second you drop any literal connotations and understand that in this case “daddy”, the authoritative figure that Swift seems to feel beholden to either ask for permission or forgiveness, is her fanbase and the wider spectators, its genius is revealed. She sings about “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best, clutching their pearls, sighing “what a mess!” and later, “all the wine moms are still holding out”.
It’s clearly a response to widespread outrage from her own fanbase in response to her relationship with Matty Healy, who bears a certain unsavoury reputation, outright acknowledged with “I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one I want..”
But in truth, it’s a song about agency and Swift cementing that she is not a puppet who lives her life for the satisfaction of her dedicated listeners. She doesn’t owe them consideration in how she conducts her personal life.
Because the reality of the situation is that even if you didn’t “approve” of her relationship with Matty Healy from a deeply parasocial outside perspective, it's not yours to approve or disapprove of. Taylor is a grown woman who has agency in her choices. And to think that she needs to be “saved” or that you, as someone who has never met her, are helping her by pleading with her to end her relationship, is deeply insulting. It strips her of agency and paints her as naive and vulnerable and deems her untrustworthy of making her own choices. It was a moment of deep parasocial turmoil in fans going as far as to create open letters for Swift to end her relationship, and it’s something she was understandably deeply wounded by. I don’t know if I have ever heard a major artist outright scold their audience this way and it’s incredibly commendable.
And so, she pleads “but Daddy, I love him!” and actively mocks the virtue signaling listeners with “I’m having his baby... No I’m not, but you should see your faces!” But the thesis statement of the track comes in its post chorus and strikes down like an iron fist:
I'll tell you something right now, I'd rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitchin' and moanin'. I’ll tell you something ‘bout my good name, it’s mine alone to disgrace. I don't cater to all these vipers dressed in empath's clothing.
It’s about as cutting as Swift has ever gotten with her listeners and it’s glorious.
The Prophecy, unlike the unsubtle Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, or even But Daddy I Love Him, sees Swift drop the ultra-confident artifice and resign to desperation. She is pleading, singing “Please I’ve been on my knees, change the prophecy”. In a sentiment which has been echoed by Swift previously, it’s about the loneliness and alienation which accompanies being the most famous person on the planet and the fact that this “prophecy” is obviously a blessing, but also a curse.
It seems to reflect on a time in Swift’s recent life where, by day, she is the most famous person on the planet, but she “pads around” aimlessly when she returns to her empty home at night. “And I sound like an infant, Feeling like the very last drops of an ink pen” is another personification of this resigned sadness. There is something achingly pathetic about the whole thing.
Fortnight (Ft. Post Malone) had the disadvantage of being the lead single of an album that’s not really fit to have commercial singles. It initially washed over me with indifference. But once I dug beneath its murky synths and mumbling nature, it revealed itself to me as a deeply despondent, cold portrayal of being forced to live in mundane cordiality with an ex, in some sort of imagined suburban nightmare.
Yes, on its face there is an abrasive melodrama to some of its lyrics, notably in its opening verse with lines like “I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me.” But when you understand it as a sardonic take on a woman suppressing her rage and bitterness in this imagined scenario where she and her ex “turned into good neighbours”, I think the tone sells it. “Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather/comment on my sweater” is darkly comical when viewed through this lens, and it allows for lyrics like “I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary” to land, with “Your wife waters flower, I want to kill her”, in this tonal context, being one of my favourite lyrics on the album.
The Bolter is perhaps the album’s greatest exhibit of Taylor Swift’s monumental talent for prose and cleverly utilizing motif and imagery to create fictionalized fables. A Tale of an idiosyncratic woman with commitment issues bouncing from relationship to relationship, it opens with the story of how “By all accounts she almost drowned when she was six in frigid water” and Taylor acts as the detached narrator as she tells us that “I can confirm she made a curious child, ever reviled by everyone except her own father.”
It evolves into a string of images depicting his woman who exists in a cycle of indulging in the exhilaration of first meeting and becoming intimate with someone, before succumbing to fear and bolting the minute that she feels herself becoming too tied down. Hence why “behind her back her best friends laughed, And they nicknamed her the bolter.”
The most memorable refrain in the song that effectively captures this sense of panic and urge for abandonment that accompanies feeling trapped by a man comes in the second verse with the story that
When it’s all roses, portrait poses, Central Park Lake in tiny rowboats, What a charming Saturday. That’s when she sees the littles leaks down the floorboards, And she just knows, She must bolt.
The allusion to aggressive misogyny that rears its head in the face of women unafraid to prioritise themselves and make a clean break comes in the chorus with
Ended with the slam of a door, Then he’ll call her a whore, Wish he wouldn’t be sire, But as she was leaving, It felt like breathing.
But it’s the use of the story from the opening as a repeated motif that solidifies this as one of Taylor’s all-time greatest;
All her fuckin’ lives flashed before her eyes, It feels like the time she fell through the ice, Then came out alive.
I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, perhaps the most striking song on the album on a first listen, is a masterclass in almost possessed, paradoxical dread. Crescendoing with an exuberant, sparkling beat drop at the chorus, Taylor giddily sings the almost comically dark lyrics of
I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day. I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague. I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art. You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.
It’s remarkable that we get to hear this song while she is still actively on the Eras tour. Because it chronicles the period of her recent life in which she was expected to tear herself apart on stage each night of the tour to appease tens thousands of people all while, in private, her life was falling apart and she had been plunged into misery, following the dissolution of her six year relationship with Joe Alwyn, which played out in the public eye.
Taylor is asserting that she is a master in compartmentalization, suppressing this internal darkness to be a dancing monkey sparkling om stage under the pressure of public spectators, from “I can hold my breath, I’ve been doing it since he left”, to the “lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die”.
But the genius of the song is that sonically, it tracks this and evokes this emotional dissonance for the listener. With the core beat recreating Taylor’s click track that she hears in her earpiece when on stage, and the lead-in to the drop being someone, many speculate to be Swift’s tour manager Robert Allen, counting her in, it places the listener in the frenzied state of moving from verses of devastation into an explosive, upbeat dance number.
The tracks closing moments, which see a delirious, almost maniacal Swift speak through giggles “‘cause I’m miserable, and nobody even knows!”, provides ultimate confirmation on the songs intended impact.
Guilty as Sin? deserves to be in the conversation for Taylor’s greatest work and is honestly one of the most fascinating offerings we’ve ever gotten from her. Though she has spent years deconstructing this, Taylor Swift had a fairly conservative, Christian upbringing in Pennsylvania, and later Tennessee. As is effectively seen in Miss Americana, she spent much of her early career groomed into a prim and proper image of a good southern girl, devoid of sexuality. And so, sexuality has always been somewhat of a complicated wrinkle in Swifts writing, and not something that perhaps came as naturally to her.
Her first five albums are almost completely devoid of sexual references other than vague, tasteful allusions. Repuatation saw her first soiree into explicitly acknowledging sex and, understandably, it’s a little stiff and sometimes awkward, like with So It Goes...’s “scratches down your back now” or Dress’s “only bought this dress so you could take it off”.
The prelude to Guilty as Sin? that telegraphs it is I Can See You (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault), the only truly memorable vault track on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). It’s fascinating and understandable that the song didn’t make the original cut of Speak Now, because it would have completely shattered the artifice of conservative innocence Swift still held at that time. Though not as explicit as some of the refrains I mentioned on Reputation, it’s a deeply erotic ode to repressed sexuality and sexual fantasies, as Swift details a secret affair, seemingly with someone she worked with as indicated by “and we kept everything professional”. With the chorus of
'Cause I can see you waitin' down the hall from me, And I could see you up against the wall with me, And what would you do, baby, if you only knew? That I can see you
It's unclear how much of this is based in reality, and how much is fantasy, but it’s the idea of the glorious danger in being able to achieve sexual catharsis through fantasizing. Nothing better exemplifies this than
You won't believe half the things I see inside my head, Wait 'til you see half the things that haven't happened yet
And it is this concept which leads us to the song's spiritual sequel on The Tortured Poets Department; Guilty as Sin?, which is an ingenious extended ode to sexual fantasies, and unpacking internalized guilt and sexual shame. Before the chorus, Taylor states “I’m seeing visions” before asking “am I bad? Or mad?” And the question mark, the representation of doubt in your own core beliefs, is a key motif, as seen in the track title, here and in the chorus’ “what if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh, only in my mind?”.
Echoing the strikingly similar lyric in I Can See You, she says, “I keep recalling things we never did” and asks, “without touching his skin how can I be guilty as sin?” It’s a vicious cycle of feeling shameful and questioning the morality and decency of indulging in such sexual fantasies, hoping that allowing them to play out in your head, as opposed to in reality, saves you from the perceived indecency.
In the second verse, this repression is echoed in “I keep these longing locked in lowercase inside a vault.” And in arguably the most important lyric, which reinforces the conceptual framework of the entire song, “Someone told me there’s no such thing as bad thoughts, only your actions talk.” This notion of supposed “bad thoughts” is key to this understanding of both sexual shame, and the desire to expel it.
After further references to the fictionalization with “we’ve already done it in my head” and “if it’s make believe”, we get something I never thought we’d get from Taylor Swift, and one of my favourite things she’s ever achieved lyrically, with the most gorgeous and poetic illustration of masturbation and its power for poignant exploration with
My bedsheets are ablaze, I've screamed his name, Building up like waves, Crashing over my grave, Without ever touching his skin, How can I be guilty as sin?
It’s the bridge where we finally get direct references to religion, with “they’re gonna crucify me anyway”, “what if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?” and
If long suffering propriety is what they want from me, They don't know how you've haunted me so stunningly, I choose you and me... Religiously.
It’s a song that, even a few years ago, I never could have imagined Taylor writing or releasing. But like many tracks on this album, it’s one I feel her entire career has in many ways led towards her releasing, as she matures into a different phase of life.
Which leads us onto Clara Bow...
Finally, the original album’s closer before the anthology tracks, Clara Bow, honestly feels like the definitive reflection on fame that is only possible when you are two decades into your career as the most famous person alive. An evolution of themes previously touched on by Swift in The Lucky One and Nothing New (Ft. Phoebe Bridgers), it’s an ingenious deconstruction of the fame monster that female artists are understood in, forced to be constantly striving for impossible innovation and sanding off their edges.
It follows three time periods, beginning with the subject being told “You look like Clara Bow in this light, remarkable”; Clara Bow of course being a legendary starlet of the silent film era in the 1920s. Following an evocation of the desperation for fame with “I’m not trying to exaggerate, but I think I might die if it happened to me”, we jump forward over half a century and Clara Bow has been forgotten, no longer the model for perfection because of all those younger who have moulded themselves on her.
Now, the narrative is “You look like Stevie Nicks in ‘75, the hair and lips, Crowd goes wild at your fingertips,” which it seems to be implied, is a sentiment Taylor felt echoed to her at one point in her career, wibut Stevie being a personal idol of hers.
It’s becoming clear, that the increasingly violent cycle is mining its young starlets, constantly looking for the newest young, fresh face, forgoing the women who proceeded her and discarding them. This is chillingly evoked in
The crown is stained buy you’re the real queen, Flesh and blood amongst war machines, You’re the new god we’re worshipping, Promise to be... dazzling.
It’s some of the most stunning lyricism to ever come from Swift and rendered me speechless.
It evokes like a bargain being made that can never be upheld. And in an even more explicit account, that’s followed by the sinister
Beauty is a beast that roars, down on all fours, demanding “more”. Only when your girlish glow, flickers just do, do they let you know.
This propels us to the climax that the song, and in fact Taylor’s entire career, has been hurtling towards, as we jump to the future:
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 cycle continues.
I Can Fix *Him (No Really I Can)
*This Album
The thrust of my proposal on how to fix The Tortured Poets Department is all in scaling back. First, the pretentious and insufferable title has to go. I have considered a couple of options for alternative titles based on the tracklist, but I keep returning to how fitting and effective The Albatross would be as a title to define this body of work and what Taylor is primarily trying to express at this introspective point in her career.
The cover I find to be similarly overthought and in need of scaling back, with the suggestive shot of Taylor’s torso and huge white borders. Instead, I am deeply obsessed with this image from the official photoshoot for the album, which was used for the The Bolter CD/vinyl variant. Still though, even that cover has thick borders and text and I think that, like folklore and evermore, this album is best served by a sense of rawness. And so my ideal cover for the album is just the plain image with no text or design features:
It conveys that raw, resigned energy I think is at the core of the album as opposed to the performative confident rage.
This would be my proposed tracklist:
Fortnight
Guilty as Sin?
The Albatross
The Black Dog
So Long, London
I Hate it Here
But Daddy I Love Him
The Alchemy
The Prophecy
loml
I Can Do it With a Broken Heart
Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
Peter
The Bolter
Clara Bow
It's not at all to say that there's not still other songs I enjoy or think have merit, as I have outlined, and in this hypothetical scenario, I would be perfectly fine with some of those making it as bonus tracks on a standard deluxe edition of the album. However, it's these fifteen songs, that I feel could be constructed into a stunning and cohesive body of work.
The Tortured Poets Department is, in every way, is an encapsulation of the best and worst of Taylor Swift. A complicated collection of work that contains some of the most sophisticated and moving tracks of her career, that she just couldn't let speak for itself, dressing it in on the nose pretention, and not being willing to make strategic decisions and cut it down to one average-length record. And its errors like these that are increasingly colouring Taylor Swift's work as she continues to evolve, for better or worse.
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