The Tortured Poets Department review

It's hell on earth to be heavenly.

Hello, and welcome to Swiftian Theory, a collaborative newsletter about Taylor Swift. I’m Satu and I’ve been nominated for the hardest job of the year, writing a review of The Tortured Poets Department. Thank you for reading and supporting us in talking about Taylor in the depth she deserves. If you like the newsletter, please subscribe or forward to a Swiftie friend. My book on Taylor’s songwriting genius, Into the Taylor-Verse, also comes out on the 9th of May in the UK and is available to pre-order now!

A detail from Maddelena Carrai’s illustration for Into the Taylor-Verse, inspired by The Tortured Poets Department,

This isn’t a “review” that decides if the album is good or bad. I’m down bad for Taylor. Everything she puts out is going to become important to me in some way or other. But one thing I absolutely love is analysing the heck out of her songs. I wanna know what inspired her to write, I wanna listen to the band The Starting Line, I wanna know what musical key the songs are in. I want to add “kids’ cereal” to my very short list of foods Taylor has mentioned.

I’m heaven-struck by this album.

As one of the world’s only “happiness” stans I was so ready for her to explore the grief and humiliation and stony-cold shock of her long-term relationship ending. “The Black Dog”, “So Long, London”, “The Prophecy” and “I Look in People’s Windows” cover these feelings so well – how heartbreaking is “I've been on my knees / change the prophecy / don’t want money / just someone who wants my company / let it once be me”. Let it once be her. There is a lot on this album about the “fortnight” and how it managed to mess her up in such a short time. My theory is that this album is an outpouring of accumulated grief. I can so readily imagine her Joe sadness being buried under the excitement of this new relationship, and feeding the intense sense of relief that comes from new love. It has the feeling of coming home to her favourite place: her imagination. This is someone who she “swirled into all her poems” and who she fantasised about (“I keep recalling things we never did / Messy top lip kiss”) and kept as a little secret personal thing for over a decade. When the fortnight with the new person ends abruptly, it’s a double whammy of hopes being dashed.

I never believed this was going to be a sad and mopey album through and through: there’s lots of fun moments here. The internet has already developed a culture of dog videos for “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys”. But as well as enjoying myself in the traditional sense of having fun I also got what I came for: my heart did get turned inside out. I was especially touched by the loneliness Taylor mentions in “I Hate It Here”. I am claiming it as a daydreamers’ anthem:

I'm lonely but I'm good

I'm bitter but I swear I'm fine

I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose

This place made me feel worthless.

Although we’ve been through a lot of heartbreak with Taylor before, this feels new. I’m sorry she had to go through all that but it’s a treat to have a Taylor album that recognises the negative space around narratives of love: that it also leaves people out. One of my favourite choices Taylor made on folklore was to extend her sympathy to the girls in “August” and “Illicit Affairs”. They are not chosen, but their feelings still count. When I became a Taylor fan back in 2008, I never dreamed she would take any perspective other than the main character of every love story. Taylor clearly envisions herself as a wife (or she’s gonna smash up your bike hehehe) and there is wedding imagery in spades on this album, including possibly my favourite TTPD moment of all. The end of “Fresh Out the Slammer” has a gorgeous tempo change that leaves us stranded on the lyric “Here, at the park where we used to sit on children's swings / Wearing imaginary rings.” The change in speed seems to be about the moment she went from the grey boredom of the six-year relationship to the sublime elation of the fortnight-long one. I want to surround those words with twinkling lights to express how they make me feel. I must also excerpt this much of “loml” to show you the reference to “rings”, I have no choice:

You talked me under the table

Talking rings and talking cradles

I wish I could un-recall

How we almost had it all

Dancing phantoms on the terrace

Are they second-hand embarrassed

That I can't get out of bed?

'Cause something counterfeit's dead.

I understand the use of wedding rings to symbolise being chosen, falling deeply in love, arriving at last. But this promise has been used against Taylor so many times. Why don’t I necessarily want this happy ending for her? Because I don’t want an ending! I want 100 more equally urgent and heartfelt albums. And while the rings and strollers in this album presumably represent an authentic desire for a wedding or whatever, I know exactly what the ages of 30 to 35 are like, and how women are bombarded with messages about how they need to get a man and baby RIGHT NOW. I’m trusting the media to stay calm if Taylor passes the age of 35 having merely achieved the status of great artist and having a billion dollars and being friends with Beyoncé. Please do not torture my poet.

Weddings and happy endings have been in Taylor’s songs since day 1 (where are you, “Mary’s Song” hive?) but although we’re on familiar “falling in love and heartbreak” territory on a lot of TTPD, there’s also some proper new ground being broken. On “But Daddy I Love Him”, Taylor tells her critics, including from inside the fandom, to basically go fuck ourselves. I loved it! I don’t want her to pander to us, whether it’s over Matty or whether she swears too much to appeal to more conservative fans. She has truly done her time in the good girl trenches. On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, Taylor becomes a horror movie apparition “levitating down your street”. It seems to be aimed at the media “you lured me / And you hurt me / And you taught me / You caged me and then you called me crazy / I am what I am 'cause you trained me”. There’s lots and lots of references to being “crazy” on TTPD, which along with the line in “Fortnight” about being a “functioning alcoholic” and the asylum imagery in the video make me wonder if Taylor is expressing something to us, and we don’t have a way to send her a message back. Up untol now, we’ve laughed about her love for white wine with ice cubes. But this line made me wonder if she’s suffering in plain sight. I’m sure if you asked her she’d say she’s fine, like she said to a fan from the stage at Eras last year. But you can be fine and actually not fine.

Image: Youtube

When pathological people-pleasers stop pleasing, it can hurt, but she doesn’t owe us her life. Celebrities have been relentlessly saying “I just love my fans so much!” for over a decade now and we’re seeing an accelerated level of burnout among those who have to cater to fans in order to make a living. She’s very clever: “But Daddy” can be enjoyed as a story set in the 1830s in a Wild West town, and it’s so infectiously lovely I’d forgive her if the lyrics were specifically about me and how much I suck. I can’t see “How Did It End?” becoming a fan favourite in the same way as it’s a downbeat piano ballad that confronts us with an unflattering portrait of ourselves (or maybe just those of us who follow Deuxmoi):

Soon they'll go home to their husbands

Smug 'cause they know they can trust him

Then feverishly calling their cousins (ohh)

Guess who we ran into at the shops?

Walking in circles like she was lost

Didn't you hear?

They called it all off

One gasp and then

How did it end?

This is the most overt way that Taylor is testing our famous relationship with her. There’s other ways she’s withdrawing her labour, for example the lack of curation. She used to carefully put one of every kind of Taylor Swift song on her albums. When Red TV came out we learned she’d originally cut “Better Man” for “All Too Well” because they did the same job. I will tell people this anecdote every time they say 31 songs is too many because how am I expected to live without one of those? On TTPD it feels like Taylor hasn’t cut anything. Instead she’s taking the “Drake mixtape” approach of dropping an infinity number of songs and letting us be the editors. Some songs, like “Down Bad” and “But Daddy I Love Him”, floated up quickly because they’re just so catchy and great, and because they’re earlier on in the album frankly. “Robin” (which read to me as being about the suffocating box of “sweetness” that little girls are put into, although Aaron Dessner has a son called Robin) could be the most robotic radio banger of all time but it’s hard for people get 30 songs deep into the album.

But time, doesn’t it give some perspective? Some songs suddenly make sense when you hear them in the gym, or listening with friends, or because you got your heart broken for the first time. Repetition also matters: I’ve heard that a song only gets stuck in your head on the third listen. I’ve already gone from being less keen on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” to finding it the perfect song to hype yourself up for stressful situations. I can’t wait to see what the Bama Rush girls do with “But Daddy I Love Him”, which has the same “running breathlessly into a glorious future” feeling as “August”. The only other review Swiftian Theory acknowledges is Jessica Karl’s meta-review for Bloomberg, which suggests we stop trying to come up with an immediate take on a new album, especially one 31 songs long: “If you’re a fan of an artist — Taylor Swift or otherwise — do yourself a favor and skip the initial slew of garbage takes, both on social media and in the news. Not only are they a disservice to the artist, they hurt our ability to actually revel in the ambiguity of it all.” Jessica gives us some good advice for enjoying music in the era of the algorithm and the 24-hour news cycle: “Let yourself marinate in the music! Listen to it in the shower. On a long drive. In line to get coffee. While you’re doing dishes. Figure out whether you like it or hate it. After all, that’s what really matters.”

The “double album”, called that because of the time limitations on CDs and vinyl, used to be the ultimate sign of an artist who had travelled too far up their own arse. This doesn’t apply anymore, as artists are just meeting the demands of the current market when they drop lots of songs on us. But could Taylor “use an editor”? It depends on what the end goal is. 1989 had an editor and I remember it being dismissed by critics as soulless. Taylor and super-producer Max Martin were listed as executive producers, who have a say over the overall vision of the record. It shows their close collaboration on this album but also reveals a power struggle between two geniuses with strong points of view.

(l-r: Max and his wine, Shellback and his wine, Taylor and her wine).

Max is renowned for sacrificing everything for catchiness (a classic is making Ariana Grande sing “Now that I've become who I really are” because it fit into the rhyme scheme). Taylor now answers to no one, not a manager, not a producer, not a record label. TTPD goes against every trend in terms of attention spans and how fast the songs are. Of the first seven tracks on the album, only one, Tortured Poets itself, goes above 100 beats per minute, funnily enough mirroring the elite ∽95bpm run from “Blank Space” to “All You Had To Do Was Stay” on 1989. I’m in mid-tempo soft-rock heaven, imagining myself driving across America with only TTPD and its distant influence Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for company. The band’s singer Stevie Nicks is honoured with a verse on “Clara Bow” and she contributed a poem to the liner notes. You can hear a little bit of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” in “The Prophecy, although it could be The Chicks version as I hear some echoes of their dreamy “Easy Silence” on “The Black Dog”. Could a full Taylor x Fleetwood Mac collab be on the cards? Please please please let it be.

Introducing more long words, changing the lyrics between verses, and stuffing each bar with words makes this album harder to sing along to, but other than the clear bops like “Shake It Off", her songs have been too wordy to easily pick up since around Speak Now. I level this criticism at pop music these days in general: write things we can sing along to! The way music affects our bodies and how we interact with it matters and I think pop might be so afraid of repeating itself it’s getting too tricksy. I find myself singing “The Black Dog” or “But Daddy I Love Him” but slightly struggling to remember where to sing certain lines that she’s squeezed in, or the way the lyric changes from “but daddy I love him” to “my daddy just loves him”, and that’s one of the easier ones. This album is overall one of sacrifices. The discipline of a 1989 is sacrificed for Taylor’s artistic freedom.

I work as a book editor and my role is to help the writer or artist convey their vision as clearly as possible. I would have advised Taylor to drop some songs that do the same job, so that the album’s overall vision comes through more clearly. I personally want all 31 songs. I stan a Sagittarius: I know she’s going to make her point for as long as it takes. But I would have suggested picking between “The Albatross” and “Cassandra”. They’re both slower songs that deal with being right in the context of a media scandal. I might be the only one but I like songs about Kim Kardashian, because she’s a fascinating player in the Taylor Swift story and women’s media overall. I don’t need Taylor to ever get over things and I love her bitterness. Editing Taylor’s songs on the line level – I wouldn’t dare! But I would flag mixed metaphors. The word “litany” jumps out at me on “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys”. Using a loaded Christian word in the middle of your Barbie metaphor is too much of a grab-bag to work. It’s already a high-concept song about being reduced to a plastic toy in a box and I think Taylor holds it together by the skin of her teeth. But “litany” is a religious word, bringing up very different ideas and images. It’s fun to spot all the references Taylor throws in, although her own mythology is strong enough for me (my joy when she talked about wearing a short, tight skirt in “imgonnagetyouback! I’ve missed the tight little skirt of the “Style” days).

This rogue “litany” is just one one of many religious references on TTPD, so many that I wonder what’s been going on in her faith. She – finally! – compares herself to Jesus in the ode to masturbation, “Guilty As Sin?” My fave is the “Speak Now”-esque Sarahs and Hannahs all dressed in pastel, pretending to pray for her. Then there’s the Christian choir in “Cassandra”, who pray to greed just like the man sitting in his palace of bones on “it’s time to go”. Likewise, the idea of alchemy, a medieval pseudoscience, mixed in with American football imagery on “The Alchemy”. Throwing in chaotic, apparently unrelated elements has the side-effect of spotlighting the greatest weakness in Jack Antonoff’s production: the random “fun” sounds. Yes, we’ve arrived at the Jack Attack. I would give every fun sound on TTPD  the spelling-is-fun disappearance treatment if I could. I don’t want to make you hear them too but think of “...Question?” from Midnights when the line “15 seconds later they were clapping too” is followed by sounds of cheering and clapping. When he’s good, he’s great, but this is facile. It’s also not relaxing to question the production choices so much, and when combined with Taylor’s current looser style of songwriting, keeps me a little bit tense at times. It’s no surprise that the most joyous moment of all is Taylor in collaboration with her two best boys: “But Daddy I Love Him” is what I’ve been hoping to hear since the gang joy-bombed us with “Hits Different”. Creating within a platonic love triangle is ideal for Taylor it seems: we saw in Miss Americana how well it worked between her, Max and Shellback, and we saw Taylor give some space to Jack and Aaron once she was done talking in The Long Pond Sessions.

My friend Ira is a member of one of Taylor’s most important demographics: children. He described Taylor as singing in a “blocky” way on TTPD. This is a fascinating and true observation, quite a bit more useful than the New York Times describing the album as verbose with a link to this tweet

TTPD is an album of “right where you left me”s, a major songwriting milestone for Taylor somehow tacked on the evermore bonus tracks. This kind of song really does feel like a litany, mantra-like words coming in a long, insistent string. Sorry to get all literary theory but it’s the first time I really noticed her using enjambment, where the sentence continues over the line break: “They say, "What a sad sight", I / I swear you could hear a hair pin drop right / when I felt the moment stop”. That’s not something you got in “Shake It Off’! There’s stacks of internal rhymes and complex triplets on TTPD. Could Taylor, the eternal cover star of Girls World magazine, finally be drawing away from “pop” and becoming merely “popular”? The wall of words is an innovation and when the blocks sound like my new beloved “Camera flashes, welcome bashes / Get the matches, toss the ashes / off the ledge” I couldn’t be happier. I can’t believe we get a popstar who makes pop songs (the greatest form of art) with lyrics as weird as “we declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist”. This is the one irrational absolute I must put in this review: the Charlie Puth line is superb. It’s specific and it tells me exactly when this song took place – this go-around with Matty in May 2023, which means the conversation was presumably inspired by Puth’s recent remix of “That’s Not How This Works”, which features Taylor’s friend Sabrina Carpenter. Yes I could tell you all about rock legend and world’s greatest memoirist Patti Smith or give you the story of Cassandra from ancient Greek myth, but archiving the career of Charlie Puth was what I was put on this earth to do. 

There’s another poet and singer who should be a bigger artist and she’s in the DNA of this record. Lana Del Rey is the groundbreaking Caravaggio to Taylor’s blockbusting Rembrant. Lana’s work is very wordy, and sometimes it hits deep in your soul and sometimes makes no sense to you at all. Like her song “Blue Banisters”: it’s about what colour her staircase is, and it makes me weep. I think where you reside on the Lana spectrum informs whether TTPD feels lush with meaning or whether it just sounds like a woman saying things.

People may remember this album mostly as the really long one. I’ll remember it as the one she wrote not to entertain us but to survive. As she said onstage in Melbourne: “I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me”. There’s a widespread assumption she’ll next move on to an album of loved-up “So High Schools”. Maybe she has moved on, and writing this album helped her. But one of my favourite things about Taylor is that she refuses to “get over things” on anyone else’s schedule. I think of the common saying that it takes half the time you were together to get over someone. If you believed it was forever, how can you ever really get over it?

Thank you to Ira for letting me quote him. Thank you to Helen for checking and Fleetwood Mac insight.