Taylor Swift Doesn’t Care What You Think about The Tortured Poets Department.
Nor should she.
Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department April 19th, shocking fans, critics, and detractors who came to the album with specific expectations. Fans were confused as listening quickly revealed that the anticipated breakup album sidestepped an extensive post-mortem of Swift’s six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn only to center on her brief and painful relationship with The 1975’s problematic frontman Matty Healy. She doubled down on the decision to release particularly personal work, delivering sharp rebukes to Healy, the public, and Kim Kardashian. Swift returns yet again to excavate her heart, crafting an album that requires repeated listening to parse in full, prompting hot takes, scrutiny, and deeper revelations. Listening to The Tortured Poets Department is akin to experiencing a nervous breakdown in real time, but this album is an artistic power move and you won’t convince me otherwise.
After years of feeling shackled to expectations, Taylor Swift released an album purely for her own catharsis, writing to release herself from the tidal wave of emotions that threatened to drown her. Swift employs asylum overtones, allusions to classic literature and mythology, and cowboy imagery to channel a traumatic period of her life. It’s pure manic chaos; it’s no surprise that people aren’t warming to it. The album is a raw, unapologetic look at a turbulent period in the artist’s life— a page out of her diary, if you will. Swift cleverly nods towards the album as cathartic performance art in the lyrics on “So High School,” by referencing Aristotle. While the line “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle,” is one of the most-mocked lyrics on this album, it also points to the heart of Swift’s conception of these songs. In Poetics, Aristotle advanced his theory of tragic narratives as vehicles for catharsis. The Tortured Poets Department presents purgation, purification, and clarification across 31 tracks.
Writing about emotional highs and lows is what she does best, but women’s writing about emotions is often reduced to maudlin melodrama (it’s another project about a broken heart! Does she write about anything other than men?!). Men and women alike have shared these views with me after learning I love Taylor Swift. The wild vulnerability it takes to translate a love affair into art is a process of channeling the blistering experiences that change you. What’s frivolous about that? Swift summed it up herself in a 2013 Vanity Fair profile, saying “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that frankly is a little sexist.”
Like 2017’s reputation, The Tortured Poets Department reveals itself over repeat listenings. At first, the album is overwhelming. The sharp sonic differences between the first and second half are jarring; the storytelling feels chaotic and tumultuous. As her critics have said, the songs all sound the same (sonically, not necessarily lyrically)—pointing to Jack Antonoff’s repetitive synths. Yet after the dust settles, you can clearly see the creativity at play. Looking for signs that what she experienced was real, Swift straps her listener into their seats on the emotional rollercoaster. The Tortured Poets Department sends us hurtling through the monotonous fog of depression, soaring mania and desperation, the sharp curves of bitter disappointment, and lucid finality. The album’s sound mirrors the narrative. Let’s not forget—this is Taylor Swift. When she wants to give the listener glitter pen bops, she does. In “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” Swift delivers bitter honesty in the trappings of a shimmering pop track. Her decision to depart from audience expectations is intentional.
Swift is writing directly to her subject, whether it’s Matty Healy, Joe Alywn, Kim Kardashian, or her fans. Arguably this leads to some of her most stilted lyrics (“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” and “Brand-new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto”)—hyper specific details that would blend in better in prose or, better yet, not exist at all. She also offers some of her most cutting (“I’ll tell you somethin’ ‘bout my good name, it’s mine alone to disgrace / I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing”), painful (“Dancing phantoms on the terrace / Are they second-hand embarrassed / That I can't get out of bed? / ‘Cause something counterfeit's dead”), and hilarious (“We’ll tell no one except all of our friends”). We’re invited to listen in, but the album isn’t for us—it’s for Taylor Swift herself. There is catharsis in transforming pain into something you can bear holding up to the light.
In a move similar to her message on reputation, Swift thumbs her nose at her audience in “But Daddy I Love Him” and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” offering direct challenge to our misapprehension that we think we have a say in how she lives her life. Clapping back at the untenable dynamic she’s created with her fierce fan base, Swift addresses the way we conflate Taylor Swift the individual with Taylor Swift the pop star, Taylor Swift the artist, and Taylor Swift the brand. The Tortured Poets Department echoes Swift’s storytelling strategy from reputation, which tucked a fragile love story into an album overtly focused on Swift’s media cancellation. Much in the way that reputation buried the lede, The Tortured Poets Department is about breaking free of expectations while falling in and out of love with a gaslighting narcissist. Swift transforms her pain into an immersive narrative that echoes the feelings that threatened to sweep her away. Our experience is secondary.
At 31 songs, the album runs for just over two hours. Arguably influenced by the public’s appetite for the vault tracks, this time Swift leaves little to nothing on the cutting room floor. Her vault tracks are sometimes imperfect, but seething with raw emotion. Some were more specific and biting, out of step with the curated election of songs we were initially given. For example, in “Nothing New,” added to Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift agonizes over the fleeting currency of her youth as a woman in the music industry. Written in her early 20s, this sentiment is a stark contrast to her public persona, which emphasized her relatability in order to maintain the parasocial relationship with her fans. Swift is increasingly less precious about whether her life is relatable, and I’d argue that this is a positive shift. If she remained caged by relatability, we would miss out on gems like “The Prophecy.”
Earlier in her career, her relatability gave her momentum. Increasingly, the one thing in her life that was consistently relatable was the ups and downs of her love life. Swift allowed her audience to speculate on parallels between her life and her work, constructing a gilded cage that kept her star rising while inciting increasing tension. We’re called to remember that Swift is essentially a child star turned billionaire who experiences daily levels of public scrutiny that would reduce the lesser among us to the fetal position. She’s the most famous person in the world; she’s still a person.
If you’re looking for relatability, that door closed a long time ago. That’s not to say that Swift doesn’t offer up plenty for her listeners to engage with on an emotional level. Delivering an complicated album unraveling the kaleidoscopic range of emotions from a brief and blistering period of her life, Swift offers a narrative that is heartbreaking, sarcastic, manic, biting, hopeful, earnest, and resigned. Akin to reputation, The Tortured Poets Department discards relatability in favor of delivering a message. Swift doesn’t give us the album we want, but the album she needed to make in order to close that chapter and move on.
The haters might want to wipe that egg off their face. Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, is officially Spotify’s most streamed album in a single week, with over 1 billion streams since its release April 19th. Listen here.
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That’s all folks!
