Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), was released on Friday, April 19th. Announced on February 4th, Taylor revealed that the tracklist contained 16 songs and that was what fans got…until Taylor revealed in a surprise announcement two hours after the release of TTPD that it is actually a double album. Taylor announced The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, which gifted fans with 15 new songs, for a total of 31 songs.
The album, initially highly speculated to be about her breakup with ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, whom Taylor was with for six and a half years, is now speculated to be primarily about Matty Healy, the lead singer of the band The 1975, whom Taylor had a brief relationship with after her breakup with Joe Alwyn went public. However, this album is not about Joe Alwyn or Matty Healy or any other speculated muse, and I believe Taylor intentionally blurred the line between muses on this album so that people would realize that her music never was and never will be about who inspired the song. This album is about Taylor Swift, her struggle with mental health, and her complicated relationship with fame as she tries to work through her complex feelings in the only way she knows how to: by writing songs.
Before the album was released, Taylor had mentioned at one of her shows on the Eras Tour how she needed to make TTPD more than she needed to make any of her other albums because it was a lifeline for her as she navigated the struggles she was writing about. As I listened to the album and what she was going through in her life that caused her to produce such a poignant and candid body of work, it became evident to me just how true that statement was. The album explores themes of depression (I Can Do It With a Broken Heart and So Long, London), religion (Guilty As Sin? and The Prophecy), and insanity (Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? and But Daddy I Love Him). The album weaves through an array of emotions ranging from freedom to captivity and exuberance to grief that Taylor herself doesn’t know how to comprehend.
Lyrically, this is Taylor’s most impressive album to date. She has such a unique way with words and an unheard-of ability to make you feel what she felt while writing her songs. Each song felt like reading pages of her diary. Every single lyric is filled with so much emotion and feeling. It truly feels like Taylor put her raw and unfiltered thoughts and feelings into each of her songs. It takes an unimaginable amount of strength to be so vulnerable in your songs, knowing the world will say whatever they want about your love and your pain, and it’s something that makes this album so personal.
Something that sets Taylor aside from other artists is her authenticity and honesty in her songs. A popular topic for Taylor in recent years is her complicated relationship with her fame; however, I don’t think she has ever been so candid with her struggles with fame as she has in this album. She touches on this in her song I Can Do It With a Broken Heart where she talks about performing for fans while being heartbroken, and she conveys this in lyrics such as, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘More!'”, and “They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it’ and I did.'” She also gets really frank about hearing outside opinions about her life in her song But Daddy I Love Him, saying, “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this b****ing and moaning,” and “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.” As Taylor’s fame grows in an unprecedented manner (Time magazine person-of-the-year!), the pressure on her shoulders to always be perfect gets heavier and heavier, and I think she is at a point now where she is getting tired of the high expectations she is always being held to and she is no longer keeping those feelings to herself, and she definitely lets those emotions free in this album.
As pointed out in the title, this album is extremely lyrically focused. A lot of the songs on this album have very minimal production which leaves the lyricism and poetry as the star of the show, and, in my opinion, that stands strong enough alone. Taylor never fails to make me pull out my dictionary and my tissues. The lyrics were hard to digest as they were raw and vulnerable, which explains why she worked with long-time producers and friends Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner to produce this album. She trusted them with her thoughts and feelings as she worked through them during the making of this album, and now the fans get to hear the product of that.
The Tortured Poets Department was cathartic for Taylor, with full disregard for the media and their opinions. As articulated in the songs on the album, Taylor was working through things internally and externally. The album is introspective, personal, and melancholy, but as Taylor said when the album was announced, “This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”
