Earlier this morning, Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department.” It’s, surprise, a double album! In 31 chapters, the undisputed queen of songwriting gives deep insight into her soul – and into her feud with Kim Kardashian.
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According to her own statements, she worked on the new collection of musical poems for two years and not only deals with the end of her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, with whom she was in a relationship for six years, no, what’s more: Taylor Swift also makes it clear that love is a spectrum is. A kaleidoscope of pain, torture, acceptance and hope. The fact that the 34-year-old no longer writes about high school crushes or teenage tears on her guitar has been clear since the two hypnotic pandemic albums “Folklore” and “Evermore”.
But she still makes heartbreak the central element of her lyrics. And although her art has grown up with many of her listeners, “Tortured Poets” comes across as the confession of a woman who thought she had decoded life and love, but ultimately finds that she is just as awkwardly tumbling through emotions as she is everyone with whom their metaphors resonate.
A look at the dictionary
The singer has demonstrated on every release of her 18-year career that the words from Swift’s pen are always as deeply personal as they are sharp – and yet in the new songs her art reaches a different sphere. The album starts off almost subdued. Together with the rapper Post Malone, she strikes a gentle tone in “Fortnight” and it quickly becomes clear: Swift is no longer interested in conquering the charts with just catchy tunes, she is putting her lyrics in the foreground.
“Fortnight” is the only feature besides the bass climax “Florida!!!” with Florence + The Machine. Before the release, her fans joked that a dictionary would be needed to decode the new record’s lyrics – an absurd idea that doesn’t seem so far-fetched when Swift comes up with lines like “Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see” in “But Daddy I Love Him” or “Rivulets descend my plastic smile” in “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” ” shines. In the title track she mentions two literary legends and one of the places that connect them when it says: “You are not Dylan Thomas. I’m not Patti Smith. This is not the Chelsea Hotel.”
Thomas was a Welsh poet, Smith is a legendary punk singer and songwriter, and the Chelsea Hotel is a New York landmark that has always hosted bohemians, including, well, Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith. We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously, Swift seems to be saying, we’re not tortured poets, we’re just “modern idiots.” In the song, the singer could discuss her short liaison in spring 2023 with “The 1975” frontman Matty Healy, whom she describes as a “tattoed golden retriever” and thus takes the seriousness away from the affair.
“The Tortured Poets Department”
New album, style icon, global star – Taylor Swift’s life in pictures
Taylor Swift’s reputation as a breakup song writer has preceded her for years. It’s all the more surprising that she hasn’t released a breakup album since “Red,” released in 2012. She preferred to write love hymns and become entangled in fictional folk narratives. In this sense, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a grown-up version of “Red,” with more mature metaphors and a polished sound.
“Tortured Poets” is a collaboration between Swift, producer Jack Antonoff, with whom she wrote some of her biggest hits, and Aaron Dessner, whom she first teamed up with on “Folklore.” The singer not only remains loyal to her creative allies, she also follows an unparalleled path of introspection. Hardly any of her albums allowed such a deep look into her emotional turmoil.
In “So Long, London,” a dark sequel to her heartfelt 2019 “London Boy,” she bids a dramatic farewell to her ex-lover. A man who she thought she would meet at the altar, but who now doesn’t come off well at all. It shows him as a long-time jailer (in “Fresh Out The Slammer”: “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine / Years of labour, locks and ceilings / In the shade of how he was feeling). the relationship with a prison from which she is happy to have escaped. “But Daddy I Love Him” addresses toxic love and a toxic environment, while “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” underlines the professionalism of an artist who maintains her persona as a pop star with the most successful tour in US history, even if her private life is crumbling at the same time.
Between passion and insight
Navigating love and life isn’t easy, Taylor Swift is like us, constantly fluctuating between passion, false harmony and eventual insight. The singer feels guilty (“Guilty As Sin?”) for imagining a relationship that would actually be unthinkable and fatal. She even goes one step further and insists on dating someone who is obviously not good for her.” “to be able to fix it” before she finally comes to the self-deprecating realization that she can’t do exactly that (“Woah, maybe I can’t” in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”).
As serious as she is in many of the new songs, others are just as relaxed and playful. She demonstrates strength and fragility, humor and irony run through her language. While she often cast herself in the role of victim in her early albums, it now seems clear to her that a lot of things are not so black and white – and many wounds were even self-inflicted. In titles like “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me,” which is lyrically very reminiscent of “Mad Woman” from “Folklore,” she sees herself as a vengeful protagonist who was treated by the public as a circus freak. The standard version of the album ends with “Clara Bow,” in which the 34-year-old takes an external position. The song seems like a critically praising anthem about stars like Stevie Nicks and Clara Bow, who remain glorious as long as they are “dazzling”. At the end, Swift puts herself in this line, sings about herself in the third person and assures the next person that basically anyone can do it: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light / We’re loving it / You ‘ve got edge / She never did.”
Taylor, Kim and the eternal argument
The singer doesn’t give her listeners time to breathe, because 15 additional tracks, collected as “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology”, complete the story. One thing is clear: Swift has had enough of her love life being under the scrutiny of the public while she has to pick up the pieces. And although she herself gives insight all too often, in “I Hate It Here” she sings about secret gardens that she visits in her mind and to which others need a key to access. She rails against the world and the pressure she is under. Possibly a little surprising and yet consistent, the long-standing feud between Swift and Kim Kardashian is also the subject of the title “thanK you aIMee”, in which the capital letters unsubtly spell out the reality star’s first name.
“All’s fair in love and poetry” is the album’s slogan and the sound also reflects that. “The Tortured Poets Department” captures the atmosphere of sister albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” against the pop-synth backdrop of “Midnights”. Calm, often reserved and reduced to the sounds of a piano. The album is expansive at times, but still personal. Yes, yes, “Tortured Poets” feels downright intimate at times, both lyrically and musically. Swift lets her voice and those of the features convey the emotions without much editing or loud instruments.
The album seems like the melodic realization of a book of poems, and that’s exactly where the focus lies: on the ink that forms the words from the imaginary pen of the poetic pop star Taylor Swift. That makes it timeless – and yet seems to come from a bygone era. It stands in contrast to the commercialism of the charts, a step not many artists can afford. But Taylor Swift has long been on her own level. 31 songs are a lot and yet you won’t get bored. This is the work of an artist who is confident in her art. And who, after an 18-year career, has reached the dizzying heights of success reserved for generation-defining artists.