The Problem With Taylor Swift’s New Album
“Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” Taylor Swift sings on “But Daddy I Love Him.” It’s the song on which her new album The Tortured Poets Department finally gains some momentum, six tracks in. It’s also the one on which the 34-year-old billionaire, who is one of the most famous humans on the planet, finally dares rebel a little bit against her parents. Even if partly tongue-in-cheek and via a Little Mermaid reference.
“Dutiful daughter” Swift always has been ultraprotective of her mom and dad, who are also part of her management team, so it’s more shocking to hear Swift sing “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you” than any of the abundant curses and feints at sex talk that pepper the album. Pretending she’s pregnant by the bad boy of whom they disapprove—just to see the looks on their faces—is one of the best of the jokes with which Swift tries (and sometimes strains) to alleviate the core sadness of this collection of songs.
The second half of the track makes another startling pivot when she directs much of the same sarcastic ire at some of her own fan base, which she’s always carefully trained to view her as a mutually adoring best friend or big sister. No doubt a lot of them boggled momentarily at the pregnancy claim too. But what a sense of release when Swift calls out the “judgmental creeps” among them “who say they want what’s best for me” but then hound her online about the choices she’s made in her private life.
What feels less healthy, and not so grown-up, is that the former child star still can’t seem to feel good about herself without seeking out enemies she can complain are treating her unfairly. Seven years ago, when she put out Reputation, Swift really was dealing with widespread backlash spearheaded by her antagonists Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (whom she, unbelievably, takes time out to feud with some more in the back half of this “anthology”). Four years ago, she had some reasonably legit grievances against business associates that prompted the ongoing and startlingly successful Taylor’s Version project of re-recording her old albums to claim ownership of the recordings. But in 2024, in the midst of the ongoing “Eras” tour, the highest-grossing in history, today’s Swift faces less reactionary public hostility than pretty much any star in her position ever has—Elvis, Madonna, Michael Jackson, you name it. You like Swift, I like Swift, and people who don’t like her mostly recognize there’s no percentage in fighting over it.
Hell, in 1966, people were burning Beatles albums in the streets because John Lennon had joked that the band was then more popular than Jesus. I doubt Swift will get any such grief for portraying herself as a Christlike figure in at least two songs here (singing “What if I roll the stone away?/ They’re gonna crucify me anyway” in “Guilty as Sin?” and “I would have died for your sins” in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”). Then again, what doesn’t Swift compare herself with in the course of the 31-count-’em-31 lyrically crammed tracks on The Tortured Poets Department, if you include the 15 that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the album was supposedly already out?
In such a state of excitation, looking around for a backlash and seeing practically none, Swift can only resort to accusing the people who do love her, like her family and her fans, of loving her the wrong way. Now she’s upset about her good reputation: “I’ll tell you something about my good name,” she sings, “it’s mine alone to disgrace.”
A similar state of mind is evident in the aspect of the album to which the world reacted most immediately when Poets leaked Thursday: It mostly isn’t about what everyone thought it would be about, the breakup last spring of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, which surely must have been, as Swift sings on “LOML,” not only the love but the loss of her life. Instead, it seems to dwell obsessively on a brief affair with another pop star, the aforementioned disapproved-of bad boy and “tattooed golden retriever” we all assume is Matty Healy from U.K. band the 1975. In the versified introduction in the album liner notes, Swift writes, “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face. Because it’s the worst men that I write best.” And that feels like the true explanation. I don’t question that Swift’s craving and anguish were genuine enough at the time, but focusing on the tumultuous affair instead of the lengthy partnership allows her to reach back into her usual bag, to deploy the same range of voices as in the songs she’s spent most of the album’s two-year gestation period singing in stadiums. How could she generate that trademark Taylor Swift melodramatic emotion from the muted adult miseries of a slow-dissolving domestic partnership, without a villain to skewer? Moreover, how long could she stand to linger over that weightier, less easily processed loss, to capture it fully in song?
She’s proved she has the capacity. She did it on “You’re Losing Me,” a quietly wrenching single she released back in November. She does it on this album’s “So Long, London” (in the fifth-track slot that Swift famously reserves for gut-punchers), which deals with the fact that losing a person often comes together with losing a place, whether geographical or simply a grounding in familiar settings and routines. There’s an extension of that idea in the first bonus or “anthology” track (and frankly one of only a handful of worthwhile ones there), “The Black Dog.” It takes off from the very modern-love conceit of finding that you can still track a former partner’s location on your phone because he “forgot to turn it off.” Swift observes her ex patronizing a bar called the Black Dog (a phrase that was also Winston Churchill’s term for depression) and begins fixating on what he might be doing there, perhaps meeting other women, perhaps hearing one of their favorite songs, perhaps not missing her. Why can’t she stop these thoughts? Because, she sing-shouts, “old habits die screaming.”
And then there is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” likely the album’s most pop-friendly anthem and, oddly, despite its scenario being so specific to the condition of being Taylor Swift, the one that perhaps makes the protagonist’s emotions easiest to identify with. Most people dealing with devastating life events may not have to get up in front of tens of thousands of screaming people and pretend “like it’s my birthday every day.” But we do have to swallow our feelings, go to work, and put on a mask. It uses the trick of wedding upbeat music to despairing lyrics, gaining extra poignancy from the contrast—but doubly so because that contradiction is also what the song is about. And the track’s special force is that Swift knows that the listeners have seen her doing what she’s describing, whether in person or in the “Eras” tour movie or in the countless hundreds of hours of tour clips of her online.
Together, these songs suggest an alternate album that could have been, a breakup album more like the classics of the type, a kind of spiritual sequel to Red but from an adult point of view. Instead, she gets there only via lengthy detours, with mixed metaphors piling up to block the off-ramps. The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t show much growth lyrically beyond the Folklore stage. Musically, it carries on mostly in the manner of her past few albums, Midnights especially, with co-producers and co-writers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner architecting the ambiences in which Swift’s stories can take place, but with few of them solidifying into juggernauts that carry the listener away. Vague verses might transition into vivid choruses stymied by run-on-sentence bridges (e.g., about what fingers rings go on), or vice-versa-and-reversa. The scatterings of fucks often seem to stand in for truly visceral, embodied evocations of eros and animus. It’s more of a stream-of-consciousness assemblage of parts than of gratifying stand-alone works of the kind you may associate with Swift albums past. I’m a staunch defender of Antonoff, and he does some excellent work here—the sultry contours of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” the giddily trashy grand guignol of “Florida!!!” with Florence and the Machine. But a person definitely can get to missing Max Martin and the definitive shape and hooks of a song like “Blank Space.”
I could blame this on her crew’s superfluous productivity. No one was forcing Swift to release another album so quickly (her fourth in four years without counting the re-records and all their bonus material), much less 31 songs. But between her workaholism and the economic incentives of the streaming era, the ethos is the more the better. And given her place in the music-industry food chain, there’s nobody to say no, nobody to serve as an editor, nobody even to voice the dreaded old label complaint “We don’t hear a hit.” But that may be far too conservative and old-fashioned a way to take TTPD. It’s the arc of the album as a whole (bonus tracks not included) that’s really satisfying, more than individual songs. What it offers instead of bangers are unruly passages back and forth through the stages of grief, as Swift hinted at with the themed playlists she made for fans earlier this month. The original impact of the breakup is absorbed by the all-consuming rebound affair (which some songs suggest was already waiting lustily in the wings), then it in turn falls apart, and the protagonist finds refuge and fulfillment in the artistic work itself. Even then, with the coda, “Clara Bow,” in which Swift parallels herself with that 1920s “it” girl and with Stevie Nicks in the 1970s, she counsels herself to remember that this too shall pass; her star must fade, like those of every generation. (I’m leaving out the part about a redemptive new love, because the football-metaphor-blitzed song “The Alchemy” and its bonus-track correlate “So High School” seem so weak and tossed-off as to be wholly extraneous, as if included only as a courtesy to the party in question.)
My friend and colleague Ann Powers calls TTPD novelistic. But I think that is also too much of a throwback, despite the album’s capital-R Romantic literary airs, equal parts sincere and in jest. It’s just as much like a role-playing game in which you and Taylor set off on a joint expedition while simultaneously engaged in dense, meandering cross-talk. As Swift cracks to her paramour on the title track, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.”
As I’ve said ever since Reputation, I resist bringing celebrity gossip to bear on thinking about artists’ work, but on this album it is all but formally part of the music, just as on rap beef tracks. All the “Easter egg” details and name-dropping (“you told Lucy … and I had said that to Jack”) practically force the listener to read the songs via the stories we’ve gotten from the news and social media. Swift knows that fans are going to do it anyway, and she long ago chose to feed it rather than fight it, even if she reserves the right to kvetch about it. As “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” reminds us, Taylor Swift–style feminism may not mean having it all, but it does mean getting to have it both ways, to be both the threatened and the threat—or, as she puts it on “Cassandra,” both Eve and the snake.
The Tortured Poets Department might be the fullest realization yet of Swift album as multimedia work. Forget visual albums. Here, every photo, film clip, article, rumor, and stray online comment in the world is in a sense part of the text, and we are all participants as well as spectators. It’s a more-than-three-dimensional portrait of the modern superstar caught in extremis, with heartbreak serving as a CAT scan to illuminate more of the interior of our global avatar.
Through this rendering process, Swift hopes to liberate herself. As tedious as I find many of the “anthology” tracks, I was moved to tears by the final one, “The Manuscript.” There, she looks back on a past relationship with an older man, no doubt one of the subjects of her classic kiss-off songs of the 2010s. She finds those emotions safely distant now, simply part of the story she’s woven into her musical score. “The only thing that’s left is the manuscript,” she sings. “The story isn’t mine anymore.” As she wrote recently on Instagram, “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.” Mind you, as “thanK you aIMee” demonstrates (decode the capital letters), Taylor Alison Swift has to our knowledge never in her life let anything go. But as an aspiration, it’s a very grown-up one to have.
