When Taylor Swift shocked audiences by announcing a new album at the Grammy Awards in February, fans speculated that this would be the break-up album of a lifetime. The Tortured Poets Department was to be her first body of work since separating from long-term partner Joe Alwyn and her scandalous two-week love affair with Matty Healy, both of which occurred during her global phenomenon, the Eras Tour. Yet, as the tour has shown over its three-and-a-half-hour spectacles at over 100 shows, Swift never runs out of ways to keep her emphatic fan base entertained. Not only did she release the 16-track The Tortured Poets Department, she followed it with a double album version—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology—two hours later. And despite the rumors surrounding her love life, Swift proved with this album that the men floating in her orbit are far from the only things on her mind.
Swift begins TTPD on the other side of tragedy, singing gently to her muse “All of this to say / I hope you’re okay / But you’re the reason” in the album’s lead single “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone).” She’s moved forward from this relationship and wishes her former lover well but she wants to set the story straight, sighing “I love you / It’s ruining my life.” While Post Malone’s verse towards the song’s conclusion is smooth and sadly stirring, his vocals are more akin to background noise than a strong counterpart to Swift. The single would have captured the grief more effectively had Post Malone been given some of Swift’s lines. Fans have long criticized Swift for her duets that turn the guest singer into a background vocalist, especially those featuring female artists such as Lana Del Rey and HAIM. Yet Swift buried this legacy with “Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The Machine),” where Welch’s haunting echoes resonate more powerfully than Swift’s, carrying the song to a dark, eerie swamp that likely would not exist without Welch’s depth.
This duet highlights a larger issue the album faces, however, which is that Swift’s voice mainly remains in her lower register for almost the entirety of TTPD. Although this deepness sits well in the title track and the electric-pulsed “Down Bad,” which hints at a life-threatening depression, it misses the mark in songs like “But Daddy I Love Him” that establish a more ethereal aura when she hits the high notes live. When she breaks this deep tone in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” the jolt is electric, enraging us as we listen to Swift’s rage at the constant criticism surrounding her songwriting and love life.
While The Tortured Poets Department is the stronger of the two albums in its conciseness and cohesiveness, The Anthology welcomes a number of gems. From the gut-wrenching screams of “The Black Dog” to the strained “plee-eeeaaasse” on “The Prophecy,” these songs reflect the storytelling of folklore and evermore and the raw, longing emotions from which she has built her fanbase. Swift yearns to set fire to her clothes to unremember a lover and wonders if she’ll ever find a soulmate, building her image as the relatable girl who got her heart broken and causing her audience to forget that her lifestyle is drastically different from theirs.
The Tortured Poets Department’s most intriguing choice, though, comes in the final track of the first 16 songs. The bass-driven “Clara Bow” tells the story of the world’s first it-girl who “was picked all [her] life like a rose.” Even though Swift’s songs concerning subjects other than ex-boyfriends remain largely ignored by the media, she has penned numerous poems describing her struggles with fame, such as Red’s “The Lucky One” and Speak Now’s “Castles Crumbling” with Hayley Williams. In making “Clara Bow” the final track on Tortured Poets, Swift is sending a message that her life is more than her long list of ex-lovers. Songs such as “loml” and “I Hate It here” detail not simply the sadness of a breakup but the loss of Swift’s dreams for the future—“You shit-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could unrecall / How we almost had it all.” Through these songs, she grieves the loss of her chance to build her own family and her freedom when she dated Alwyn, as she was rarely seen in public during that time and was “scared to go outside.” Swift is mourning not the man but rather the life she envisioned for herself, including the life with her lover, her reputation, and her career. In her Miss Americana Netflix documentary, Swift stated she knew that the music industry would try to dispose of her by the time she turned 35 and she wanted to make the most of her time before she hit that precarious age for female artists: not old enough to be a legend, but too old by ageist, misogynistic standards to continue making new music. Now 34, Swift has done that. She has reclaimed ownership of two-thirds of her auctioned-off catalog, The Eras Tour movie has grossed over $250 million, and she secured herself as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, the first honoree acknowledged strictly for their contributions to the arts. “Clara Bow” is Swift’s response to the music industry’s systemic misogyny: she ends the song by putting herself in the spot of the old star and acknowledging that, although younger artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo are filling the ingénue role in the industry that she once filled, she is still around and still making headlines.
Thus, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department tells the story of a mid-career and mid-life crisis: what do you do when everything you thought you knew about your future—your career, your partner, your family plans—vanishes like vapor? Swift gives voice to these fears and insecurities, birthing art from her pain and bravely sharing it with us so that we might understand that when our tears dry on paper, they become tortured poetry.
Kami Steffenauer is a junior in the College studying Anthropology and Women & Gender Studies.
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