That Taylor Swift would write a break-up album is no surprise.
Over her last 10 records, the star has taken a scalpel to her personal life, filleting the details of flings and trysts and heartbreaks to create some of pop’s most memorable lyrics Taylor Swift.
For the last half-decade, she’s been in romantic mode: Songs like Delicate, Lover, Invisible String and Lavender Haze were all inspired by her boyfriend of six years, the British actor Joe Alwyn.
They were so close that Swift moved to London, and shared writing credits with Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) on her Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnights.
Then, in April 2023, a month after Swift kicked off her record-breaking Eras tour, it was announced that they had split.
An anonymous source told People magazine that it was “friendly” and “not dramatic.” But after she announced her 11th album, The Tortured Poets’ Department, at the Grammy Awards in February, her fans began speculating that this might be the end of things.
They quickly realized that this title was similar to “The Tortured Man Club,” a group chat between Alwyn and her fellow actor Paul Mescal.
Swift later told her audience at a concert in Melbourne that the album was her most cathartic project to date.
“I remembered why songwriting actually helps me live my life,” she said. “No album required more songwriting than Tortured Poets.”
It feels like a cleansing experience.
The singer is stunned and confused. Vulnerable in a way you’ve never heard before.
She sings about being too depressed to get out of bed, feeding her kids cereal, and crying at the gym.
In London’s So Long, you can hear her heart breaking as she accepts her defeat and moves on.
“I’m running smoothly / It’s a moment of warm sunshine / But I’m not the one,” she laments, as overlapping backing vocals evoke the sad farewell of city church bells. It’s one of the best things she’s ever written.
And the veil of grief remains in place, even when she’s basking in the glow of her Eras tour.
“Breaking down, I hit the floor /All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, ‘More’,” she sings on the deceitfully upbeat I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.
Getty ImagesThe success of the Eras tour has made Swift a billionaire
Later, she demands answers, wanting to know “if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal”.
That line appears in the viciously-titled The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, a song that opens with a weary sigh but crescendos with anger and paranoia.
“Were you writing a book? / Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In 50 years will all this be declassified / And you’ll confess why you did it?“
In the sleeve notes for the album, Swift acknowledges both the turmoil of the relationship and the sharpness of her pen.
“It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest,” she writes, before adding: “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face. Because it’s the worst men that I write best.”
Getty ImagesSwift and Alwyn at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards
So, yes, this is a break-up album. But Taylor Swift didn’t get to be Taylor Swift by adhering to the rules.
Throughout her career, she has consistently exceeded expectations, evolving from a country teen queen star to a pop phenomenon to a folksy author exploring complex characters during a pandemic.
In her “The Tortured Poets Division,” she blurs the lines between her roles, sometimes writing as both her diarist and fantasy writer in the same song. Masu.
This approach reaches her climax with “But Daddy I Love Him.” This is an outstanding, dazzling ballad about a small-town girl who elopes with the local delinquent boy, much to the dismay of her family and “all the wine mothers.”
But the lyrics also address the finger-wagging surrounding Swift’s reported but unconfirmed romance with The 1975 lead singer Matty Healy last year.
Some fans were disappointed in the relationship, saying Healy, who has faced accusations of misogyny and racism throughout her career (all of which she denies), was a poor choice of partner. He said it was.
In the song, Swift fights back, saying, “I’d rather burn my whole life than listen to one more second of this whining and whining/I’ll tell you what my good name is, it’s all my business.” It is declared. I’m sorry. ”
Barbed lyrics like those prevent the album from becoming dreary with sadness; but the production (supplied by Swift’s long-term collaborators Jack Antonoff and Bryce Dessner) can smother her more vengeful instincts.
The music is full of the pillowy synths and muted drums that served the hypnagogic vibes of her last album, Midnights, so well. That’s fine when she submits to grief, on a song like the delicately percolating Bad Down, but when she writes something salty and mischievous like Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me? it gets suffocated by layers of echo and gauzy strings.
Some of her vocal quirks are all too familiar, like the staccato patterns in her verses and the hooks that demand emphasis.
But some songs point to new musical directions.
Florence + The Machine duet, Florida!!! A cacophony of drums and guitars earns a number of exclamation points, highlighting the story of a flight to the Everglades to escape the law.
And the sparse tremolo of his guitar on “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” is the perfect foundation for Swift’s dark, self-deceptive lyrics.
The Tortured Poets Department is an uneven album, and one that lacks a slam-dunk radio anthem like Anti-Hero or Shake It Off – but Swift has pop music in a stranglehold for now, so it will sell by the bucketload, even though it leaked a day ahead of release.
And, because the singer loves a cliffhanger, she ends the album by hinting at her next phase.
Getty ImagesSwift is now in a relationship with US football star Travis Kelce
Clara Bow is named after the US film star who became the first “It Girl” in the 1920s, and looks at how women are moulded and sold by the entertainment industry, with their time in the spotlight dictated by anonymous “men in suits”.
The last verse, and the album’s closing words, are addressed to pop music’s next young ingénue.
“You look like Taylor Swift / In this light, we’re loving it / You’ve got edge, she never did / The future’s bright… Dazzling.“
It’s a typical piece of self-awareness, bridging the gap between her self-perception and the perception of the public.
Swift knows her current world tour is a pinnacle, a once-in-a-career moment of cultural dominance – and there are younger (but maybe not hungrier) stars nipping at her heels.
With The Tortured Poets Department, she’s closing a chapter on a relationship, for sure, but maybe on a way of living and working, too.
Is this the end of her latest Era?