When Taylor announced The Tortured Poets Department at the Grammys I felt like I was seeing something shift in her self-presentation—like she finally stopped caring so much about what other people think. She announced it casually, even weirdly, to much public irritation, but she didn’t really seem like she cared. I was into it.1 I wanted to see what a Taylor who wasn’t trying to get straight As would do.2
And… the album confirms this feeling, partly because doing something incredibly stupid against the opinion of everyone around you is what it is mostly about.
This album is messy, it’s for sure too long, it’s sometimes Taylor at her most personal in the way “Question…?” on Midnights was a song that was true about exactly one person.3 For a balanced take on its virtues and its flaws, I think Tom Breihan at Stereogum is basically right to say it’s an album composed entirely of bonus tracks and without any radio-friendly bangers and also correct to say that Taylor has been a little too happy to stay toggling back and forth between the sounds of folklore and Midnights. (For a somewhat more positive take, I also like Ann Powers at NPR.)4
Like a lot of people, I think Taylor should work with a wider range of producers—but I also think Jack Antonoff gets a lot of flack for basically producing the songs the way she wants them produced. (He’s not just a synthpop guy—even where Taylor’s concerned!) Even just in terms of her roster of previously-used producers: would I like to see her go back and work with Dan Wilson (“Treacherous”) or Jeff Bhasker (“Holy Ground”) or Louis Bell and Frank Dukes (“It’s Nice To Have A Friend”) again? Yes. Would I like to see her work with Nathan Chapman again? For sure.5 Would I like to see her work with Imogen Heap again? You have no idea. And so on.6 Like everybody I want her to make a soft rock album, and the ways in which this album reminds me of Tusk only increase this desire.
But I think I break from a lot of people in because I do think the first half of the double album is… actually better as an album. It’s coherent, it tells a story, and its use of the dread synthpop is pretty deliberate in that story. The second album (which I guess we’ll call “the anthology” but I guess really has no official name) has a lot of good songs but I think it’s a lot looser, more abstract. In some ways it’s the evermore to the main album’s folklore.7 Many days, I like evermore better.8 But folklore has an internal logic and progression to it, grabbing me right away, whereas evermore took a couple years.
Anyway… what The Tortured Poets Department is first and foremost, however, is a completely crazy album to release when you’re on top of the world and you can know that basically everybody is going to tune in. It is angry, bitter, self-loathing. It has at least one song that seems pointedly directed at her own fans (“I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”). It is clearly very, very personal but often seems written to deliberately baffle people who want to match songs to people.
But mostly, it’s an album where Taylor often refuses to do what she does best—distill something real or imagined into a few key details and an intense feeling. There aren’t a lot of karaoke-friendly songs on this album. There’s a lot of anger on this album but there’s nothing like “my tears ricochet” or “Dear John” in terms of feeling both wounded and triumphant. There is (almost) no triumph on this album at all. Ironically, given that one of the tracks is called “The Alchemy,” alchemy is what Taylor doesn’t do on this album. She’s done turning lead into gold this time. To mix metaphors in a way she would appreciate, she just vomits up the poison of the past two years and leaves the rest of us to deal with it.
One place I disagree with both Breihan and Powers is that I think it’s not only easy to listen to this album without being invested in the drama of Taylor’s personal life, it’s a much better album if you don’t.9 And maybe it’s just because I’ve genuinely never, ever cared about the Kens (as Taylor calls them on “Hits Different” and again here). I’ve felt no emotional investment in any of them, Travis very much included.10 To me, this is like saying you can’t listen to Fleetwood Mac without caring about the romantic drama of the band. It’s there sure. But you don’t need to know or care about it and I loved plenty of Fleetwood Mac songs before ever having an inkling. I am going to talk about a little of it in here, but again, I think it’s not important.
What you do have to care about is the drama of being Taylor Swift—the ways in which Taylor Swift is really tired of being “Taylor Swift,” the ways in “Taylor Swift” is all she’s got. Taylor Swift wants you to know she’s not some kind of performing monkey. Except she is, also, a performing monkey. She’s the best performing monkey. And just try to take her job.
There’s a popular meme you see on Twitter that goes something like “you couldn’t waterboard that out of me.” I find this meme annoying on its own, frankly. But I’ve seen a lot of it about this album in particular. Here’s a variation:
When I read this I thought: so what would you do? What song would you write? What is the great, face-saving art exactly that you’re going to produce out of such an experience? I’ve said repeatedly I think this album is flawed… but it’s not flawed because Taylor portrays some exquisitely delusional feelings and their subsequent come down. When in “Florida!!!” she and Florence Welch slyly ask, is that a bad thing to say in a song.… of course it is, she knows it is. No pop star has been more attuned to her image. She is not releasing this album thinking that it makes her look good. On this album Taylor is wrung out. She’s got no dignity to save.
There’s a lot on this album that’s startling in its emotional vulnerability. In particular, a frank and intense longing for children is all over this album—a subject Taylor has almost never let herself touch before (“peace” is the closest I can think of that she’s come as an adult). On Midnights she repeatedly chose ambition over love; on this album, she wonders if that ever was a choice, or if love just was never and will never be an option for her. She throws herself, like Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, into a passionate love affair with somebody who seems like her aesthetic and intellectual match, into something that seems like a genuinely great love story of lovers parted and reunited. And then Willoughby reveals himself to be a cad and he disappears—like he always does.11
That’s a humiliating story. And I would imagine it would be a great feeling to write an album of wall to wall “Dear John”s to cope with it, and maybe even pretend those scorchers are about somebody more palatable and explicable.
But Taylor is an adult now. She’s not nineteen. She has to live with the fact that she makes choices and some of them are bad; that she might be a bad judge of character, but nobody else can do it for her; that she might be great at snapping into “Taylorbot mode” at the expense of her own self-knowledge and well-being. She knows if she releases a song that sure sounds like her owning up to fantasizing about Matty Healy while officially with Unobjectionable Blonde Man Joe Alwyn, she’ll get no sympathy.
But one thing she underlines a few times here is that she’s done with people who claim to care about you. She’s read your reddit threads speculating about her mental health and whether she’s alcoholic or pregnant or spiraling because she lost Perfect Boy Joe Alwyn. She so totally slams the door on that relationship that I’m pretty sure Joe can only be “assigned” two songs on the whole double album—“So Long, London” and “How Did It End?” (which only barely counts). She knows there’s a sizeable group of people who want to poke around in the wreckage of Joe and who want to forget about Matty Healy and to them she says—pretty literally—fuck you.12 The double album drop is also a bit of a fuck you, frankly—to leakers, to music critics whose reviews will be automatically out of date,13 and to people who hate Jack Antonoff and just want her to make folklore again.14
And for me, I’ll be honest: in some ways this album is what I’ve always wanted Taylor to do. That doesn’t mean I love it unreservedly. But I always wanted an album from her where she was just mad as hell and didn’t give a shit about hits or appearances, one where she was willing to lose. And even if the result is a mixed bag, I’m honestly just so thrilled she did it at all. I never thought she’d ever let go of her image to this extent. I’m always saying I want big stars to get messy. Well, here it is. This is messy. “Clara Bow,” which closes album one, and in which she sees herself in a chain of naive girls who are told “you’re the real thing” as the last model is discarded, is probably the darkest song she’s ever put out. Album two ends with “The Manuscript,” in which the narrator looks over her life—including being used by an older man—and realizes that even her worst experiences aren’t even hers anymore, they’re just material she’s given to other people, is not any cheerier.
About the second half. It is, for one thing, the return to that folklore / evermore sound, and at least one song (“Peter”) is calling back to “cardigan” on folklore. Album one is about trying and failing to burn down your life; album two is about living with the damage, with the often unhappy fact that you will and do survive most things—even the things that you not only thought would kill you, but sort of hoped would. In the first album, she depicts a love affair as an alien abduction in “Down Bad”; in the second, she has a song where love and its endings is understood as a series of near death experiences. She’s still mad and she’s still taking shots, but she’s tired and despairing and maybe all she wants is to sit next to a guy playing Grand Theft Auto and let him be nice to her for a while.
I like a lot of the songs on the second album, but the one that feels very significant to me is the penultimate one, “Robin,” a song sung to a child (presumably Aaron Dessner’s son, who is named Robin). Like “seven” on folklore, it’s a song that remembers and mythologizes a certain type of childhood wildness and freedom:
Long may you roar
At your dinosaurs
You’re a just ruler
Covered in mud, you look ridiculous
And you have no idea
But unlike “seven,” here Taylor shows childhood freedom as illusory. Robin is free because Robin is protected: “You’ll learn to bounce back just like your trampoline / but now we’ll curtail your curiosity.” In an album that seems, to me, to be haunted by children and their absence, the presence of Robin is bittersweet—he’s a child, but someone else’s child; he’s free, but only because he doesn’t know he’s caged; he’s someone who will have no choice to grow up and not only have his heart broken, but hurt other people, too. One day Robin will look ridiculous and he’ll have every idea. What you do after that—that’s adulthood.
My predictions sort of came true and sort of didn’t.
I didn’t expect to be writing up my thoughts this soon, which is why I did the open thread, but after saying the bonus tracks were physical release only she just put them up on streaming right away… which as a person who bought the CDs I feel like I should be mad about, and yet I’m not, go figure.
Sorry to air a pet peeve but sometimes lurking Reddit I see the complaint that “Question…?” is a bad song because it’s too vague… the problem you have is actually that it’s too specific.
Though I’m not sure she can? At least until the re-records are done. They are clearly on good terms (he’s posted nice things about her on Instagram etc), but I get the sense the politics of working together are a bit complicated right now.
I don’t really care if she works with Max Martin again—fine if she does, fine if she doesn’t. Joel Little however is not allowed in the studio.
I don’t think she could do this until the rerecords are over but I think Taylor would benefit massively from the Carly Rae Jepsen approach of releasing a “Side B” album a few months after releasing the main album.
I basically agree with Robert Christgau on its virtues… evermore supremacy.
Unlike reputation, which is somewhat illegible if you don’t know about the Kanye drama.
But I also think that this album makes a point of setting its cast in a fictional scene from the first song.
a comparison that occurred to some of us during May 2023
“This is for you… you know who you are… I hate you.”—Taylor to FauxMoi I guess
i have a lot to think about with this album but at present my #1 thought is that i'm so glad she kept up the energy from London Boy for London Boy II, going from "yeah, i go to the 'pub' with the man i 'fancy,' to eat 'fish and chips' with his 'mates'" to "and where does this sad song take place? Why, on the Heath, of course, where *all* the sad english things happen"
I would just like to say that if intolerable golden brit Joe Alwuss keeps you waiting six years for a commitment and in some of that time you let your mind wander you have my FULL SYMPATHY