Taylor Swift’s music was once much bigger than her. A born storyteller, she gathered up the emotional ephemera of her life and molded it into indelible songs about herself, but also about young women—about their sorrow, their desire, their wit and will. She was the girl next door with the platinum pen, her feelings worth hearing about not simply because they existed but because she turned them into art.
Those days are gone. Swift, pumped up to mythical proportions by discursive oxygen, is bigger than her body of work—no knock against her body of work. She is her own pantheon: a tragic hero and a vindicated villain; an inadvertent antitrust crusader and a one-woman stimulus package; an alleged climate criminal and fixer; The Person of the Year of the Girl. Over the past 13 months, she’s strapped on her spangled bodysuit and performed a Herculean feat three nights a week on the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning her vaunted billion-dollar valuation. Her musical achievements are remarkable. But nobody makes a billion dollars from music alone.
The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, senses that widening gap between Taylor Swift the artist and Taylor Swift the phenomenon, and wants to fill it with a firehose of material. The burden of expectation is substantial: This is Swift’s first body of new work since the end of a years-long relationship and a pair of high-profile, whirlwind romances—one of which, with the 1975’s Matty Healy, appears to have provided much of the inspiration here. Fans came to Tortured Poets seeking emotional catharsis, or at least the salacious details. Swift, it seems, wanted the comfort of familiarity. Returning to Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, her primary songwriting and producing partners of the last several years, Swift picks up threads from Folk–more and Midnights without quite pulling anything loose.
Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor. The winking title track—a joke about its subjects’ self-seriousness—makes fun of the performance of creative labor, which is funny, given the show that Swift is putting on herself. She piles the metaphors on thick, throws stuff at the wall even after something has stuck, picks up the things that didn’t stick and uses them anyway.
