OPINION — Going into my first listen of The Tortured Poets Department, I had no idea what to expect.
And coming out the other side of a 16-track release, followed by 15 more surprise songs two hours later – titled The Anthology – I don’t really know what we just sat through.
But all I can say is: thank god Taylor Swift released that second album.
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Pretty much the entire first drop of the album, save for a couple of tracks, seems to be about Matty Healy – a guy Taylor had a two-month fling with last year.
But with the 15 new songs, we got a Kim K diss track, an old-school-Taylor song about falling for Travis, and songs about feeling unlovable, unable to commit, and waiting for a boy to grow up.
While it’s pretty impressive that she was able to craft such a strong narrative story from what appeared to be a rebound situationship, it’s with the release of the rest of the tracks that it really feels like a Taylor Swift album.
This is my tenth new album release as a Swiftie, going back to 2009 when my friend and I listened to Fearless – downloaded from Limewire – on a Discman before school.
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So though I’m not a music expert, I am certainly well-versed in the lore of Taylor Swift. And I’m confident when I say that this album is like none we’ve seen before, and none we’ll get again.
It’s a captured moment of a brief period of time in Swift’s life. Her previous albums have been about looking back, looking forward, reflecting and hoping. But TTPD is about losing yourself in delusion.
On the standard TTPD release, there are no ‘glitter gel pen’ songs – the label Swift gives to her upbeat, fun, tracks like Shake It Off, We Are Never Getting Back Together, and Karma.
The album ‘quill’ and ‘fountain pen’ songs about sad stories, packaged into neat four-minute tracks with a good beat (thanks, Jack Antonoff). And unlike Folklore and Evermore, these tracks aren’t fiction.
Save for So Long London (about the breakdown of her relationship with Joe Alwyn), each song tells a story of clinging onto a false reality that she’d built in her head.
In the album’s prologue poem, Swift admits this album was born of a time when she was feeling particularly mentally unstable. “I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity / Which explains my plea here today of temporary insanity.”
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“It was a mutual manic phase,” the poem continues. “It was self harm.”
It’s clear she’s talking about the two-month period where she dated Matty Healy following her breakup – when Swifties wrote open letters begging her to dump him, when headlines trashed their relationship as he was accused of racism.
Swift’s publicist swore they were ‘just friends’ but Swift mouthed “I love you” to him from the stage.
Half a million people flocked to Swift over these four words
And judging by lyrics on But Daddy I Love Him, she didn’t care at all about how people labelled their relationship. “I’d rather burn my whole life down / than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.”
Swift has never been this raw and open on an album. She’s conducting a post-mortem on a relationship that was never meant to be – despite how much she needed it in that moment.
She’s admitting to being in a compromised mental state, sharing details that, without this album, fans would never have known about her private life.
In the 30 minutes between digesting the standard album and being hit over the head with the Anthology, I felt a little like I was floating out to sea on a life raft. WTF did I just listen to?
However, Swift truly brought it back with the 15 surprise songs.
May I direct your attention to So High School, a song which is clearly about Travis Kelce. Finally, a glitter gel pen song on the album.
With lyrics like “Truth, dare, spin bottles / You know how to ball I know Aristotle”, it’s an upbeat and positive antidote to the depressing Healy songs that dominate the album.
Similarly, the song thanK you aIMee, a thinly veiled reference to Swift’s one-sided feud with Kim Kardashian is a grown-up version of Look What You Made Me Do, where she’s looking back on the situation with maturity.
There are so many more references in here that I’m just waiting for the smarter Swifties to pick up on and help me understand – from Cassandra of Troy to Peter Pan, to whoever or whatever Robin is, it feels like we’ll be learning more and more about this album in the days and weeks to come.
Swifties, we are so back.
