I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with my tail between my legs, much like the titular “Black Dog.” My comprehensive review of Taylor Swift’s new album turned out not to be comprehensive at all. At 2 AM EST, hours after the scheduled release of the first 16 tracks, Swift announced on her social media that the new record was actually secretly a double album. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology,” she wrote. “15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
If you’re someone who already wrote and published a review that is now only half-finished, you might be shaking your fist at the sky and yelling, “Why, Taylor! Why!” But as a Swiftie scholar, I should’ve known better. Swift has trained her fans to be on constant alert. Midnights got 7 extra tracks on The 3 A.M. Edition; surprise-dropping additional songs is now so commonplace that it’s almost not a surprise. And I knew full well the Swiftie augurs had been seeing signs (a conspicuous plethora of peace symbols, visual promo materials with clocks set to two) and predicting some sort of something. It was my own hubris to ignore them. The stans know they’re “clowning” maybe seven times out of 10, but I should’ve listened to “Cassandra.”
As for the actual “why”—why not just announce and release a double album in the first place?—there are a few potential reasons. For one, a surprise is still a surprise, even if Swift is now training us to expect the surprises. It’s a reward to the fans who spend so much of their wild and precious lives theorizing about her next move, a game that Swift and her fans are playing together. We were always getting a supersized Tortured Poets Department, but for those who went to sleep on Thursday and woke up to twice the Taylor Swift they thought they were getting, it is indeed exciting.
There are also the less fun reasons, including the fact that the first half of the album leaked earlier in the week. That’s a borderline inevitable but still incredibly unfortunate consequence of being the biggest star in the world. But by pulling the double album bait-and-switch, there were 15 songs that were actually fresh on Friday. As someone who famously and rightfully cares about owning and having control of her work, Swift probably relishes the opportunity to get one over those who would illegally share her music. And then there’s the most cynical explanation: Swift has already sold who-knows-how-many copies of the multiple editions of The Tortured Poets Department, and now she can sell a whole other version of the album. Her fans, who are typically collectors and completionists, will no doubt line up to get their copies.
So what about the actual music, the second half of my incomplete review? Much like Tortured Poets, TTPD: The Anthology is good! If the first half is Midnights B-sides, The Anthology songs are folklore extras. Though there’s a mix of tracks from both producers throughout the entire behemoth of a project, it’s easy to delineate part one as a “Jack Antonoff album” and part two as an “Aaron Dessner album.” If you prefer Swift’s moodier, folkier work with Dessner, The Anthology is a welcome change from the sleepy synthpop of the standard edition. There are more “story songs” on The Anthology (that is, songs that are less diaristic and play more with fictional characters)
Yet The Anthology suffers from the same problems the standard edition does, which is that it’s a place we’ve already been before. There is very little by way of musical innovation, and the sounds begin to blend together. Of course, an artist doesn’t need to innovate on every album, but in a whopping 31-track project, some variation would inject energy and life into the proceedings. “So High School” is a good example; it’s a fun, poppy number that disrupts the whispery melancholy that dominates The Anthology.
It’s not just the sounds that are the same, but the subject matter. There are multiple new tracks referencing her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. On “Cassandra” (which sounds like yet another version of folklore’s “mad woman”) she sings spitefully about “The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line,” and how “they filled my cell with snakes” (remember, Kardashian released the fateful West/Swift phone call on “National Snake Day”). On another track, she prides herself that when writing songs about her bully “I changed your name, and any real defining clues.” Except the song is called “thanK you aIMee,” stylized with a pretty defining clue that points right toward the bully’s name. Swift’s sense of humor is one of the best parts of the whole Tortured Poets project, but you certainly start wishing she’d get new muses.
All that being said, given the sheer volume of music, TTPD: The Anthology is a staggering achievement. Though the subjects may be repetitive, her lyrics are evocative and masterful. There is no one creating at her prolific level, especially considering that she made this project amid rerecording her old albums and going on a supersized world tour. There’s so much to process and enjoy within The Anthology; the stans have certainly been well-fed.
I stand by my assessment that Tortured Poets could have used more pruning and cultivating. A truly excellent album here that’s bogged down by the noise and the oversaturation. It’s difficult to complain about getting more Taylor Swift, and big, emotional excess is part of her brand. She’s earned the right to do whatever she likes, and obviously, she likes writing and releasing a lot of music. I can’t help but wish that she’d take more time to develop her material rather than flood the market, that she’d tighten up and get a little more ruthless about what she releases. But I’ll be streaming TTPD: The Anthology along with everyone else.
