The Tortured Poets Department - a review

While this post is about Taylor Swift and I'm sure many of you don't care, I hope you stay and read on anyway. For people who don't know much about her, I hope this interests you, and for people who don't like her, I hope this changes your mind. 

Taylor Swift announced her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, on the 4th of February at the Grammys while she was accepting her award for Best Pop Vocal Album (for her 10th album Midnights). The album was released on the 19th of April and it has been three days since I listened to the songs for the first time.

In terms of New-York-time, she released the album at midnight, and then two hours later released a surprise 15 extra songs - it was a double album - called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.

The combined tracklist is below:

Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)

The Tortured Poets Department

My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys

Down Bad

So Long, London

But Daddy I Love Him

Fresh Out the Slammer

Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The Machine)

Guilty as Sin?

Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

loml

I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

The Alchemy

Clara Bow

The Manuscript

The Anthology ~

The Black Dog

imgonnagetyouback

The Albatross

Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus

How Did It End?

So High School

I Hate It Here

thanK you aIMee

I Look in People's Windows

The Prophecy

Cassandra

Peter

The Bolter

Robin

There is a lot to unpack here. First of all, it's worth noting that in April 2023, she broke up with actor Joe Alwyn after being together for six years. The release date of TTPD was 19th April - and what else happened on 19th April? On that day in 1775, the first battle of the American Revolution commenced, Britain vs. America. Joe Alwyn is British, Taylor Swift is American. April is also national poetry month in the USA. This was not a coincidence: Taylor Swift is well known for being very clever with the way she writes and releases her music - everything she does is a clue for something.

So we knew the album would be about Joe, but what I did not expect was for a handful of songs on this album to be about Matty Healy, who she dated for two weeks during the summer of 2023. She is now in what seems to be a secure relationship with Travis Kelce, who she was first seen with in September 2023.

The first track, Fortnight, seems to be about Matty Healy. A little detail I liked was that the word 'fortnight' is only in the English dictionary, and Matty Healy is English. The song is upbeat, a good fit for the first radio single, but nothing special in my opinion. It has the first music video too, and I think the video is brilliant. It shows her being in what looks like an asylum, and throughout the video she is given electric shocks, pills that say FORGET HIM, and writes "I love you, it's ruining my life" on a typewriter. As my Dad said when I showed him the music video, Taylor Swift has become more than a singer/songwriter: she is an art installation. The first line of Fortnight is "I was supposed to be sent away / but they forgot to come and get me". The rest of the album refers to this idea of her being stuck in a mental hospital or insane asylum, which could be argued either represents her fame, or the emotions she had to deal with when she went through her breakup with Joe Alwyn.

Leading on from this idea of her feeling overwhelmed by fame, the song Clara Bow is very interesting. Clara Bow was a silent film actress in the 1930s. The first line is "You look like Clara Bow", and the first line of the second verse is "You look like Stevie Nicks". She then goes on to talk about how she would react if that level of fame ever happened to her, and the use of simple language and a lot of exaggeration gives the impression that she is talking from the perspective of a teenager who aspires to be like the people mentioned. Then, the last line is "You look like Taylor Swift / In this light / We're loving it / You've got edge she never did / The future's bright / ... Dazzling."

Taylor began her Eras Tour last year, and she said she has been writing this album throughout that time. I think that this song is about how after performing to so many people (96,000 at shows in Melbourne, Australia), has made her suddenly realise just how famous she is and how much of a phenomenon she has become in the past few years. She has realised that instead of herself being a person who looks up to others, she is now the aspiration for many people.

My favourite song from the album comes from The Anthology, and it is called How Did It End?. This song conveys the message of utter sadness so well, that when I started listening to it I was happy, and when the song ended I was completely blown away - and sad. Even though I can't relate to it! It opens with beautiful piano, and a high-pitched "ohhhh-ohhhh" (if you couldn't already tell, I'm not very good with the music terminology) that is repeated twice and honestly gives me chills. It is the most ethereal and pretty opening to a song that I have ever heard. The song is about the aftermath of a relationship, when everyone who knows you is gossiping about it and when someone finds out, the first thing they say isn't "are you okay?" but rather "how did it end?" - in other words, why did you break up and how did it happen. By the end of the song, the narrator is questioning whether she even knows how it ended because it was so abrupt. Here is the bridge of the song - it really is poetry. I love the play-on-words of the childrens' rhyme "sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G".

Say it once again

with feeling

how the death

rattle breathing

silenced as the soul

was leaving

The deflation

of our dreaming

leaving me

bereft and reeling

my beloved

ghost and me

sitting in

a tree

D-Y-I-N-G

One of the more upbeat songs that I really like is Florida!!!. The featuring artist, Florence + The Machine, has a voice that compliments Taylor's really nicely. The song talks about Destin, Florida being the location of a holiday home used to escape from the chaos of life. At the end of each pre-chorus, the word "Florida" is sang loudly and in one quick sound, very loud compared to the rest of the song, and followed by the heavy bass notes. The song talks about Florida being a drug and when you need to forget, you go to Florida.

The other arguably most notable song on the tracklist is called "thanK you aIMee". You really have to have been a fan of Taylor Swift for a while to be able to understand all the events that influenced this song, but I'll attempt to summarise them now.

In 2009, when Taylor was just 19, she was on stage at the VMAs, accepting an award for best music video. Then the almost double her age singer-rapper Kanye West, ex-husband of Kim Kardashian, got up on stage uninvited and took the microphone off her, saying that Beyonce should have won. A few years later, Taylor Swift decided to forgive him, saying in a different acceptance speech that "Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time!". Kanye was in the audience at the time. All seemed to be well until 2016, when Kanye called Taylor a b***h in his song Famous, and rapped that his encounter with her in 2009 is what made Taylor famous in the first place.

Intertwined in all of these events is Kanye's wife-at-the-time, Kim K, who used her platform to make it very clear that she hates Taylor. The song "thanK you aIMee" has lines like "I push each boulder up the hill / your words are still just ringing in my head / ringing in my head" and is basically a song stating that while she acknowledges all of the awful things that the Kardashian-Wests did to her, there will always be a little niggling thought in her mind that Kanye might have been right: would she be so famous if the attention hadn't been brought to her by Kanye in 2009? It is also about how, ironically, Kim and Kanye's daughter is a Swiftie, and the song includes the very clever line "one day your kid comes home singing / a song that only us two is gonna know / is about you".

However, the fans know that all of that drama was only water under the bridge, and Taylor Swift's lyrical genius and brilliant singing would have got her to where she is today regardless. She writes all of her own songs, has directed all of her most recent music videos, and is a brilliant performer.

I love The Tortured Poets Department, especially The Anthology. I haven't decided if it is my favourite album yet, but it has her best songwriting. However, I don't think the music is at its best, so I wouldn't recommend it to new fans as a starting album, but it is definitely an instant classic.