All the Celebs Taylor Swift Name Drops on Tortured Poets Department, From Charlie Puth to Patti Smith

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A new Taylor Swift album means one thing to the codebreakers known as Swifties: spending hours poring over every line, allusion, and reference, figuring out what it all means in the scope of Swift's life and lore. Now that The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album (not counting the re-records), has dropped, it's time once again to grab the magnifying glass and the encyclopedia to get to the bottom of her lyrics.

Characters of all kinds populate Swift's work, starting from her very first album; in “Teardrops on My Guitar” from Taylor Swift, she mentions the real-life Drew, a classmate she had a crush on, and even names an entire song after Tim McGraw. Throughout her discography, Swift has alluded to certain people — IYKYK — but also mentioned others by name, like her BFF Abigail in “Fifteen” and Rebekah Harkness, star of her folklore song “the last great american dynasty.” Given the confessional, diaristic vibe of much of her work, this makes sense; she's writing about both her lived experiences and imagined ones, so literary references and nods to the people in her life are bound to come up. It's a tale as told as time! The Tortured Poets Department has its fair share of name drops, with most of them occurring in two specific songs.

Below, learn more about each name check on Taylor Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Charlie Puth

The first viral lyric from TTPD involved musician Charlie Puth; in the song of the same name, Swift sings, “You smoked and ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/I scratch your head, you fall asleep like a tattooed Golden Retriever.”

This is a seemingly random reference to the musician and his career, though Puth has covered Swift songs in the past, including “Teardrops on my Guitar" off her first self-titled album.

Lucy

Swift references a “Lucy” on The Tortured Poets Department (the song), which could be a nod to Lucy Dacus, member of boygenius; Swift is friends with the group. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re going to screw this up with me/But you tell Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave,” she sings, referencing the subject of the song.

If the song is indeed about Swift's brief, rumored relationship with The 1975's Matty Healy, as some have speculated, it's worth noting that Healy and Dacus have history; in addition to her bandmate Phoebe Bridgers having a friendship with him, Healy also deactivated his Twitter/X account after an exchange with Dacus. But again, big grain of salt here!

Jack

This one is easy. The “Jack” Swift sings about in the titular song is probably Jack Antonoff. Maybe you've heard of him? He's been Swift's go-to producer for years and the two are close friends. Antonoff also works with Lana Del Rey, as well as a bevy of other musicians. After referencing Lucy, Swift sings, “And I had said that to Jack about you/So I felt seen/Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be/'Cause we’re crazy.”

Dylan Thomas & Patti Smith

Swift doesn't just name check her contemporaries and friends; she also mentions two legendary poets: Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith. “I laughed in your face and said, 'You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith, this ain't the Chelsea Hotel,'" she sings. “We're modern idiots, and who's going to hold you like me?”

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet best known for “Do not go gentle into that good night." Smith rose to prominence in the 1970s as the musician behind the seminal album Horses and is also known for her moving memoir Just Kids, about her close friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Clara Bow

There's an entire song named after the original Hollywood It Girl, actor Clara Bow. Bow was a massively popular silent film star who struggled to make the transition to “talkies,” then left Hollywood in her late twenties. Bow dealt with mental health issues in her later years and died in 1965. “You spend all your youth and all your energy to attain the thing you thought you wanted more than anything else in the world, and when you get it, you find you don't want it," Bow said of her relationship to fame. "It not only doesn't bring you happiness, but you find it has robbed you of all the other things that might have given you happiness.”

“You look like Clara Bow in this light/Remarkable/All your life, did you know you'd be picked like a rose?” Swift sings in the song, which is about youth, beauty, and the pursuit of fame, set from the POV of a young person who moved from a small town to the big city (Manhattan and Los Angeles) in pursuit of fame.

Stevie Nicks

Another famous name you'll hear in “Clara Bow” is that of the Stevie Nicks. Nicks needs no introduction, of course, given that she's the patron saint of so many singer-songwriters and the force behind truly iconic songs like “Landslide” and “Silver Spring.”

“You look like Stevie Nicks in '75/the hair and lips/the crowd goes wild at her fingertips/half moonshine, a full eclipse,” Swift sings, referencing Nicks shortly after she joined Fleetwood Mac.

Later in the song, the subject realizes that “making it” isn't as glamorous as it seems and that staying “dazzling” comes with a price. “Beauty is a beast that roars on all fours/demanding more/only when your girlish glow flickers just so do they let you know," she sings. “It's hell on earth to be heavenly/them's the brakes, they don't come gently.”

There's another Nicks moment on the album — the musician wrote a poem titled "For T and me..." for the physical albums. The poem includes lines like, "He was in love with her / Or at least she thought so / She was brokenhearted / ~Maybe he was too~ / Neither of them knew" and “She brings joy / He brings Shakespeare — / It's almost a tragedy — / Says she' / Don't endanger me.”

Taylor Swift

Swift gets meta and drops her own name at the end of “Clara Bow,” picking up the theme of prior verses and singing, “You look like Taylor Swift in this light/We're lovin' it/ You've got edge, she never did/The future's bright, dazzling.”

Cassandra

OK, so it's not quite a celebrity, per se, but a mythical figure counts, right? In the song of the same name from the back half of the album, Swift references Cassandra of Greek mythology. Cassandra was the daughter of the king of Troy and gifted with the power of prophecy and foresight by the god Apollo, but after she rejected him, he cursed her so that no one would believe her truths.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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