Review: Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is more than the sum of its parts

I have to admit: I couldn’t help but read reviews of Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” before I attempted to unpack my own thoughts on this beautifully sprawling, gloriously messy behemoth of an album.

Well before I reached the end of its two-hour runtime, and before I thought to write my own (admittedly late) appraisal, a quick scan of the reviews showed me that it was perhaps the most polarizing of her works to date.

I wasn’t surprised by many of the recurrent observations. If the album’s somber title and artwork weren’t enough to spell it out for me, I had guessed, based on the singer’s early comments about “Tortured Poets,” that it would be an intensely emotive and personal work — and maybe even her most demanding.

Critics of Swift’s 11th studio album have accused it of being too insular, of being musically derivative, of being trapped in its excessive weight and wordiness and of succumbing to navel-gazing.

I think, however, those qualities are part of what gives “Tortured Poets” its charm.

If you haven’t listened to this album yet, you have to realize, first, that it’s hands down the most personal work in Swift’s entire oeuvre, which is an astonishing feat in itself, considering basically all of her songs are based on or at least inspired by scenes and concepts from her personal life.

Secondly, not only is the album long and extraordinarily intimate, it’s dense. Lyrically and thematically, at least, it’s a flood of constant heavyweight emotion, providing no reprieve from song after song of the singer attempting to explicate the fraught tensions and developments of what seems to be a complex interior life. Because of this, it demands you pay close attention to the stories she’s telling and the wordy verses and refrains she’s singing, and I feel that in its execution the album’s length is more than justified — even if some parts of it, particularly in the second half, do feel like a little too much.

None of this is to say, though, the album is in any way difficult or inaccessible. Make no mistake: “The Tortured Poets Department” is a Taylor Swift-made pop album, replete with catchy hooks and synth arrangements. But it can really only be judged after having been experienced from beginning to end, as a sequence, and with at least a marginal understanding of her prior work.

Attendant traumas

Throughout her career, Swift has shown an uncanny ability in her music to make us ordinary people empathize with the downsides of being famous — even for a superstar of the loftiest caliber like herself, who is perhaps the world’s biggest recording and touring artist.

One thing I was struck by over repeated listens of “Tortured Poets” was the way she explores the consequences of her stardom. In the past, Swift was at her best on this topic when in a melancholy vein, such as in “Nothing New,” a pensive ballad written in 2012 for “Red” that bares her soaring anxiety about being forgotten and neglected.

Ten years later, in 2022, she would write in the converse of that mode (or maybe in its natural evolution) with the devil-may-care attitude of “Lavender Haze,” which flippantly shrugs off the media’s constant scrutiny of her love life. (“I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say.”)

Now 34, Swift reigns atop the music charts and plays sold-out stadium shows across the world. She’s attained a gloriously heady mix of critical and commercial success never before seen in her career. And, while it may look fun on the outside, Swift shows us, in “Tortured Poets,” the many attendant traumas of carrying a strained and complicated relationship with the media, the music industry and even her so-called fans.

Track six on the album, “But Daddy I Love Him,” is a mischievous put-down of all the “judgmental creeps” who have ever offered haughty, unsolicited pointers on her choice of lovers under the pretense of helping her. Hints of Swift’s country roots are heard in the swooning chorus as she sings one of her sharpest couplets in recent memory: “I’ll tell you something ‘bout my good name, it’s mine alone to disgrace / I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.” She goes on to state that these amateur critics — the pearl-clutching housewives and journalists and keyboard vigilantes — are always “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies” on what supposedly is best for her.

The defiant tone of that song, however, is hardly representative of others on the album that deal with fame. Track 16, “Clara Bow,” is a beautiful meditation on stardom that seems to come to grips, in a way, with being a global pop culture icon constantly in the public eye. It starts by referencing Clara Bow, a silent film star whose colossal fame in the 1920s took a toll on her mental health. It then name-checks Stevie Nicks, one of Swift’s early inspirations, envisioning a burgeoning singer (maybe herself?) being compared to the Fleetwood Mac star’s aura of “half moonshine, a full eclipse.”

Then, in the song’s unforgettable ending, Swift casually namedrops herself, apparently imagining a future starlet who’s being compared to her: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light we’re lovin’ it / You’ve got edge, she never did / The future’s bright, dazzling.”

To me, this song feels like Taylor saying, “This is the life I’ve chosen — I’ll take it for what it is, the good with the bad.” Swift also seems to be reminding herself here that, for all the hoopla about her personal life and image, what she ultimately will be remembered for is her music, her art. The song’s invisible narrator seems to agree with that sentiment, remembering the pop star in a (mostly) positive light as Taylor Swift the musician, not Taylor Swift the person.

Keeping it familiar

“Clara Bow” would have been a perfect closing track had the singer not surprise-released 15 new songs two hours after the original album had dropped last Friday, thereby revealing her latest studio work to be “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology” — a double album comprising 31 songs in total.

Based on my first few listens, I admit the second half of the album isn’t as musically strong as the first, lacking its flow and careful sequencing.

Lyrically, however, it’s just as great as the first half, probing even deeper into the drifting conflicts and emotions of Swift’s headspace. In “I Hate It Here,” she pines desperately for a fantasy escape, reminiscent of the sense of longing evoked in “the lakes” from “folklore.” In another song called “The Prophecy,” the singer petitions fate itself to deliver a favorable outcome for her, one that avoids the tortuous endings of relationships past.

Musically, the album doesn’t quite break new ground for the singer. Each song sounds as if it would have fit on one of her last three studio albums — “Midnights,” “folklore” or “evermore.” Swift brings back her frequent collaborators, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, for production duties. With a few exceptions, the album seems to alternate between two modes sonically: the mid-tempo synthpop tune, sung in a low register, with carefully moderated beats; and the acoustic ballad, with light guitar and keyboard figures and soft orchestration.

The lack of any overt musical innovation makes sense, however, given the album’s heavy focus on lyrics and themes, and particularly with its obsession with delving into the past. Swift clearly wasn’t looking to take her sound into uncharted waters but instead opted to reel it in, to keep it on familiar ground. Her bigger priority, somehow, seems to be in what she might be trying to express as a farewell, a parting gift, to a certain chapter in her career. Although it’s hard to put into words what that exactly is, I get the sense that “Tortured Poets” does mark some kind of ending or milestone, and this is her way of unloading all of that confusion in one unbounded, cathartic deluge of emotion.

For all its lyrical diversity, it’s not until the album’s 31st and final song that everything previously expounded on seems to make sense and to resolve itself into one simple and comforting thread of closure.

A spare piano ballad, “The Manuscript” departs from the ex-lovers Swift had previously sung about on the album and chronicles her response to the aftermath of a relationship from some time ago. Even the most casual of Swifties can probably guess that this song was inspired by Jake Gyllenhaal, who Swift had dated in 2010 and who was indirectly responsible for creating some of her most beloved songs, including “All Too Well” and its 10-minute counterpart.

In “The Manuscript,” Swift suggests how, as a heartbroken 21-year-old, she subsequently channeled her tears and grief into the album that would become “Red.” She reveals that the doomed romance would continue to shape her perception of herself and the tenor of her later music.

Years later, after penning so many versions and offshoots of that same story, she finds that all that remains now is the “manuscript” — the songs — and that the pain doesn’t sear in her mind like it had before.

“The story isn’t mine anymore,” she sings, and indeed, she finds it no longer defines her; no longer is it central to her life. The story is important in her art, certainly, but not in her life — and when you’re Taylor Swift, you need to realize there’s a staggeringly important difference between the two.

In many ways, the song explains the very nature of “The Tortured Poets Department”: why it’s so inward, so sprawling and why it insists on telling multiple versions of what seem at first to be the same subjects, the same conflicts, the same ill-fated relationships. To let go of the past, you can write about it, but then you must depend on time to do the rest. Writing about your trauma — or re-living it over again in your songs and concerts — can give you the distance you need to remove yourself from its vicious pull. But it can also enrich your understanding of the subject. It gives you a valuable perspective, in retrospect, and makes it real. That’s why, thematically, “The Manuscript” is the perfect closer to an album and a career brimming with tortured poetry.

Time has a strange way of healing and altering sensations. It can make an event that once seemed your most searing source of agony and torment feel later like a distant mystery, something that could easily have happened to someone else. But, as Swift demonstrates so often in “The Tortured Poets Department,” elucidating those thoughts can remind us down the road of the immense pain that we went through, and the great efforts we took to eventually overcome it. Because sometimes, as the singer suggests, looking back is the only way to truly move forward.