Taylor Swift Tortured Poets Department Album Review: Who’s Afraid of Taylor Swift?

P. Claire Dodson
·10 min read
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Beth Garrabrant

In this review, senior culture editor P. Claire Dodson explores Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department album.

A monstrous Taylor Swift lurches toward your favorite city — that tortured poet, that sly mastermind. She has “leapt from the gallows” just to “levitate down your street,” chin tilted down, eyes slitted, cold smirk. This is not the Swift wearing a patriotic red Chiefs jacket cheering on Travis Kelce, nor the smiling, golden-haired Eras Tour empress. It’s closer to “Blank Space” Taylor, who gazes at the camera with a glint in her smokey eye. The Taylor Swift song interpretation economy churns on and on, and Swift rattles the cage; it’s a bigger one, but the bars stretch across state lines. She pleads “temporary insanity,” she didn’t know what she was doing, and didn’t she deserve to fall apart? And maybe it’s actually your fault. Wasn’t it us who put her in the cage?

In the physical album prologue to Swift’s 11th album The Tortured Poets Department, she alludes to the time in 2023 in which she and Alwyn ended their relationship of six years, and Swift went on to briefly date 1975 frontman Matty Healy. She describes it as such: “It was a mutual manic phase/It was self harm/It was house and then cardiac arrest.” It is not crucial to know that these songs are likely about these two men, and it might even be detrimental. The meta-narrative of Swift’s life — the one she built as both innovation and coping mechanism, the one we took and ran away with, the one she both benefits from and is actively harmed by — has consumed everything.

Maybe this era is a way of burning things up so a new house can be built, but the flames are currently at her feet. Conservatively, one in every five conversations I have is about Swift; even the ones that aren’t directly about her often circle back to her, magnets brought together by how massive the Swift brand has become. Once upon a time being a Swift fan meant you were a certain kind of teenage girl — now it means next to nothing. She swings ever higher, the ambitions growing alongside the money alongside the notoriety alongside the acclaim alongside the personal stakes. There had to be a breakpoint.

TTPD is an attempt to capture the ensuing phase of chaos, to make sense of the things she did for love and drama, war and poetry, over the span of a few months. It is a humbling album for Swift, and it’s as charming as it is almost too self-owning. But she’s got to leech all the details out of her skin, whether or not it really helps. All the scarlet blood is evidence, and we get 31 tracks worth, including the double album she released at 2 a.m. on April 19.

2020’s folklore and its followup evermore introduced an interesting twist in the way Swift’s work is perceived. In her personal life, the public assumption was that all was well, and so the songs were created more from her imagination, from Americana and folk tales, drenched in high metaphor. “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and diction become almost indiscernible,” she said in her folklore liner notes. “Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.” And so we largely didn’t prescribe certain songs to certain people (with a few notable exceptions, like “my tears ricochet”) and instead luxuriated in the mossy landscape she crafted.

In light of the Alwyn/Swift breakup, fans have gone back and tried to draw out behind-the-scenes footage from folkmore’s more biting songs, like “tolerate it.” Swift’s party line has previously been that she didn’t really mind when people did this investigating. She told GQ in 2015, "I don't feel there is any injustice when people expand beyond my music and speculate on who certain songs might be about. I've never named names, so I feel like I still have a sense of power over what people say—even if that isn't true, and even if I don't have any power over what people say about me.”

But those investigations, while understandable, assume the wrong premise. It’s not that every song is a 100% factual news report of what she goes through at a given time, or that the metaphors just disguise the facts, it’s that the stories we’re drawn to — the ones we tell about ourselves and other people — still reveal true things about us whether we mean them to or not.

It’s been nearly a decade since that 2015 interview, and on TTPD we see her surrender some of that power, the need to control. Who is she but a person who can be sucked into bad boy mythologies and fantasies and avoidant attachment styles, just a girl, really? The easiest kind of pain to feel is the projected kind, the kind built on a thousand things that didn’t happen, but could’ve, if we’d held the pen.

Can you blame her? It was just “too high a horse for a simple girl to rise above it,” she says of the mean fans — “vipers in empath’s clothing” — who make “sanctimonious soliloquies” under the mask of protecting her in “But Daddy I Love Him.” (She’s just too soft for all of it!) It’s one of several jabs at her fans across TTPD; her devoted listeners are saboteurs trying to ruin her relationship. It’s “Love Story” with a grotesque frame, and she’s cast herself and her lover as Juliet and Romeo: destined, ill-fated lovers torn apart by people who claim to love her. And she believes the stories she’s telling herself, which makes it a tough listen when thinking about Healy specifically. But who are we to judge? She’s an unreliable narrator and acknowledges as much, but who isn’t?

Only… okay, she sees your point. By the time we get to “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” she’s admitting that his jokes are “revolting” and he tells them too loudly. And that’s when we get the truly tortured “loml,” one of her best ballads about lost love to date. The third act twist is that “love” turns to “loss,” and the love of your life becomes “mr. steal your girl and make her cry.” The lies have built up, the pretty picture is a counterfeit. Her voice nearly breaks when she sings, “the coward claimed he was a lion.”

On this album, Swift is at her best when she’s being devastating or funny, and the in-betweens are where she loses steam — with the exception of “Florida!!!,” the Florence Welch collaboration that is as exciting as anticipated. With thudding drums and interesting percussive melody lines, it’s a great sign of what she could do with other musicians (even with Antonoff producing) and venturing more outside of her comfort zone. There are a lot of soft rock and alt rock sounds on TTPD, especially in the latter half, and in some of the double album Anthology songs; there’s a future lane for her there, combining subtle country and rock ‘n roll with slide guitars and a more ambient sense of space. From a storytelling standpoint, it’s not a huge evolution, and it’s more of an in-between era than a full one itself.

It turns out that the best sonic foreshadowing for TTPD came from 1989 and, specifically, the 1989 vault tracks. “Is It Over Now” would feel right at home on this album. She’s entranced with a certain kind of American suburbia, though the symbols feel a little undercooked and maybe better used in future concepts. The songs don’t sound quite like Midnights, despite the abundant synths, excepting “Mastermind” and “You’re On Your Own Kid” descendant “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — which she should add to the Eras Tour setlist right before “Karma.”

“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is basically what people suspected it might be about: being able to perform for hundreds of thousands of people while your heart is in pieces. And producer and co-writer Jack Antonoff — for all of the mostly justified criticisms that he and Swift have lapsed into comfortable musical synthesis — still knows how to help her pull off the shiniest bop. The song is so much fun, especially with Swift’s spoken-word asides about being miserable.

I noted in my review of Midnights how delightful it is to see Swift be funny, and she leans into that again on TTPD. “I’m having his baby, no I’m not but you should see your faces!” she mocks one “Daddy.” All her friends “smell like weed or little babies” — a “millennial truth,” as Vogue notes — on “Florida!!!” The Charlie Puth line on the title track, for whatever it’s worth, shows she’s still capable of surprising us.

Lyrically, however, she also doesn’t have to explain everything, nor enter everything into evidence. She’s so often rightfully praised for her bridges and her poetic lyrics, especially post-folklore; Folklore and evermore are beautiful works, but not every album needs to be so poeticized, especially when she’s not nailing it. “Clara Bow” carries on the lineage of songs like “The Lucky One” and “the last great american dynasty,” exploring how famous women are compared to other famous women in history in a way that tends to demean both — but the bridge is heavy-handed, dampening the power of the verse repetition about Bow, Stevie Nicks, and then Taylor Swift herself. Descriptors like “tattooed golden retriever” aren’t really working.

Structurally, some of the ordering is confusing and overwhelming, perhaps intentionally so. Unlike on 1989, there is no neat narrative here — no “Clean” at the end to indicate healing, a readiness to go off on the next adventure. It also takes a few songs to really get into the groove of the album. “So Long London” is such an exciting sonic highlight, and having Aaron Dessner back in the mix is what my colleague called “a relief,” but then we lose ground until “Florida!!!” kicks off the back half of the original set of 16.

The most interesting thing about TTPD is that she’s starting to give up the bit. She knows we know — or she knows what we think we know. How would anyone survive this level of scrutiny?

Why hide from it? Why not play it up, acknowledge fault in the only way Swift as a public persona knows how, with self-deprecation and winking nods that ask, “but are you sure you’re not the problem?” You can’t know what’s a delusion when you’re in it. We know what comes after all of this.

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” is an early top track on TTPD. It exists in the universe of “I Did Something Bad” and “Anti-Hero” — it’s perhaps the latter song’s more monstrous younger sibling. It’s the kind of Swift hit that makes you laugh at the sheer gall of it. She’s larger than life, looming ominously doing way too much and pretending she couldn’t possibly know what you’re referring to. “I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me,” she sings, but they’ve cut out her teeth, the music can only do so much. You can only get as close as the cage.

And so the stalemate with fans continues; she’ll let them (us?) battle it out online and sing in unison in a dazzling stadium. “Who else decodes you?” Taylor Swift fans will sing to her, and the most famous woman in the world will sing back, “And who's gonna hold you like me?”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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