Taylor Swift Fans Certainly Aren’t Expecting the Real Target of Her New Album

Taylor Swift has released The Tortured Poets Department, and her fans and detractors alike can agree on one thing: To quote the poet, “This is exhausting.”

The feeling doesn’t come entirely as a surprise, given the midnight release of the lengthy 16-track album, or the larger context into which it drops. TTPD is Swift’s fifth album in as many years; her ninth if you count the Taylor’s Version re-releases. (Somehow she found time somewhere in there too for the highest-grossing tour in history.) What was surprising, though, was the extent of the exhaustion that Swift has imposed: At 2 a.m., the artist announced that in addition to the original-recipe TTPD, she was also releasing The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, a double-album version that includes a whopping 15 additional songs.

Swift knows that it can be tiring to keep up with all these antics. On Midnights, she made an entire song about how “it must be exhausting always rooting for” her. America agreed so strongly that we sent “Anti-Hero” all the way to No. 1. (And keep rooting for her we did: She’s only gotten more famous since.) TTPD, like much of Swift’s music, taps mostly into her usual inspirational well, romantic relationships. Her new single “Fortnight” is about an affair that lasts for merely that long but haunts her for much longer. I’m surprised to report that, on my initial listens, the songs I’m most interested in—even most moved by—are, for once, the ones that comment on her fame and discuss her relationship with her fans. The richest tracks on TTPD are the songs about Swift’s own “narrative.”

Ah, yes, the infamous “narrative.” It’s been nearly eight years since Swift protested that she “would very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” in that case the one about her and rivals Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. (The statement was originally posted to social media; Swift would repeat it in a music video too.) That story began at the VMAs almost 15 years ago, making it older than some of her own fans. Yet, here she is on the new album, reviving it again: on the sarcastic “thanK you aIMee” (note the none-too-subtle capitalization of K-I-M”) and “Cassandra” (which finds Swift styling herself as the prophet whose warnings about West prompted disbelievers to “fill [her] cell with snakes”). Exhausting! At least this time around, those age-old enemies are relegated to the bonus tracks; they’re not so much shots fired at her foes as (rather tired) dances on their graves.

On the main album, meanwhile, given that she’s out of haters to shake off, she finds a more interesting target: her own admirers. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” it’s the fans who, “clutching their pearls,” think they know better than her how she should carry out her own love life. Apparently taking its name from a protestation from Ariel, the diminutive mermaid whose choice of crush also attracted disapproval, the song sets in its sights the busybodies who—in what has become an oddly widespread trend among pop fans—seem to care more about whom their idol dates than what music she releases. A vocal subset of Swifties lost their collective minds over her decision to date the 1975 singer Matty Healy, erupting into a civil war over the man whom some nicknamed “Problematty.” Swift does not mince words about “all this bitchin’ and moanin’ ”: “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you,” she laments, and “God save the most judgmental creeps/ Who say they want what’s best for me.” In the end, she suggests, these prohibitions will only make her want the guy more, and regardless: “I’ll tell you something ’bout my good name/ It’s mine alone to disgrace.”

While “But Daddy I Love Him” has gotten some of the most early attention, with Swifties surprised to find themselves in the crosshairs, it’s far from the only track in which the superstar expresses ambivalence about her supporters. On “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” she’s “so depressed she acts like it’s her birthday” while the “crowd screams, ‘More!’ ” Even the 16-track album’s final words are reserved for acknowledging that the devotion of her disciples may not endure. On closer “Clara Bow,” she stares into the blinding glare of the spotlight that shines on the “it” girl, and she’s not sure she likes it. “Only when your girlish glow flickers just so,” she sighs, “do they let you know/ It’s hell on earth to be heavenly.” The song gets its title from the 1920s starlet who gave rise to the term “the ‘it’ girl” (Bow made her name in the movie It) but who, after only about a decade, withdrew. When the career of her husband threatened to draw Bow back into public life, she attempted suicide. On the dagger-twisting final verse, Swift imagines her fans and hangers-on readily moving on to the next hot new thing, greeting a newcomer with “You look like Taylor Swift/ In this light. We’re lovin’ it./ You’ve got edge, she never did.”

Given their content, these songs could have been really dreadful. It would be all too easy for her to evoke a sentiment of Poor her, she can go cry herself to sleep on her billion dollars. She has before. When it comes to her statement singles, for every “Blank Space” or “Anti-Hero,” there’s always been a “Look What You Made Me Do” or “You Need to Calm Down,” the cringe of a failed clapback (“say it in a tweet, that’s a cop-out”—just … hire someone else to manage your social media, Taylor!). But on TTPD, she writes songs about grappling with fame with surprising nuance and humor and even relatability. After all, everyone can relate to love that is stifling, love that brings with it a lot of pressure and expectations and unsolicited (if caring) advice. On “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” the frantically cheerful synth beat (courtesy of co-producer Jack Antonoff) plays out the disconnect between how bad she feels and how triumphant she has to act onstage—an anthem for having to put on a happy face. Who hasn’t had to go do their job when they’re dealing with something personal and depressing? And on “But Daddy I Love Him,” the best joke is the one that’s on her fans: “Now I’m runnin’ with my dress unbuttoned/ Scrеamin’, ‘But Daddy, I love him. I’m havin’ his baby’ ” goes the setup, before “No, I’m not, but you should see your faces.” Certainly fans have been speculating about this stuff.

There are plenty of other good tracks on TTPD, many of them in more traditional Swiftian modes of breakup songs and revenge songs, even if it sometimes feels tiresome to have to sort through more than two hours of material to find the gems. But 11 albums into her career, those songs are familiar routines from her, of the like we’ve had no shortage of in her past few jampacked years. (On “How Did It End?,” she herself bemoans the familiarity of turning her breakups into a circus, mournfully inviting all to hear: “Come one, come all/ It’s happenin’ again.”) This other material is more novel. Some fans and critics have long asked that she break out of writing so many songs about lovers by learning to write songs about friends. That analysis sometimes overlooks the fact that she’s already written plenty of songs about friends and (especially) family, going back to her earliest albums. But in taking on the perils of idolization itself, she’s found a provocative new mode. Put together, the songs amount to a sort of anti-Reputation, about the struggles of having not a bad reputation but just about the best one possible. Many of us are, even as we keep listening, tired of her fame. So is she.