Taylor Swift, the chairman of The Tortured Poets Department has officially released her double album featuring 31 songs detailing navigating heartbreak on tour, saying goodbye to a long love, and her infamous short-lived relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy. This album serves as the successor to Midnights where Taylor describes the beginning of her unraveling due to her overwhelming feeling of unexplainable melancholia. Now, in The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor refers to herself as a “caged beast” who has been led to do “the most curious things” in a note she left for fans in the vinyl for the album. This entrapment refers to her six-year relationship with ex Joe Alwyn. In this note, she writes, “I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity which explains my plea today of temporary insanity,” her insanity being her brief romance with Matty Healy. This album is fuming with rage, desperate for understanding, and shares how dire the need for intimacy is.
After listening to the 31 songs, my first thought was that this may have been the most necessary album Taylor has ever released. It’s vulnerable, messy, and honest. In this album, Taylor reminds the listeners that beyond her stage performances with pearly smiles, glamorous dinners with her famous friends in NYC, and seemingly perfect life, she’s still just a girl who longs for love and understanding beyond anything. These aspects are described in her upbeat track “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” This track in particular refers to her Eras Tour performances that occurred following the news of her breakup with Joe Alwyn. Though the song has a catchy, upbeat, pop rhythm, the lyrics reveal how much Taylor was struggling to balance her heartbreak and stage appearance during that time. In the song, Taylor sings, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, ‘More’/I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’/I was hittin’ my marks/’Cause I can do it with a broken heart.” This song in particular provides perspective for fans of Taylor, humanizing her and garnering more sympathy and respect for her devotion to her job. Taylor elaborates upon her polarizing feelings of melancholia and elation in her chorus as she sings, “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day.” The contrast between a saddening loss of a relationship and the height of her career with fans’ screams of adoration is viscerally illustrated in this song.
May of 2023 was full of Twitter lectures, shared disapproving murmurs, and the height of Matty and Taylor’s romance. He shared her stage at the Eras Tour and seemingly, her heart too. In the longest song of the album “But Daddy, I Love Him” Taylor seems to reprimand her fans for the media response and rampant objections she received during this time. She elaborates upon this scrutiny as she sings, “I’d rather burn my whole life down/Than listen to one more second of all this b*tchin’ and moanin’/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.” In this track, Taylor discusses her rebellion against the nearly-parental public criticism she was facing in regard to her relationship with Matty, stating that the public undermines their chemistry and connection.
Taylor also shares intimacies of her long-term relationship with “London Boy” Joe Alwyn. Joe has been the muse for many of Taylor’s sweet love songs as well as the co-writer for songs such as “Betty” and “Exile” under the pseudonym “William Bowery.” Taylor seems to have reached the “acceptance” stage of grief in her song “So Long, London” while also discussing just how weathered she had grown while waiting for Joe to give her the proclamation of love she had been longing for. In one verse, Taylor writes, “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?/I died on the altar waitin’ for the proof/You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.” Taylors notes how distant she and Joe had become, one weighted by depression and the other riddled with impatience and worsening heartache. Taylor elaborates upon their descent into resentment in the bridge, singing, “And you say I abandoned the ship/But I was going down with it/My white-knuckle dying grip/Holding tight to your quiet resentment.” Taylor describes how she was holding on tight to what was left of their relationship, willing to be drowned in what was left of it, though she was accused of showing a lack of effort. This song serves as a final farewell to Joe Alwyn, the man who inspired lovey-dovey songs such as “Lover” and “Delicate.”
Taylor Swift’s latest album embodies themes of desperation, heartache, confusion, bitterness, and also falling in love with someone new (talking about you, Travis). In The Tortured Poets Department, her vulnerability shines through in many of her songs as she unapologetically proclaims what (and who) she wants, details past betrayals, and shares her raw feelings during desolation.