Well, Swifties, it’s that time of year again. So, let me ask you; who’s ready for a fun sad time?
Not me, apparently. Because I sat in stunned silence and awestruck astonishment as I listened to Taylor Swift’s eleventh album, THE TORTURED POET’S DEPARTMENT, three times in a row from top to tail well into the early hours of this morning.
When I finally blew out the candles and went to sleep, Taylor’s tortured words haunted my dreams.
‘How dare you think it’s romantic leaving me safe and stranded’
‘You swore that you love me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar, waiting for the proof’
‘You caged me and then you called me crazy. I am what I am cause you trained me’.
‘Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine, well me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time’
From the moment Taylor Swift stepped onto the stage at the Grammy awards and surprised the world by announcing TTPD, rather than Reputation (Taylor’s Version), there has been much speculation of what the new album would sound like.
Never one to stand still for long, in true Taylor style, the album is unique and ushers in an entirely new universe for the artist who made eras her trademark and then burned down that house.
While TTPD is informed by the sounds of her pandemic albums folklore, evermore and the more devastating songs on Midnights and underpinned by Taylor’s greatest gift; the masterful storytelling uniting all ten albums, TTPD lays the foundation for what the career of the world’s biggest musician looks like for the future.
And for an artist who has traversed seamlessly between genres and broken just about every record in the music industry, many were wondering, ‘what’s left for Taylor to do?’. TTPD proves that there’s no limit to Taylor’s artistry, and for that reason this album is the defining moment of her career to date.
Fair warning – it’s an album of deeply felt deep cuts, not for the faint of heart and certainly not for her youngest fans. Anyone who attended the Eras tour and is hoping for pop smashes like ‘Cruel Summer’ and ‘Shake It Off’, won’t find them here. But if ‘All Too Well’, ‘my tears ricochet’, ‘tolerate it’, and ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’ are amongst your most played, strap yourself in.
Which brings me to track five on TTPD, which those who know, know that’s the heart and soul of any Swift album. ‘So Long, London’ holds that position. It’s the All Too Well of this album, but the soul crushing stories of an ill-fated romance, cut you to the quick when the sentiment is applied to the love to Taylor’s life:
‘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 and
My friends said it isn’t right to be scared
Every day of a love affair
Every breath feels like rarest air
when you’re not sure if he wants to be there’
And the lyrics that elicited the biggest gasp from me were:
‘I stopped CPR, after all it’s no use
The spirit was gone, we would never come to
And I’m pissed off
you let me give you all that youth
for free’
While social media will be alight with listeners dissecting lyrics to decode which songs can be attributed to which former lover, I’m not going to do that here, but I will just say that I always felt evermore’s ‘tolerate it’ was written from recent lived experience…
But as Taylor makes clear on this record, when it comes to her choice in partner, she couldn’t give a fuck about your opinion. In response to those who clutched their pearls over a lover they felt was wildly unsuitable for ‘a good girl’ like Taylor, she sings in ‘But Daddy, I Love Him’;
‘I’ll tell you something about my good name
It’s mine alone to disgrace
I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing’
At every show on her sold out global eras tour, Taylor Swift tells the crowd that when they leave the stadium, these songs are no longer hers alone, but instead belong to the fans and the memories they created there together.
If ever we needed more proof that Taylor puts her fans above anything else, ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ does just that, as she reveals that as she performed through her misery night after night at the start of her tour, she was the consummate professional, because ‘I’m a real tough kid, I can handle my shit. They said “babe, you’ve gotta fake it til you make it, and I did”. Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you want to die.’
She knows she nailed it – ‘you know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart’, but then her broken heart has always been her greatest asset as a confessional writer.
And here is the truth that Taylor Swift knows. The magic elixir (or narcotics) in her songs, and the deepest secret to her success. From Debut to TTPD, as she has navigated life, love, loss, the highest of highs and lowest of lows. Over the past 18 years, Taylor has spilled open the pages of her diary and woven them into lullabies that capture exactly what it means to be a girl and a woman.
While the songs on TTPD may be deeply personal accounts of the past seven years of her life, they are also our stories, because we’ve lived them too in our own unique ways. She just says it best.
And so with TTPD, Taylor Swift will soundtrack the heartbreaks, rebounds and stages of grief felt by fans in their own lives forevermore.
In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t hope to explain Taylor Swift better than she could do herself, and so I’ll leave you with her own words from ‘Clara Bow’, which to me perfectly capture the future career of the defining musician of our time:
“You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it. You’ve got edge, she never did. The future’s bright… Dazzling.”
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT is out now.
