Taylor Swift has reached a peak as an artist and cultural icon that few in history ever have or will – and yet, she keeps going. With the release of her 11th studio album The Tortured Poets Department, a rich saga of a musical tapestry that rivals Red (Taylor’s Version) as the loftiest project of her career, Swift once again answers the world’s call for a figure in pop culture to speak directly to our moment.
If you are anything like me and had to hit the hay after listening to the 16 tracks and 65 minutes of music on TTPD on release night, from “Fortnight” (featuring Post Malone) all the way to “Clara Bow,” then you probably woke up the following morning with about a hundred notifications on your phone from a variety of social networks and text threads. That would be the result of The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, the surprise second half of Swift’s double album, which dropped in the wee hours of the morning. Of course, she is no stranger to unorthodox releases of this nature, i.e. Midnights (3am Edition). But, that was “only” an additional seven songs, while TTPD: The Anthology brings us another entire LP. The following 15 tracks from “The Black Dog” to “The Manuscript” adds up to a total of 31 songs across a two-hour chronicle of Swift’s blood, sweat, and tears.
When examining TTPD, I am reminded of Tom Petty’s legendary album Wildflowers in certain respects. In the midst of a divorce, Petty wrote Wildflowers, an album that seeks catharsis in every lyric. It also happens that Wildflowers was originally conceived as a double album before being cut down to 15 tracks by Warner Brothers Records. In Swift’s case, TTPD comes on the heels of a whirlwind of highly publicized romantic relationship shifts. I am not going to spend time naming names or digging into the weeds of who each song on the album may or may not be about, but it is well known that Swift was in a years-long relationship that came to an end sometime between the release of Midnights and TTPD. She is a poet and a storyteller, so of course she is going to use her art to process a major personal event like this. That is the purest expression of who she is as a human, and that is the potential that resides in all forms of art. Swift’s music is not all autobiographical, nor is it all fiction. It lies somewhere on the wild and wonderful spectrum in between fantasy and reality, daydreams and raw confessions, the hypothetical and absolute. But no matter where it lands on this arc, her music is always sincere.
Still, at the end of the day, dissecting who and what Swift’s songs are about isn’t nearly as interesting to me as simply meeting the music where it is. She makes the decision to give her music to the world, and it’s up to us what we do with it. I have always found much more meaning in the application of Swift’s lyrics to situations in my own life, rather than descending into a rabbit hole on Reddit speculating about her personal life. You get out of a Taylor Swift album whatever you bring to it. I think there’s something beautiful about the fact that the biggest pop star in the world, someone so incomprehensibly high in the cultural stratosphere, is still able to reach people with her lyrics on such a specific and unique level. We do not know her, but we do know what it is like to be distracted mid-workout by the pain in our hearts (“Down Bad”), to fake it ‘til we make it and go through the motions of our daily lives no matter the turmoil in our souls (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), and to be perplexed by the conflicting voices from people in our lives who truly care, but fundamentally disagree on our decision-making (“But Daddy I Love Him”). And we are all too familiar with replaying episodes from our past and asking questions like, “How Did It End?”
Taylor Swift’s legacy as an artist is not in question. At this point in 2024, after nearly two decades of making music, 11 studio albums, her artistic crusade of re-recording her discography to gain complete ownership of her masters, a series of riveting documentaries and concert films, a few of the biggest concert tours in history, and 14 Grammys, there is nothing she can possibly do that is going to change anyone’s mind. But she’s going to keep reaching higher, because that’s who she is. If Swift never picks up her pen again, she’ll still go down in history as one of the best to ever do it. But I think stopping is one of the few things she doesn’t know how to do.
Featured Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant