[REVIEW] The Tortured Poets Department
some thoughts on Taylor Swift's eleventh studio album and the inherent benefits of challenge
Readers of this newsletter will know that I am a Speak Now girlie. Whether the 2010 country-pop forgotten child is Taylor Swift’s best work is an unrelated concern. (If it’s not, it’s definitely a top three contender, in competition with folklore and reputation.) To me, Speak Now is Swift’s most archetypal; her only body of work to feature the singer-songwriter as sole writer to date, the record remains her most candid, expressive, optimistic, and heartbreaking. Speak Now established Swift as a master of worldbuilding, a generation-defining songwriter. Her gift for storytelling, that precocious ability to weave misty-eyed fantasy — landscapes with high towers and knights in shining armor castles — with sharply-defined portraits of predatory men and patriarchal structures aspiring to tear women down, achieved a polished convergence in Speak Now. In this regard, Speak Now remained unrivaled for ten years until folklore, Swift’s surprise pandemic. In a personal regard, Speak Now remained unrivaled as my favorite album.
Until the age of (Taylor’s Version), this is something I thought would never change. Though repTV has yet to release,1 The Eras Tour, an inevitable consequence of Swift’s unprecedented re-recording success, imbued in me an insatiable obsession with reputation’s experimental production. Upon original release, I refused to listen. Now, I can’t get enough of the way she lusts over rock-leaning hip-hop-esque beats. This is the trap of Taylor Swift, now and forevermore: her lore precedes her work.
After “controversially” announcing her eleventh studio album during an acceptance speech for her thirteenth Grammy (Best Pop Vocal Album, Midnights), Swift went relatively silent. For an artist who has built a billion-dollar empire on training fans to find the hidden clues in everything she says, does, and wears, Swift’s promotion endeavors for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT were slim: a playlist series exclusively hosted by SiriusXM, a Spotify-sponsored pop-up library with Swiftian props and lyrics snippets, and QR codes placed around the world. Rare that an artist who thrives on verbosity doesn’t plug her audience with primers. She didn’t need to. Instead, she relied on the gossip machine: TTPD is Swift’s first original release after her highly-publicized separation from Joe Alwyn, reclusive beau of six years.
TTPD is a long-winded entry in which Swift returns to her folklorian woods to spin tales that blend dramatized fact with apocalyptic fiction. Vindictive and crass, she stands in the tallest tower of her infinite castle — built on familiar motifs and conceits — with a crossbow in hand, daring anyone to cross her vast, dragon-infested lands and poisoned moat while scolding those who don’t try. Across the 31-track double record, Swift simultaneously presents herself as a tragic victim of romantic circumstance and an all-powerful auteur with the Midas touch. This identity confusion produces a lackluster follow-up to Midnights — already a lethargic output intended to maximize profit and sell stadiums across the world. (The gag is TTPD better executes the original conceit of Midnights. There’s more ease in identifying chord progressions, thematic concepts, and vocal choices from earlier Swift releases such as the sparse production of “But Daddy I Love Him” sonically recalling “Should’ve Said No” while serving as an unhinged, volatile descendant of “The Way I Loved Him” and “Love Story.”) Similar to why Midnights stumbled,2 TTPD is an unseemly consequence of Swift’s surge in commercial and critical success. Repeatedly breaking her own records and stimulating the economy wherever her private jet lands, she lives in a realm that doesn’t require her to be in conversation with anyone but herself. For the first time in her career, this includes her cult-adjacent Swifties.
In “But Daddy I Love Him,” a sardonic low-tempo return to early Swiftian songwriting staples, Swift bristles under the control of her ultimate authority figures: her fans. Self-possessed and defiant, Swift laughs off all their “bitchin’ and moanin’” and threatens to have a shotgun wedding. Instead of reflecting on the evolution of perspective — how does hearing fans and the general public disapprove of your dating choices differ at 34 versus 17? how does telling the story change? — Swift seems content with infantilizing the rebellious angst she’s spent her career validating: “I'll tell you something 'bout my good name, it's mine alone to disgrace.” The closest she gets to self-reflection is the throwaway line, “Growin' up precocious sometimes means not growin' up at all,” which blames an addiction to bad choices on childhood. Accountability is not on the agenda. For all her winks, one-liners, and fourth wall breaks (I highlight the giddy delight in trolling fans with “I’m having his baby”), Swift doesn’t care whether you laugh with her. Even though its an approach many auteurs benefit from,3 Swift languishes in her isolated kingdom throughout TTPD, tame and ambitionless.
Swift, more tedious playwright than tortured poet, has fallen deep into the trap of interiority. While a well-developed internal world is crucial to maintaining the mental health of a global superstar like Swift, she sounds unreachable and insecure inside a cage of her own making. (She’s plain and clear on the Aaron Dressner-produced “I Hate It Here”: “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind people need a key to get to. The only one is mine.”) In a world where she sets the stakes of conflict, assigns hero and villain, and always comes out victorious regardless of how she begins, Swift desperately clings to defense. On the standard album’s anti-climatic centerpiece, “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me,” Swift steps into too-big shoes better suited for Lady Macbeth to battle familiar but toothless monsters.4 Amidst toneless synths, Swift’s extreme indignation is almost masturbatory. With the confidence of someone who has never been told no, she utters the inane line: “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”5 Pared with an inexplicable vocal regression reminiscent of “Picture To Burn” or “Mean,” she sounds petulant, a child throwing a tantrum after her cousin says she can’t be Juliet at Thanksgiving. Landing as track ten, “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me” gives wind to the nagging feeling that has been reluctant to take flight: Swift has stumbled.
The lowest point of the standard album, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” helps said suspicion to soar. Punctuated by exaggerated heavy breaths, Jack Antonoff’s piano and synth engage in anachronistic duel while Swift beats a dead horse. Littered with references to The 1975’s lead troll, Matty Healy, Swift generates a copious amount of vitriol for a rebound publicly outlasted by a traditional manicure. (Especially malicious considering said rebound has never presented himself as more than a racist Morrisey derivative.) For The New York Times, Lindsay Zoladz says it all about this record scratch, “‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ ... is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?” The simple instrumental crescendos for an equally underwhelming bridge: “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? Were you writin' a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? In fifty years, will all this be declassified?” These are questions only someone in the deepest hells of paranoia-induced mania has. Satisfaction in bringing enemies to their proverbial knees without acknowledging it takes two to tussle doesn’t for dynamic storytelling make, something Swift should know after writing songs for so long her pupils have become peers. Even if she didn’t, an editor would.
Historically, Swift’s albums have been made and released in response to something. Normally a challenge, whether a bad breakup or bad press.6 TTPD’s most meaningful response concerns Swift experiencing unleveled amounts of professional success in the midst of a low point in her personal life.7 Listeners get glib love songs featuring football metaphors and the single-worst line she’s ever penned, “Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto” (the appropriately titled pop-punk leaning “So High School” which sounds like an early Brand New demo); songwriting regression in the form of ostentatious and emotionally avoidant lyrics; sincerely intriguing thematic concepts largely left unexplored in favor of more familiar roads (“Clara Bow,” “The Prophecy,” “Cassandra.”)8
Throughout TTPD, Swift champions her perspective as the most valuable, a limiting stance with no regard for dynamism. Instead, she endorses an abundance of melodramatic Swiftian lore which proves more exciting to piece together than a listening experience. Optimistically, I assume Swift is feeding the machine of parasocial relationships, mining the basement of her cleverness for material designed to please the messy and heartbroken — the same audience she’s primed to receive such material. Still, she’s not in conversation with Swifties as much as she is singing at them. Cynically, I accept the album as an unfortunate stalemate in Swift’s musical creativity, one that reminds me of the plethora of younger artists doing more interesting things with similar thematic concerns: Olivia Rodrigo, Swift’s direct descendant, and Chappell Roan, to start.
None of this negates Swift’s position as a leading voice in pop’s frontier. For all its missteps, TTPD claims a fair share of positives. The catchy accessibility of standard album highlights “Down Bad” and “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”9 recapture the inspired lightning-in-a-bottle Swift-Antonoff creativty that birthed reputation. Swift’s impudent, often dark, humor is delicious in moderation. Florida enters the Swiftverse as a top-ten place to see on the strength of stadium-ready drums paired with Florence and the Machine’s generosity (“Florida!!!”). Producer-in-Chief Aaron Dressner! Where Antonoff’s synths bleed together like generic elevator music10 and suggest his collaboration with Swift would benefit from a pause, Dressner’s sparsely elegant productions ground the album and grant Swift a complimentary medium to express a larger range of sentiment. Dressner’s approach throughout the album (the piano-backed “White Horse” companion “loml,” the anthemic “The Albatross,” “The Bolter,” “Robin”) purges Swift's ill-suited instincts to execute heartbreak and vindictive revenge as if she’s in a self-funded one-woman play. Wherever there’s a Dressner production credit, the listener receives a feeling, multifaceted portrait of an emotional, multifaceted woman without the veneer of overacted mimicry. In short: Dressner gives us the girl, Antonoff gives us the myth. Even “But Daddy I Love Him” has its own strain of brilliance and sounds heartfelt compared to Antonoff’s offerings.
Some critics have referred to TTPD as the quintessential Taylor Swift album.11 That’s a backhanded insult to Swift and everything she’s proven herself capable of since we were first acquainted with “Tim McGraw.” A tortured poet is someone who lacks the vehicle of expression. Swift’s been steering the same ship for two decades. There is material for a good, even great, album here. Among other factors, Swift’s defense of her ivory tower — this money-informed desire to release for numbers’ sake without quality control — simply got in the way.
My inner optimist has tried to convince me Swift has designed the Tortured Poets fiasco to replicate a small taste of the environment in which we first met reputation. Please for the love of God let this be true.
When considering Swift’s recent career trajectory, comparisons to Tyler Perry have been unwelcomed but common!
Having Tree Paine in charge of Swift’s PR campaigns should have freed me of these anti-media narratives long ago.
The audacity of this line drastically decreases once listeners realize “the asylum” refers to the media circus Swift has spent more than half of her life in rather than Pennsylvania suburbs but one: what’s Swift’s obsession with policing and carceral systems throughout TTPD and two: Tree Paine end this!
Shoutout to Craig: “Nothing galvanizes Taylor Swift like being told what she can’t or shouldn’t do.”
Pretending Travis Kelce never entered the picture.
“There's no hierarchy of tragic detail; these songs fail to distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting. It would help if Swift were exploring new musical ideas, but she is largely retreading old territory — unsurprising, perhaps, given that the last three years of her life have been consumed by re-recording her old albums and touring her past selves.” — Olivia Horn, Pitchfork
High-functioning depressed girlies who only thrive in an office setting will scream “I cry a lot, but I am so productive” for centuries to come.
Great exception given to his cautious Western entry with the hauntingly acoustic “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).”
Personally, I’m still screaming about the CNN reporter who retracted their initial review of Tortured Poets and used food metaphors to explain their reasoning. Fast-food can be delicious! Texans familiar with Torchy’s understand.