What's In Taylor Swift's 'The Tortured Poets Department'? (image@taylorswift)Taylor Swift can be stamped as a synonym of ‘sensational’. The millennial singer set the bar high once again with her new release. Swift released a 31-song double album, which came as a surprise for the ‘Swifties’, who were patiently waiting for her next release. The pop singer first released her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department on Friday. She then surprise-released another album titled “TTPD: The Anthology”, which constitute 15 songs while the earlier one comprise 16 tracks.
Taylor Swift is known for weaving down words in the most intricate way possible, giving birth to some of pop’s most memorable lyrics. Her pen is a scalpel to her personal life inking down heartbreaks, flings and trysts she has come across.
The Tortured Poets Department is said to be the sharpest album of Swift. The Grammy winner appeared bewildered and most vulnerable yet vicious and classy in her songs. Over the last five years, her songs were full of love. Songs like “Delicate”, “Lover”, “Invisible String” and “Lavender Haze” were reported to be inspired by her six-year long boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who is a British actor.
Alwyn and Swift were so close and in love that the American pop star moved to London. She even shared writing credits with Alwyn, under the pseudonym William Bowery, in her Grammy winning albums like Folklore and Midnights. However, In April 2023, news about the couple’s split came out. The announcement came a month into Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour kicked off. People magazines quoted anonymous source as saying that the split was “amicable” and not dramatic. However, the name of her album resembles the name of group chat shared by Alwyn and his fellow actor named Paul Mescal. The name of the actors’ group chat was The Tortured Man Club.
Taking to her Instagram handle, Swift wrote that The Tortured Poets Department “reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed”.
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In her latest album, Swift sings about being depressed and unable to get out of bed and crying at the gym. In “So Long, London”, she wrote, “Had a good run/ A moment of warm sun/ But I’m not the one”, which fans points about her moving out of London. In the song “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”, she wrote, “Breaking down, I hit the floor/ All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, ‘More'”, indicating that even when she was bathing in glory of her Eras tour, the grief remained.
Swift demands an answer as she wrote, “were you writing a book?/ Were you a sleeper cell spy?/ In 50 years will this be declassified/ And you’ll confess why you did it?”, in her viciously titled song, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”. In the sleeve notes for the album, Swift said the Album was “a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest,” she writes, before adding: “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face. Because it’s the worst men that I write best”.
While Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, two of Taylor Swift’s often songwriting and producing partners were credited as co-writers on number of the new album’s songs, Swift was the sole writer of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys” and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”.
During a concert in Melbourne, Swift said that The Tortured Poets Department was her most cathartic project so far. She said, “it kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life…I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”