Review Summary: The future's bright, dazzling
Few artists in history have found themselves in the position that Taylor Swift was leading up to the release of
The Tortured Poets Department. Following the commercial and critical successes of
folklore and
Midnights, which elevated her career to even more stratospheric heights, she then engaged in her worldwide
Eras tour, which swayed national economies while expanding an audience that was already larger than that of any other musician in the world. While doing this, she also became the talk of the NFL (of all places) by publicly dating Kansas City star tight end Travis Kelce. To put all of this in perspective, she was the biggest pop star in the world
before any of this occurred. As a result, Swift needed almost nothing in the way of official promotion for
The Tortured Poets Department just to have it still end up being the most highly anticipated album in recent memory, as evidenced by her eight second video of static that immediately shot to the top of iTunes’ charts. Has a musician ever achieved fame this ludicrous before? Is this how it would have looked if modern technology and streaming services existed back when the Beatles were still dropping albums? Needless to say, Swift was going to break initial streaming/sales records with this LP almost regardless of its quality, which seems like a bad thing on the surface until you realize that she’s only in that position because she’s been one of the best artists, marketers, and businesswomen for the past decade and a half.
As if the public exposure from the past few years wasn’t enough,
The Tortured Poets Department ended up being a thirty-one track double album with a runtime in excess of two hours. If that sounds like a nightmare, it’s because ninety-nine (point nine) percent of artists
could not, and historically
have not, effectively pulled this sort of thing off – especially when you factor in that the musical aesthetic is overtly slow and markedly similar across the board. But there’s a reason other voices have come and gone while Taylor’s has become the defining one of her generation: she’s a truly exceptional songwriter and lyricist. Even if you strip away the role that everything from her marketing team to her status as a cultural icon undeniably plays in her success, the truth is that all of that would be slowly eroding if there wasn’t an excellent foundation of music at the center. With each new album she releases, there’s something worth exploring. Even
Midnights, which was musically uneventful compared to the majority of her banger-rich discography, won longtime listeners over with its brilliant lyricism. Where else has she written something as vulnerable as “I hosted parties and starved my body / Like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss”, or as potently sad as "There's many different ways that you can kill the one you love / The slowest way is never loving them enough"? Even if her actual music is stagnating (an argument that could be made with
TTPD marking her fourth straight downtempo release), Swift is still an especially sharp penwoman who is only becoming more eloquent with age. On the heels of two breakups, one a particularly stinging fallout after six years,
The Tortured Poets Department couldn’t have been a
1989 or
Reputation redux and felt genuine. She needed a soft place to land where she could heal but also exorcise demons. Swift has seemed superhuman for so long that it’s easy to forget that she actually
is one, and
The Tortured Poets Department finds her in the most emotionally-charged moment of her entire career.
Dating back to
Speak Now, Taylor Swift has always wrapped her music in a theme that befits the music on display. Here, the imagery is once again clear: a heartbroken artist, slavishly working on her music to avoid being consumed by darkness and depression. Everything from the album’s artwork/overall stylization to the way she portrays herself as maniacal lends itself to the overarching theme, and it all helps to lift
The Tortured Poets Department out of lengthier stretches that might otherwise serve as quicksand for listeners' attention spans. Most of it is subtle enough: the way she practically shouts the titular refrain on ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’, only to follow it with a soft and unsettling whisper of, “you should be”; how unstable synths waver beneath her voice on ‘So Long London’, mirroring how her voice shakes amid recounting the end of her relationship with Joe Alwyn; or the way she elongates her annunciation and exaggerates her inflections on deep cut ‘The Bolter’. There’s a purposely dramatic flair to much of
TTPD that could be construed as insincere if it wasn’t intentionally performative. The album’s title alone is enough to get the point across, but Swift ensures that
The Tortured Poets Department also
sounds the part.
Perhaps most crucially, Swift’s lyricism lives up to expectations while giving listeners new leaves to turn over with each recurring visit. Yes, there are still the occasional misfires like the hilariously bad “You smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever”, and there’s no escaping the fact that these types of lines will go viral because of just how meme-worthy they are, but they are the rare exceptions not the rule. Most of
The Tortured Poets Department resides in thoughtful solitude, painful regret, and behind-the-scenes storytelling that showcases her knack for delivering clever and instantly memorable lines that do not need to overreach for depth. Take the aforementioned ‘So Long London’ and how she sings, “You say I abandoned the ship, but I was going down with it” in reference to her six years with Alwyn, adding even more bitterly, “I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” On the piano-underscored and string-swept ‘Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus’, she adds another brilliant one-liner with, “If you wanna break my cold, cold heart / Just say, ‘I loved you the way that you were’" – which is illustrative of just how painful it can be when two otherwise in-love people grow apart. On the gorgeous acoustic number ‘The Prophecy’, she sings of how empty her wealth feels without companionship: “A greater woman wouldn't beg, but I looked to the sky and said / Please, I've been on my knees / Change the prophecy / Don't want money / Just someone who wants my company”. Even the title track – which has the undesirable distinction of containing that golden retriever line – also bestows us with “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger, and put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding.” It’s clear from lines such as these that Swift feels more than fulfilled in terms of money/fame and wants to feel something real again– she's had it in spurts, but a sense of permanent belonging has been evasive.
The Tortured Poets Department is a complex album to even perceive because there is an oversaturation of surrounding context. If you whittle it straight down to what matters, however – the
music and the lyrics – it’s an excellent record despite its tremendous length and monotonous tempo (discounting ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart' here, which is an absolute bop). There are beautiful instrumental accents and interesting production flourishes throughout, and Swift continues to illustrate lyrical growth even though it has always been her strong suit. Aesthetically, it sounds like a cross between
folklore and
Midnights, and feels like an improvement over the latter because it is more focused and cohesive. One thing about Swift’s entire discography is that her albums all tend to age well. Even records that initially seemed a little too eclectic (
Red), disingenuous (
Reputation), or sleepy (
Midnights) all ended up carving out their own essential niche once the lyrics sunk in and the melodies took hold.
The Tortured Poets Department already feels essential. I’m not sure what that means for the album’s long-term outlook, but it seems like another defining moment akin to
1989’s pop breakout or
folklore’s transition into stripped-down acoustics.
TTPD is less of a sonic transformation and more of an emotional one. Swift seems to look at this record as the closing of an entire series of chapters in her life, and the future is uncertain. On the standard (non-
Anthology) portion of the album’s curtain-call, ‘Clara Bow’, Swift seems to acknowledge that she has evolved from the up-and-comer ("You look like Clara Bow / In this light, remarkable / All your life, did you know / You'd be picked like a rose?”) to the one who will eventually be replaced. The final line of the song comes from the perspective of a talent appraiser or fan, who is admiring a young star: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light, we're lovin' it / You've got edge, she never did / The future's bright, dazzling.” And with that, the album ends. It’s a brilliant conclusion to a piece that dramatizes and memorializes Swift’s career, all at once lending it context and even some levity. No matter what happens in our lives – love, drama, heart-stopping pain – it’s just temporary. Perhaps the best thing we can do is write it all down.
