Review: On ‘Tortured Poets,’ Taylor Swift Continues to Spill Her Own Tea (and the Flavor Is Mostly English Breakfast)
If the song title “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” doesn’t say it all, wait until you hear the lyrics.
“Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead?/Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed?/Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy?/In 50 years will all this be declassified?,” Taylor Swift sings on track 14 from The Tortured Poets Department. “I would’ve died for your sins/Instead I just died inside/And you deserve prison/But you won’t get time.”
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It’s clear songwriting is Swift’s specialty, and her new album features her superb storytelling. As she processes a breakup, the lyrics will hit you in the gut or smack you in the face — sometimes both on the same song. As she turns another page in her personal diary on her 11th album, Swift bares it all, and the songs reveal that she has been going through it. She drops f-bombs, sings about crying on several tracks and other lyrics point to depression (“What if I told you I’m back?/The hospital was a drag/Worst sleep that I ever had”). On the upbeat pop bop “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” she says it plainly: “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday, every day.” There are also multiple tracks where she’s in so much pain she compares the suffering to dying.
“Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me/But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave/And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen,” she sings on the title track. “Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be/’Cause we’re crazy.”
Tortured Poets (and the expansion album The Anthology) is the singer’s first project since her breakup with English actor Joe Alwyn, whom she dated for six years until 2023. Alwyn was also her musical collaborator — working as a co-producer and co-writer on Folklore, sharing the 2021 album of the year Grammy with the pop star; he also worked on her follow-up project Evermore. “Smallest Man” doesn’t sound like it is about him (fellow Englishman Matt Healy maybe?) but most of the album describes the end of their love affair — Swift’s longest relationship — and the songs hint at a possible engagement and babies, from the country-tinged “But Daddy I Love Him” to the title track to “?loml,” where she sings: “You shit-talked me under the table/Talking rings and talking cradles.”
One of the best songs is “So Long, London.” Over a soft, electropop beat, Swift is recovering as she sings about “getting color back into my face” and being “pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” Near the end of the song, the singer, who is now dating NFL star Travis Kelce, proclaims: “So long, London/Had a good run/A moment of warm sun/But I’m not the one.”
“Florida!!!” is also a winning track, especially thanks to Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine’s eerie and badass verse. Post Malone is also a highlight, blending vocally with Swift on the downbeat track “Fortnight,” which opens the album.
Sonically, Poets Department feels like it pays homage to Swift’s past work: “But Daddy I Love Him” could easily fit on Speak Now or Fearless; “Fortnight” and other tracks are reminiscent of Midnights, Swift’s last album; while other songs could live in her Folkore/Evermore era.
The production throughout the album is light, and some more experimental sounds would have made it better. But maybe that was done on purpose, so that the strong lyrics could do all of the talking.
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