Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Songwriting Credits Reveal Familiar Collaborators
Taylor Swift may be the Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department, but the rest of the faculty has finally been revealed.
The songwriting credits for TTPD have dropped ahead of its April 19 release date, and fans quickly learned who wrote what on Swift’s forthcoming album. To no one’s surprise, Swift, 34, is credited on all 16 of the album’s tracks. She’s also the sole songwriter on two TTPD songs: “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.”
Swift’s longtime collaborator, Jack Antonoff, is listed among the credits. The 40-year-old Bleachers frontman began working with Swift in 2013, most notably on her 1989 album, and has been by her side ever since. On TTPD, he’s credited with co-writing “Down Bad,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “Guilty as Sin,” “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “The Alchemy,” “Fortnight” and the album’s title track.
Austin Post — a.k.a. Post Malone — also has a credit on “Fortnight.” Post’s collab with Swift opens the album. The only other featured performer on TTPD is Florence and the Machine, who appear on the song “Florida!!!” Florence Welch, the band's primary songwriter and vocalist, is credited with helping write the track with Swift.
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Besides Antonoff, Malone, 28, and Welch, 37, the only other songwriter listed in TTPD’s credits is Swift’s recent creative confidant, Aaron Dessner of The National. Dressner, 47, first worked with Swift on her cottagecore albums, 2020’s Folklore and Evermore. Since then, his work has appeared in the Taylor’s Versions of Fearless, Red and Speak Now. Dessner also helped produce songs on the deluxe and 3 A.M. editions of Swift’s 2022 album, Midnights.
On TTPD, Dessner co-wrote five songs: “So Long, London,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “LOML,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and the album’s closer, “Clara Bow.”
Songwriting credits for the bonus tracks — “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross” and “The Black Dog” — were not made available online. The songs are included in the respective special edition vinyl pressings of The Tortured Poets Department and will not be immediately available on streaming services.
Fans have speculated that TTPD concerns Swift’s relationship with ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. When Swift won the Album of the Year Grammy for Folklore in 2021, she credited Alwyn, 33, with being “the first person that I play every single song that I write, and I had the best time writing songs with you in quarantine.”
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Alwyn wrote with Swift under the pen name William Bowery, contributing to tracks “Exile,” “Champagne Problems,” “Betty,” and more. He also contributed to “Sweet Nothing” on 2022’s Midnights. He is not credited on The Tortured Poets Department.
Swift and Alwyn broke up in April 2023 after six years of dating. Later that year, Swift began her current relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
