Taylor Swift - "The Tortured Poets Department"

Long and Pensive

So this one has been brewing for a bit. I was working on a companion piece to release along with this review, but I just have not had enough time or energy to see both through to completion in a reasonable amount of time. With the number of albums on my list piling up and The Tortured Poets Department drawing closer to a full month old, I really just need to get this out.

On the bright side, I’ve had plenty of time to listen to this monstrosity of an album and pick out lots of neat little details.

I have not had the time to review the lyrics for every song on Genius, as I had planned. But the few I have looked at are full of notes and details; the Swiftie army doesn’t disappoint. With the full album containing 31 tracks totalling over two hours of music, it’s just a beast to try and digest everything. I would normally try to just focus on the base album — the first 16 songs — but that version only really existed on Spotify for something like two hours. I never even saw it. So I can only assume that The Anthology is the intended version and go from there.

As a unit, the album does have a sort of comprehensive vibe or style. There is only really one truly upbeat song: “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”. Every other song that sort of stands in as ‘upbeat’ on Tortured Poets is really just mid-tempo, at best. And the vast majority of tracks channel this thoughtful, pensive tone, which serves as the album’s greatest unifier and continues the Eras concept, where every album really has its own distinct feel.

And The Tortured Poets Department neatly places itself in the Eras stylescape in a neat little triumvirate with Reputation and Folklore/Evermore. The album doesn’t quite approach the raw Folk and Chamber Pop style of Folklore, but it gets close in its downtempo, melancholic tone. Yet, it also works in a fair amount of R&B and electronic elements, not to mention many callbacks to the Reputation era. This positioning feels incredibly intentional, as her relationship with Joe Alwyn was brand new at the release of Reputation, with many of its more positive tracks being about him; their relationship hit a new level during quarantine, though, when much of the writing for Folklore happened, with Alwyn even co-writing a couple of tracks with Taylor.

But Tortured Poets also incorporates a heavy amount of synth, and the dominant genre on the album, as a result, is Synth Pop.

At the same time, there are a handful of piano ballads (and one waltz), especially towards the end, where it’s really just Taylor and the keys.

As unified as the album’s musical stylings are, its concept and thematic elements are a bit more scattered. It is, on its face, a breakup album; especially for those first sixteen songs which make up the base album. Except for “But Daddy I Love Him”. And “Alchemy”. And “Clara Bow”. “Alchemy” is a vague attempt to shape the album more positively, giving the album’s arc a final, positive note as it discusses her new relationship with Travis Kelce — but then the base album actually ends with “Clara Bow”, a discussion of Taylor’s arc through the music industry and how she feels herself slipping into the rearview as she gets older; it would have fit perfectly on Midnights, but feels a bit out of place here.

Even before that the tracklist is jumbled, bouncing back and forth between the album’s chief muses, Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy, with no discernable rationale. And the songs are even less unified after the halfway point. Many are still vaguely attuned to the concept of a breakup album, but the connection is loose.

Thematically, the album deals with heartbreak and loss on multiple levels, with recurring motifs of drug use and literary allusion¹ helping to tie the album’s varied songs together on some level. And this is an element Taylor has always excelled at — writing lyrics which remain relevant to the song but also play on multiple levels all at once.

You can’t say she isn’t an amazing poet.

I mean. You can, but you’d be wrong.

That said, there are actually a couple of songs on this album that really didn’t click for me. “Florida”, despite the phenomenal feature by Florence & The Machine, really just grates at me. It’s repetitive, for one, and I am, frankly, just tired of the entire state of Florida at this point. Its presence on the album, though, makes sense — Taylor was in the middle of the North American segment of the Eras Tour when her relationship with Alwyn was officially pronounced dead; the next dates on the calendar were in Florida.

Then, there’s “But Daddy I Love Him”. This one gives me mixed feelings for a number of reasons. Let’s start with the “good” — it’s largely amusing, with most of the song being light in tone and making light of the situation, which works. “The situation”, by the way, being the intense reaction to her relationship with Matty Healy. Dedicated Swifties sounded alarms for their Queen; detractors used the relationship to justify their disdain for Taylor. “But Daddy I Love Him” is Taylor’s response to all of them, with the gist being “my life, my choice”, which is totally fair. Yet, it’s also rather tone-deaf, considering that Healy sunk Taylor into controversy for the first time in a decade. And this is not without foresight, considering his well-known reputation; nor hindsight, considering that Healy is the muse of more tracks than Alwyn on Tortured Poets, most notably “The Saddest Man Who Ever Lived”, a brutal takedown delivered with forlorn judgment.

Taylor’s indignation is understandable, but considering how the whole affair played out, many would be willing to admit, “yeah, okay, I was wrong about that one” rather than writing a song doubling down on the indignation in the middle of a breakup album which spends a lot of time tearing down the man she was warned about.

It just rubs me the wrong way, given the context.

Those two songs aside, damn near every other song on the album is a testament to Swift’s songwriting and musical sensibilities. There is so much to love on Tortured Poets, and it has definitely given me some of my favorite songs of the year so far.

But it’s shocking to see blemishes. As a unit, the album could be stronger. And finding songs that I actively dislike on a Taylor album is a shock. I still strongly recommend this album for pretty much anybody, but it’s only about a 9/10.

Rating: Blue

1. Among them, The Wizard of Oz on “loml”, The Secret Garden on “I Hate it Here”, and Peter Pan on “Peter”.