With the release of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, is Taylor Swift getting ready to step back from music? Emma Clifton dives into it.
A lot of Taylor Swift’s albums make more sense in hindsight. Take her previous new release, Midnights, which came out in October 2022 and ended up winning her a record-breaking third album of the year. At the time, it was a mixed bag critically, and a less-than-cohesive collection of songs. But then just six months later, her long-term relationship ended and as the excellent podcast Sentimental Garbage first hypothesised, Midnights was the break-up album that had been hiding in plain sight all along.
The songs suddenly made sense as you realised they were her wrestling with the fact that she was in a relationship that wasn’t going to work out, with someone who couldn’t handle her level of fame, and she was getting bored and stressed about knowing there was a timeline on it – and that she would get crucified, once again, for not being able to keep a man.
The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) is many things, including so long – SO LONG – and it is even messier than Midnights, both in terms of being all over the place, content-wise, but it’s her most emotionally messy album as well. It has a lot of things you wouldn’t expect to find on a Taylor Swift album – drugs, masturbation, her mum wanting to kill Kim Kardashian (still??! There are people dying, Andrea).
But it’s also the first time she’s sung about fame, which is the most unrelatable thing about Taylor. Her lyrics are so second-glass-of-wine confessionally intimate, so accurate to anyone who has ever been heartbroken – ‘once I fix me, he’s going to miss me’ – that it’s easy to forget that she’s literally a billionaire who looks like a supermodel.
Last year, she went from being very famous to being the most famous person in the world with her Eras Tour, which had such a profound economic impact on every city they arrived in that there was a ‘Taylor Swift effect’ that saw an uplift of tens of millions of dollars. Yes, Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour was equally as ambitious and as impactful, but Beyoncé has – sensibly, healthily – held her fans at arm’s lengths for a while. We don’t expect access to Beyoncé’s inner world in a way that we do of Taylor’s.
Late last year, New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote an in-depth piece about the lore of Taylor Swift and took part in a very good interview on the NY Times podcast The Daily about why Taylor Swift was so appealing to so many people in such an overly emotional way (no judgement, I’m one of these people).
Her thesis was that bad things kept happening to Taylor – from being bullied in high school, to the Kanye clusterf—k, to having her music sold out from under to by her manager, and then all that heartbreak. “Usually by this stage, every pop singer becomes ridiculous because they’re too famous to live regular lives anymore,” Taffy says. “So they can only write about their fame, not their interior [lives]. They’re protected, they’re surrounded by people who only agree with them, and they’re just sort of statues of who they used to be.”
Like how, the old observation goes, stand-up comedians stop becoming relatable once they can only write about airports, because they’re so famous they no longer have any kind of normal life. Taylor has mostly avoided talking about her fame, until now, because she knows it’s a reality her readers can’t relate to. But this album indicates she’s no longer looking to be accessible.
In TTPD we get at least three songs about being SO famous and boy, they’re not sugar-coated. Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me, fame is an asylum, a gallows, a circus where they ripped out Taylor’s teeth. In But Daddy I Love Him, it’s not her dad she’s singing to but her overly invested fans who want to keep her in a cage of grey days and good behaviour.
These fans were so devastated by Taylor’s brief, train-wreck fling with rockstar Matty Healy that they wrote her open letters, begged her ex Joe Alwyn to take her back, and told her they would burn her albums for dating Matty (even though anyone with anyone relationship experience took one look at that brief situation and was like, ‘this is textbook rebound sex’).
“I’ll tell you one thing right now, I’d rather burn my whole house down, than listen to one more second of all this bitchin’ and moanin,” Taylor sings at her ‘vipers dressed in empath’s clothing’ fans.
And then there’s I Can Do It with a Broken Heart, about the surreal experience of having to start her world tour as her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn imploded, which included singing three albums worth of love songs written about him live on stage every night, plus then another break-up with Matty shortly after. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile! Even when you want to die!” could sum up a lot of Taylor’s last few years, if we’re honest.
It’s an album that looks at the cost of fame most squarely in the eye – and in particular the fans that fuel it. Previously, Taylor has sung about people who quit at the top of their game – back on Red, which came out over a decade ago, she wrote The Lucky One about a pop star leaving it all behind to start a farm and how Taylor thought it was the right call. Even back in her Speak Now days, she spoke of admiring Shania Twain’s purchase of land in Aotearoa (Taylor, we’d love to have you) and move out of the limelight. And I wonder if this is where her career is heading.
Because what could possibly follow The Eras Tour – a juggernaut that will have lasted 18 months by the time she’s finished, that will have seen her travel to five different continents and perform 17 years’ worth of songs. She’s released three albums – and counting – while on tour. All this, while starting a new relationship with Travis Kelce, a very famous man who absolutely looks like he’s in it for the long haul. How could she possibly follow this? And what if she really doesn’t want to?
Taylor loves to drop hints along the way about her next move and the name of her tour might be the biggest one of all: The Eras Tour. What’s the phrase that you most associate with ‘era’? It’s the saying ‘the end of an era’, right? What if this whole time, she’s been presenting her world tour as a recap of her career so far, but really it’s the farewell review.
Over the weekend, in amongst all the record-breaking stats about TTPD, there was a little PR story seeded about how Taylor and Travis are ready for parenthood. Even Taylor’s own words about her latest album call it the end of a chapter, the end to all those stories she’s been singing about for years. It’s the first time she’s used that kind of language, and it might be indicating that what comes next is some time away from the spotlight. She’s got films to direct, a farm to buy, possibly a family to start. The tortured poet might finally put her pen down for good.
