This past Friday, April 19th, Taylor Swift released her new album: The Tortured Poets Department.
Swift has always been an excellent songwriter and lyricist, but the title of her newly released album calls more attention to her incredible lyricism than usual, inviting listeners to interpret each track.
Adding to the high levels of intrigue surrounding the project, Swift is always at her best when she writes autobiographically about her own personal life and heartbreaks; an exceedingly complicated breakup with her former boyfriend of six years (Joe Alwyn), a rumored situationship with 1975’s lead singer, Matty Healy, and the trials of embarking on an enormous world tour while dealing with many earth-shattering changes in a more adult heartbreak style.
Due to the nature of the promo videos and teaser lyrics, fans knew that The Tortured Poets Department would find Taylor delivering some of her most vulnerable lyrics yet, such as this lyric from “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,”
“Cause he took me out of my box / Stole my tortured heart / Left all these broken parts / Told me I’m better off / But I’m not.”
She even confirmed this during the Melbourne Eras tour, saying that, “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
What fans did not know was that two hours after the release of the album, Swift would immediately drop 15 additional tracks under an album called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. Some of her most painful moments as the Department Chairman are seen on these bonus songs, with Taylor writing on her Instagram account that she had “written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it with all of you.”
Between the 16 main tracks and the 15 bonus tracks, Swift covers a lot of ground with her lyrical genius. The tracklist on The Tortured Poets Department includes “Fortnight,” the album’s first single, “The Tortured Poets Department,” “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Down Bad,” “So Long, London,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “Florida!!!” “Guilty as Sin?,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “loml,” “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Alchemy,” and “Clara Bow.”
The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology features bonus tracks “The Black Dog,” “imgonnagetyouback,” “The Albatross,” “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” “How Did It End?,” “So High School,” “I Hate It Here,” “thanK you aIMee,” “I Look in People’s Windows,” “The Prophecy,” “Cassandra,” “Peter,” “The Bolter,” “Robin,” and “The Manuscript.”
Tortured Poets combines the intimate sound of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop sound of Midnights. The songs in this album go for the detailed Folkmore style of storycraft and lyricism, but instead of fictional characters, Swift pours her heart into her own deeply personal catharsis.
The Tortured Poets Department has a Reputation edge to it, and like Reputation, it sounds designed to confuse those who try to decode it before listening. In her “Summary Poem,” Taylor calls it “a debrief, a detailed rewinding / For the purpose of warning / For the sake of reminding,” which anyone can hear in the depth of the music. Over all these songs, Taylor lives up to her ideology that “all’s fair in love and poetry.” But as she shows in The Tortured Poets Department, both can get pretty brutal.
