Review: Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department dazzles soon after Australian Eras Tour
Two hours after releasing her highly anticipated new album, The Tortured Poets Department, the pop star pulled an extraordinarily well-hidden rabbit out of her hat. | REVIEW
Across her first 10 albums, Taylor Swift had cemented a reputation for sprinkling her songwriting with observations from the pages of her life, as she evolved from a small-time country artist to a major pop player.
This diaristic, confidential approach has endeared her to a global audience and cleared a path to the throne where she currently sits, alone among her peers, as the most popular recording artist issuing music today.
On her 11th album – released at 2pm Friday, eastern Australian time – Swift has elevated her artistry by blending aspects of her much-discussed reality as one of the planet’s most famous people with cutting character studies rooted in a love of poetry.
And two hours later, the artist pulled an extraordinarily well-hidden rabbit out of her hat.
“It’s a 2am surprise,” she wrote on Instagram at 4pm AEST. “The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second instalment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore … it’s all yours.”
It was news that blindsided everyone but for those in her inner circle and her record label: all of a sudden, there was a total of 31 songs for her fans to devour, comprising a touch over two hours of new material. Productivity, thy name is Swift.
It was only four years ago, on her eighth album Folklore, that she began writing beyond the bounds of her own experiences by exploring other perspectives.
That relatively new habit has stuck, at least in part; accordingly, the 16-track set – effectively comprising the first half of the album – interweaves fact and fiction to stitch together an absorbing, cohesive narrative tapestry rooted in love lost and found.
First impressions of The Tortured Poets Department, or TTPD for short? The final word that Swift sings on the last song of the standard edition album can also be applied to her newest work: “dazzling”.
As its finale, Clara Bow, fades out – a track named after an American film star who died in 1965 – the afterglow is pure admiration for Swift’s mastery of the pop songwriting form, and her ability to compose deep works that reward repeated listens.
It’s at once accessible, heartfelt and expertly crafted. Some of her lyrics are so cutting, surprising and funny that you’ll find yourself instantly rewinding while wondering: did she really say that?
As an artistic statement, it feels like a summation of the 10 albums that came before, each of which was written under the accumulated weight of celebrity.
Her last album, 2022’s Midnights, topped charts around the world, as so many of her releases have since her 2006 self-titled debut.
But even with 18 months’ hindsight, Midnights seems like small fry compared to the whale-sized anticipated that surrounds TTPD.
Swift only announced its existence on February 4, a little more than two months ahead of release, while accepting a Grammy Award for Midnights.
That moment was pure marketing genius: as she stood in front of the US Recording Academy and many of her peers while broadcast live around the world, she sucked up most of the oxygen in the room by redirecting the industry’s attention toward her forthcoming art and its unusually wordy title.
As soon as she had mentioned April 19 as the release date, if you listened carefully, you could faintly hear the sounds of hundreds of record industry workers and managers face-palming as they reckoned with the quandary of either moving their artists’ album release date or staying the course as an incoming, Swift-shaped meteorite approached.
It was a boss move that generated headlines immediately, as planned.
Back on February 4, there was nothing to do but admire her strategic chutzpah in essentially treating the Grammys as a brief press conference – albeit one without press questions, given her long-held preference for skirting journalistic inquiry in favour of communicating directly with her huge global fanbase via the intimacy of carefully written social media posts.
Most artists ready new work in anticipation of spending the next year or two touring those songs.
Swift, clearly, is not most artists: at 34, she is issuing her 11th album while midway through a 152-date concert run that has become the most successful tour in human history and made her a billionaire.
It arrives, too, two months after the biggest concert of her life: soon after the Grammys, on the first night of her seven-date Australian leg of The Eras Tour at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, she took to the stage before a stadium brimming with jubilant fans who hung on her every word, while her band, dancers and unseen technicians combined to deliver a perfect show.
That word is used advisedly, and accurately.
Perfection is worth striving for. Plenty of artists aim for it; very few achieve it. Anyone who can hold 96,000 people in the palm of her hand for 210 minutes is an artist of redoubtable quality. To do it night after night in the spotlights’ glare, no matter what’s going on behind the scenes in her personal life, is a remarkable feat.
Now, as millions of devices around the world begin playing The Tortured Poets Department, the focus returns to the music.
One suspects this is the part that Swift herself enjoys the most: she plays the marketing game better than anyone, but when all’s said and done, what she’ll be remembered for is the art she has created.
In a cleverly self-referential move, one of the highlights of the new album centres on her performance during The Eras Tour, which was underway when Swift’s previous relationship – a six-year partnership with British actor Joe Alwyn – ended.
It’s a slice of sleek pop dedicated to the entertainment maxim that the show must go on, even amid heartbreak. She’s at her most playful when she sings, in an upbeat voice:
I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day
I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague
I cry a lot but I am so productive – it’s an art
You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart
As on most of her previous releases, Swift is credited as the sole songwriter, plus occasional co-writes with her trusted collaborators and producers, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. Two guest vocalists appear: US singer/rapper Post Malone on opening track and first single Fortnight, and Florence Welch, of British indie rock act Florence and the Machine, on mid-album track Florida!!! (yes, with three exclamation marks).
The sound palette is modern pop music, with programmed drums, synthesiser tones and layered vocals dominating the mix for much of the 65-minute release.
Stylistically, there’s an easy link between it and Midnights, which makes sense given the short gap between their respective writing and recording sessions. Rather than reinvention, she has continued working in a musical mode that fits her like a glove.
Cultural references abound: in the chorus to the title track, two famous poets get a mention in Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith. In the same song, Swift and her companion – whose head she scratches, prompting him to fall asleep “like a tattooed Golden Retriever” – declare that “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist”, referring to a fellow US pop singer-songwriter.
Later, on Guilty as Sin? – an ode to self-love coloured by descriptions of sexual fantasies – Swift opens by name-checking Scottish pop band The Blue Nile and its shimmering, elegant 1989 single The Downtown Lights.
As with everything she submits for the public record, these references are calculated for maximum effect; the move is akin to scattering pop cultural breadcrumbs for her ravenous followers to gobble up.
Within a few hours of the album’s release, the late Welsh poet Thomas and 77-year-old Smith will see sudden spikes in their book sales, just as Puth’s work will be pored over by an army of new fans, and the YouTube page for The Downtown Lights will undoubtedly be filled with comments along the lines of: “Taylor sent me here”.
Stevie Nicks appears in the lyrics of final track Clara Bow, too, as Swift draws a link between the titular actor and the Fleetwood Mac singer: “You look like Stevie Nicks in ‘75 / The hair and lips / Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, a full eclipse.”
Nicks is a friend and fan of Swift’s, and returns the admiration by penning a poem that’s included as an introductory note in the album materials. Handwritten in Austin, Texas by Nicks in August last year, it ends with these lines that help set the album in context: “She was just flying thru the clouds when he saw her / She was just making her way to the stars when he lost her …”
Penultimate track The Alchemy seems to be written directly for Travis Kelce, her Super Bowl-winning NFL athlete boyfriend. In its chorus, she sings: “So when I touch down / Call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby I’m the one to beat / ‘Cause the sign on your heart said it’s still reserved for me / Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?”
There’s even a pregnancy fake-out on sixth track But Daddy I Love Him, which may or may not recount an actual conversation with her parents, Scott and Andrea Swift, who have been hands-on supporters throughout her career: “Screaming ‘but Daddy I love him! / I’m having his baby!’ / No I’m not / But you should see your faces …”
Welch’s guest turn in eighth track Florida!!! is perhaps the heaviest musical moment, as pounding drums are used to give the texture of a coming storm amid a murderous narrative. The British artist pens one of the album’s best couplets, too, when she sings: “So I did my best to lay to rest / All of the bodies that have ever been on my body / And in my mind, they sink into the swamp / Is that a bad thing to say in a song?”
This brief list is a mere taste-test for a 31-course feast of delicacies that will have fans writing notes in the proverbial margins for months to come, as they study these songs like holy texts.
That’s nothing new for Swift. In fact, it’s the chief reason why she earned her spot on the throne: by writing songs that connect en masse, over and over again.
In the wave of press coverage that follows her – from news tabloids and broadsheets to blogs and social media minutiae – it can be easy to lose sight of that truth: above all else, Swift is famous because she’s a brilliant musician.
A common complaint from older generations is that music was better in their youth, and that modern songwriting hasn’t got a patch on the past. This attitude, frankly, is closed-minded, defeatist rubbish.
It’s OK to admit you’re out of touch, just as it’s OK to be brave and curious enough to play an album like this, no matter your age, if only to hear what all the fuss is about.
Swift has been flying through the clouds toward the stars – as Stevie Nicks put it – for nearly two decades now. This album offers cutting-edge pop music composed by a woman at the peak of her powers who continues to seek new peaks and conquer them.
“There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people’s lives forever,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2014. “Some artists will be like finding ‘the one’. We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.”
Those were prophetic words from Swift a decade ago, aged 24, back when she was merely an arena-filling performer rather than the record-breaking, singular star that stands tall today.
For many millions of people, she is ‘the one’, and The Tortured Poets Department is another glittering entry in what has become a most formidable discography.
On track 10, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? – one of the songs where it’s hard to tell whether it’s autobiographical, or a character study – she briefly breaks the fourth wall by addressing the audience and referring to her own lyrical prowess and penchant for writing hooks.
In its bridge, as the arrangement falls away to create a few spacious moments that draw in the listener’s attention, she sings conspiratorially: “Put narcotics into all of my songs / And that’s why you’re still singing along …”
In the hands of many other artists, such a bold statement could come across as false, lame or arrogant. But when it’s Swift’s voice heard speaking those words, it works because they’re true.
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