A few months ago, Taylor Swift was a recipient of this year’s Grammy Awards. During one of her acceptance speeches, she announced that her next album was imminent. In anyone else’s hands, launching your latest on that type of platform would’ve been revolutionary. Instead, those outside of the immediate fan base were sighing from exhaustion. She had just come off a press cycle that discussed her massive concert film The Eras Tour (2023) along with a heavily scrutinized Super Bowl appearance that featured debate around everything from whether she’s a psyop to how many cutaways from the game is too many.
In a rare honor reserved for Starbucks or McDonald’s, she felt inescapable. The Grammys were supposed to be the capper. The world would take the rest of 2024 to relax and think about something else. Instead with that announcement the doomsday clock reset, and “Cruel Summer” became ironic all over again. While it was technically her first new AND original album since 2022, her ongoing series of “Taylor’s Version” albums meant she never fully stepped away. Adding insult to injury, when Billie Eilish complained about artists repackaging too many versions of the same album, everyone assumed she was talking about Swift, herself notorious for rereleasing albums and, during the rollout for “Midnights,” included multiple special editions that quickly made the original piece obsolete.
The straw that broke the camel’s back on April 19th was not the actual release of “The Tortured Poet’s Department.” It is true that many were criticizing it for being a victim of “quality control” as it felt a bit repetitive. However, right when people believed that this would be the last shenanigan she’d pull for a while, the memory of the 3 A.M. Edition of “Midnights” reared its ugly head as “The Anthology” premiered at 2 A.M. on streaming services. It wasn’t just a small handful of songs. It was 57 minutes worth that could constitute a full album. Suddenly a hill turned into a mountain and the avalanche of complaints ran rampant.
It would be one thing if this truly was her first album since “Midnights.” It would be one thing if news outlets treated her like J.D. Salinger. Instead, “The Anthology” is a moment that will come to symbolize the moment oversaturation reached its zenith. There hasn’t been enough time to suggest it will have a net negative on her larger career, but the early buzz has been overwhelmingly resentful. To some extent, efforts to focus on the quality of the actual music has been ignored in favor of how Swift is overstaying her welcome to the point that news outlets can get easy page views by adding her to their S.E.O. even if it’s just Courtney Love dismissing her.
I would say this is unfair, but I calculated the numbers and since August 2019 when “Lover” came out, she has released 147 individual songs with an average of 29 per year. Given that there’s still time for more before the fifth anniversary (such as a rerelease of “Reputation”), that number could escalate even higher. That is why I say that if you’re tired, you have the right to be.
So please, forgive me for what I am about to say. Despite the larger reputation that “The Tortured Poets Department” is likely to be a blight on her career, I am going to be somewhat controversial. As more reviews are released and the burnout kicks in, there will be those who look at you funny for having this opinion, but I believe it with all of my heart. Following a storied career that more than proves her capability to craft a charming pop song, I believe that she is officially in her phase where she has nothing to prove. As a newly minted billionaire, she has exhausted her wells of stories and has nobody to hold her career back from risk. So, what am I saying? I am saying that “The Tortured Poets Department” is my favorite album of hers. Now that you’ve finished your spit take, let me say that I’m mostly referring to “The Anthology” – which makes me annoyed it’s yet to get a proper release.
Like most people, my initial response was dismissal. An initial listen to the first half convinced me that it was a great 45-minute album with a lot of filler. I recognized that there were some tracks doing interesting work, but it also needed room for the easy Top 40 hits. Those songs were generally uninteresting and just made me eager to hear her dig into the “poets” motif that the title alluded to. When she played with allusions and metaphor, I found myself entranced with the listening experience. Given that my second-favorite album was “Folklore,” I have always been more of a fan of her storytelling work. I’m talking about the music that draws you in and forces you to listen to the lyrics as they detail allegories. If anything, “Folklore” was a starting point of a more interesting period. I felt her coming alive with new ideas that culminate in her latest album.
For as much as I want to fault her for spending so much time mining her past for quick bucks, I can’t say that I’m any better. Much like Swift, I was born in 1989 and hit similar hallmarks. Maybe I’m considerably less successful than her nor is anything I’ve created going to sell out Sofi Stadium, but I want to believe there’s small things that bond us. We grew up in different environments, but I had to believe she spent her youth at the start of the 21st century watching the same shows I did and witnessing the same historic events that I did. For years, I’ve looked for that connection. While she’s been very personal and I can empathize with her experiences, I can’t say enough of it feels like she’s my age…
Until “The Tortured Poets Department.”
Unlike Swifties, I actively choose not to delve into her life story. To me, her music is good enough to stand on its own. I’m able to convince myself that the world she builds is authentic and speaks to something emotionally resonant to her.
It feels so real because it has allowed me to tap into a certain nostalgia that I recognize. When I was in high school, I was friends with students in the literary arts department. I spent afternoons sitting in classrooms playing art rock and listening to others discuss their lives with these grand poetic terms. I’m sure from an adult lens you can nitpick the triviality of these moments, but when you’re a teenager they’re very important.
Swift has honed a craft of speaking to a youthfulness that is quickly fading from her. As much as we can argue “age is just a number” all day, the reality is that we’re turning 35 this year. Very soon we’ll have spent over half our lives as adults post-high school. It’s maybe the most I’ve personally grappled with mortality and I feel like my way of coping has been to look back on my past and bring a lot of topics to terms. There’s so much that I can’t change. Moments I will forever regret. However, they have made me learn and hopefully become a better person.
Swift has long used her music to reflect on this, but I feel like it’s only been a recent phenomenon that she’s able to move from contemplation into a form of acceptance. For as antagonistic as certain tracks are on this album, there is a confidence that makes me realize she’s evolving as a person. She’s not only accepted her past, but learned to embrace the goofy nerd inside. Nowhere does that seem more evident than making the midway point the contemplative “Clara Bow.” It’s hard to say if she’d be here without “Folklore,” but she is making pop music interesting on a lyrical level. Complaints of Jack Antonoff be damned because this is one of those listening experiences that demand you to hop on over to Genius and follow along line by line. Not to determine who it’s about, but to appreciate the literary technique on display.
As an English major, this is the type of direction I would love to see her move into. It’s maybe more beguiling, especially since it’s not the most direct pop music she’s ever released. Even the projected summer jam “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is subversively mixing upbeat melodies with dissociation and depression. It’s the type of record that feels far more dense than any initial listen can offer. For as much as I still think the first half has a lot of filler, I’m willing to bet that I’ll be here in five years listening and recognize this as something greater. Much like I’ve learned to accept “Reputation” as a quarter-life crisis in record form, I have to imagine “The Tortured Poets Department” will symbolize how your 30s may make you feel old and irrelevant while also forcing you to connect with what matters most to you.
Along with being a record that makes me think of every silly writing project I’ve ever done in that “poets department” at my school, it’s the moment that Swift feels like she’s moving onto the next phase of her career. To sidestep for a moment, I see the record as her version of Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Bannisters.” Many were equally beguiled by her decisions to make a sprawling and experimental record that took her into strange corners. Lyrically, it was also her most complex as she moved between personal narratives and creative hallucinations. As the friend sitting at Swift’s table at The Grammys, Lana Del Rey’s influence can’t be totally coincidental and may have inspired her to try and make art that speaks to where Swift is now. While I don’t know that she’s moving away from her Top 40 instinct just yet, lyrically she has more in common with Lana Del Rey than she’s likely to get credit for.
But, like “Blue Bannisters” lead to “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.,” I have to believe that Swift’s next album will be something even more ambitious and reflective of where she is now. Ever since a teenager, she’s had to please others with country and pop melodies that have given her a healthy fan base. I think somewhere in rerecording her music and celebrating “The Era,” she has come to peace with who she was and “The Tortured Poets Department” is a hint of where she could be going. It’s one not totally removed of who she was, but evidence of more to come. She talks of seeing The Starling Line and watching American Pie (1999). For as easy as that bait is, it’s one of those things that reminded me that, yes, we are from the same generation after all.
For the time being, I see this record like I do The Clash’s “Sandinista!” Going once again back to high school, I was a big fan of “London Calling” and played that record religiously. However, “Sandinista!” was a daunting record because it had 36 songs over 144 minutes. While I will agree that it’s good, the reality is that I’ve read a lot of posts hypothesizing the perfect album that lies within. I haven’t cared enough to find it, but I think it speaks to how certain artists have such creative bursts that it’s almost more interesting to see the great with the filler side by side. Contemporary examples include Green Day’s 2012 trilogy, A.G. Cook’s “7G,” or even Lil Uzi Vert’s “The Pink Tape” that may be messy, but I refuse to not think something greater lies within.
For me, “The Tortured Poets Department” exists among this pantheon. I can’t tell you what that “great 45-minute album” is in the first half yet, but I believe it’s there. Maybe it will fluctuate and change with time. However, I think this largely because I was so immersed in “The Anthology” tracks that I found the greater intent shining through. It was the stretch where she was genuinely personal and welcoming the listener into something akin to embarrassing Facebook memories. She’s one Myspace reference away from “The Anthology” feeling like a Millennial photo album. Even if we are very different people, we are both artists born in 1989 trying to make sense of our place in the world. She arguably has a better idea of what that means than I do at this point.
So to those who are exhausted, I understand. One can only take so much oversaturation and the past five years has reached satirical peaks for Swift. However, I think draining her resources has forced her to find new areas to explore, and I think it’s the side of her that will hopefully be more present as she reaches the back half of her 30s. It’ll hopefully be more mature and clever, pushing her audience into new corners of her life that she hasn’t really explored in great detail. Who knows… maybe she has stories of watching The Notebook (2004) like I do. I’m here for whatever lies ahead, even if I’m still going to be annoyed if she reaches The Grammys next year and announces something else besides some time to take a chill pill.
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