13 Initial Thoughts on THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT

it’s been close to a week and I STILL don’t know how to feel

1. It’s great. I’m not gonna pretend to be a professional at this music writing thing, I’m just doing my best Tom Breihan impression half the time. Nor will I pretend to be objective about Taylor Swift. Y’all know how I feel about Taylor Swift. And if you don’t, you can refer to my piece on Speak Now TV, or my piece on 1989 TV, or my piece on the Eras Tour concert film. Of course I was excited for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, and I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when the second Anthology portion of the album dropped. I’ve listened to pretty much nothing but this album since it dropped last week. Sitting with these songs and really mulling over what I wanted to say about them has been such a rewarding and somewhat intellectual experience. TTPD is really good.

2. It’s also deeply flawed. And I also also think, perhaps more controversially, that those two opinions can and must co-exist. Neither response feels possible without the existence of the other. I don’t expect all of you to agree with my takes. I’m sure 145 of you will be in my DMs saying I mischaracterized a song or whatnot. Hopefully at least something here will age gracefully and not embarrass me for the rest of my life. Speaking of embarrassing:

3. “Fortnight” sucks. It opens this album and it’s also the first single. Taylor has a track record of picking terrible first singles. “Anti-Hero” broke that years-long streak, but “Fortnight” starts a new one. At first my opinion on it was clouded by my excitement for the album. But compare it to how “Lavender Haze” sets the stage for Midnights, and the difference is night and day. “Fortnight” just sounds limp and undercooked in comparison. Why couldn’t something more energetic like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys” be the first single?

4. The title track is weird. “You left your typewriter at my apartment / Straight from the tortured poets department” is a bar. But it’s all downhill from there. That second verse with the golden retriever line quite literally dogwalks the song. The chorus is an ear worm and the “modern idiots” thing could act as a thesis statement for the album, but all the momentum drops once she starts cramming seven Page Six pages into every verse. I see the irony in the Charlie Puth namedrop—it’s a device meant to mimic drunk stupidity—but I’m biased because I can’t stand his stupid millennial Mayer face.

5. She isn’t getting an editor. People have been arguing for it, and of course there are lines you wish were more precise, but she’s long past her days of doing co-writes with, say, the seasoned Nashville vet Liz Rose. Given how protective Taylor is of her songwriting, I don’t see her doing it, not in my wildest dreams. Besides, that wedding ring line in the title track—you think Taylor doesn’t know how wordy it is?! She’s doing that thing Rob Thomas said once about songwriting, where you try to find the longest way to get to the point you’re trying to make.

6. “Down Bad” is the best song on the first half. It clicked with me instantly. There’s all this rhythmic stuff happening with the melody but it feels so natural that you don’t even realize how different it is from the rest of the stuff on pop radio. I love the parallelism that comes with her telling us she’s experienced this incredibly brief but borderline divine fling—and then boom, we crash right back down to Earth with this subtle two-note hook about crying at the gym. Aphorisms like “Fuck it if I can’t have him” are what turn skeptics into lifelong Swifties.

7. “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” is the album’s only true bop. But what a bop! Her delivery of these really dark lyrics over skittish Jack Antonoff synths is something we haven’t really heard from her before. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile” is the new “I’m the problem, it’s me.” You wish the rest of the album had more of this energy and inventiveness—though the fantastical and fantastic “But Daddy I Love Him,” in its breaking of the fourth wall, gets pretty damn close.

8. It’s less of an album and more of a purge. 31 tracks is objectively unnecessary. I know it makes us Swifties feel so fed, but get real. Does the nearly six-minute slow burn “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” or the Kim Kardashian rehash “thanK you aIMee” really add anything, other than doubling down on the rage and hatred written all over the album?

9. The second half is so much stronger. These big convoluted metaphors, like those on “The Bolter” and “Cassandra,” weigh down so much of the almost entirely Aaron Dessner-produced back half. She should’ve taken the 3AM Edition route and kept it to a handful of standout songs. But those standout songs? My goodness. Gorgeous. “The Black Dog” could fit right in on Red, its sharp crescendos gutting me every time I hear them. And the desperate pleas in “The Prophecy” are devastating enough to rival anything on evermore.

10. Why aren’t we talking more about “How Did It End?” There’s an incredible self-portrayal and perspective shift in the second verse and chorus. The fact that it’s being overlooked boggles my mind. Given that this is a double album, meaning this is a track five, we should treat and revere it as such.

11. This thing gets dark. She seems more messy and vulnerable and strange and juxtaposed than ever before. Some will sympathize with her and others won’t—I don’t think she cares. She seems to suggest that she had to write through this chapter in her life in order to close the book on it. You wish the sonics behind her said more; you want Jack Antonoff to jump into the deep end rather than tread in shallow synth-pop waters for the millionth time; you know, most importantly, that the two of them are capable of better. Like, foklore was quiet, too, but it was also catchy as hell. Many of TTPD’s ballads just seem to blend into one collective C major mush.

12. Some of these songs will take time to grow on us. I feel way more positive about “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “Clara Bow” than I did last week. Same goes for “loml,” a top five saddest Taylor Swift song. Some absolute BARS. You can hear this quiver in her voice that sets her a bit off-key when she sings “The coward claimed he was a lion” and it guts me every time.

13. “So High School” is the one. So much of this album feels like Taylor messily tying up bows in her legacy. But once the Eras Tour wraps up, once the last two re-recordings are out, once she takes a nice long break from the music industry—from being the music industry—her comeback album should be full of songs that sound like “So High School”. I keep getting shocked seeing people exclude it from their Twitter lists of favourite tracks. It’s a well she hasn’t tapped into in more than a decade. The guitar immediately grabbed me on first listen, which alone says plenty about the blandness of this album’s sonic palate. Couple that with some truly swoon-worthy melodies and you’ve got a track cut from the same nostalgic cloth that made Fearless so timeless. When you get this deep into a double album full of sad and slow piano ballads, a grown-up “Fifteen” feels special. It’s more endearing than cheesy, and also more concrete than the lyrics on this album that are actually worth dunking on. There’s truly playful wordplay in lines like “Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me?”. You don’t need the Travis Kelce context to feel the pure, unadulterated love. None of the boys I liked in high school ever liked me back, only tolerated me. “So High School” makes me want to cry. It makes me feel like I’m worthy of the love she’s describing, that I’m worthy of finding and having someone in my life who sees me as worthy. The best Taylor Swift songs can do that. They somehow convince you to believe in magic, to believe in yourself. It just sucks that THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT doesn’t do that nearly as often as it should.