The Tortured Poet’s Compartmentalising
My scalding hot take about The Tortured Poets Department is that Taylor Swift’s discography is infinitely more interesting if you zoom out and consider the possibility that she might be writing about something other than her public love life. When I listened to this album, I went in with three assumptions.
1) celebrities have PR relationships. Yes, even celebrities who are already really famous. PR is about influencing public narratives, not increasing one’s level of fame. I’m not saying all of her relationships have been PR, but some of the shorter and overly-public ones may have been (think: Tom Hiddleston plastered across newspaper front pages in an “I <3 Taylor Swift” T-shirt half a lifetime ago). I’m not assuming this album is about a particular man, or any man at all. I’m not saying it isn’t, but I think it’s derivative to think the only things of value she has to say are about men.
2) she is a liar. Of course she is. In her own words “the greatest of luxuries are your secrets”.
3) irony and satire are threaded throughout Taylor Swift’s songs. "Blank Space", "Look What You Made Me Do", "London Boy", and, in my opinion, several songs on TTPD. This isn’t the first time she has satirised the media/her own fanbase’s perception of her, and I think many of the songs that people think are basic, cringe, etc, could well be satire.
The final thing I will say is that this is a literary analysis, not a pop culture analysis. I know the discourse, I know all the things people don’t like about Taylor Swift, we’ve been through all of this last year. I’m not claiming she is a moral paragon or above criticism, but if you believe all art must be pristine and morally pure you strip it of its spirit and authenticity. This is an album full of anger and bitterness, and my interpretation is that it’s not directed at the people you think.
There is a paradox in Taylor Swift’s work, where the more explicitly her songs reference her public life, the more fictional they seem. But the more abstract and literary her songs are, the more truth is contained within them. If you are new to the “maybe some of her relationships are PR” school of thought, I will ask you one question: why are there so many references in her work to publicly seen moments, captured by the paparazzi? Why is she only referencing the things that have been photographed, when relationships have so many private moments? I think these references are red herrings so she can write about her more private experiences in peace. “The greatest of luxuries are your secrets”, again. Once you emancipate yourself from the idea that Taylor Swift the Songwriter and Taylor Swift the Pop Star are the same person, and consider that she is writing about things beyond the obvious, her art becomes so much richer and deeper.
After listening to The Tortured Poet’s Department on repeat for a day and a half and finally digesting some of the lyrics (31 new songs is a lot to process), I have come up with a hypothesis of what I think the album is about. For anyone who is not up-to-date on the swiftiverse and has somehow got this far into a blog about Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department was advertised as an album with 16 tracks. Two hours after the release yesterday morning, Taylor Swift released another 15 tracks under the title The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. The first 15 tracks are sonically and thematically cohesive with each other, dominated by producer Jack Antonoff’s signature synth style. The Anthology tracks are largely produced by Aaron Dessner, Taylor Swift’s collaborator on Folklore and Evermore. Thematically, TTPD and The Anthology feel like two separate albums, and this is emphasised by the contrasting production styles. Where TTPD is closer to the production of Midnights and the 1989 vault tracks, The Anthology feels like the little sister of Folklore and Evermore, dark and haunting. So why would she combine these songs into this dual album?
TTPD is angry and bitter, delving into themes of mental health, substance abuse, and the restrictive psychological impact of a life in the spotlight. The album is ostensibly about the aftermath of two relationships, one long and devastating, the other a short-lived whirlwind of madness. It is noteworthy that for a woman whose entire career has been plagued by the claim that she is obsessed with men, Swift does not use many male pronouns in her lyrics. When she does use them, they are sometimes even to describe herself (“these desperate prayers of a cursed man” in “Dear Reader”). Swift often uses second person POV in her lyrics, or cleverly alternates between “him” and “you” in a way that could be referring to two muses instead of one. She has played around with gender in this way since her debut album. TTPD feels heavier on male pronouns than any of her previous albums, and this feels so unlike her previous work that it leads me to think it’s deliberate.
Let’s look at Swift’s friend and collaborator, Lana Del Rey. Del Rey’s songs have multiple references to “Jim”, “Jimmy”, etc. I can’t remember the exact quote, but she has said in the past that Jim was not a real person, but referred to alcohol(ism?)/substance abuse, etc. Jim was not a person, but a personification. My interpretation of TTPD is that the abundance of “he”s and “him”s don’t refer to a love interest, but a personification of fame as a toxic partner.
The biggest clue that TTPD’s male-heavy focus is a red herring is the titular track, where the phrase “tortured poet” is used in a derogatory way, where Swift claims that she and the muse are “modern idiots” and nothing deeper. The album’s title is positioned as something artificial, a false claim. The majority of references to literature and mythology come from the Anthology tracks. Swift said that she started working on this album after handing in Midnights, which would be early 2022, and finished it whilst on tour last year. I believe that the album was written in the reverse order to how we listen to it, considering the sonic similarity between the Anthology tracks and Folklore/Evermore. I believe she wrote the TTPD tracks last year as she witnessed the shift in the public forum from adoration to disdain for her as her image became oversaturated in the media.
The theme that I believe connects TTPD and The Anthology is childhood. Swift began working on her first album when she was 14, and catapulted to fame with “Love Story” when she was 18. Whilst she wasn’t a child star, she has grown up in the public eye. She has never been able to exist as an adult without her choices (or lack thereof) being dissected. But didn’t she choose this, you may ask? Imagine we all had to live with the consequences of the choices we made at 14. Not to mention how social media has morphed since the early 2000s. Fame is a whole new monster now. I believe fame is personified as a man in her album because of the patriarchal and heteronormative ideals that have been forced on Swift from a young age, the way her art is always reduced to the public narratives of her romantic endeavours. Fame, in TTPD, is characterised as a prison, an asylum, a circus, and Swift is a tiger without its teeth. In contrast, The Anthology is rich with themes of childhood. Swift positions childhood as the opposite of fame. Childhood as freedom, as creative richness, as escapism and the dissolution of gender. The significantly fewer male pronouns, the casual bisexuality of her muse in
“Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”, the gender-neutral name Robin, etc. Gender is less restrictive in this half, aside from, perhaps, “Cassandra” and the narrative of a cursed woman whose truth is never seen or believed. “Peter”, “Robin”, references to The Secret Garden, all tie to children’s books, and this escape into mythology and literature links to the freedom of childhood (a theme also seen in Folklore’s “Seven”. Childhood = wilderness and freedom).
If we take TTPD’s “But Daddy I Love Him” as an angry retelling of “Love Story” (I’ll go into more depth on this later), where she is perpetually trapped at the age she became famous, retreating into childhood is the antidote for this. The media and her fan base constantly infantilise her; they keep her trapped in an artificial immaturity without allowing her the freedom of true childhood. This is also noteworthy in the context of the lyric “the asylum where they raised me” and references to wasted youth. All we (think we) know about Swift comes from the constructed public image. She became a household name in her late teens, but she spent the entirety of her teenage years working towards that level of fame. How much space was there for childhood freedom when she started working that young?
In “Clara Bow”, a devastating meditation on the way the entertainment industry preys on young women only to chew them up and spit them out, Swift sings “this town is fake but you’re the real thing”. The town in question is a reference to Hollywood/the entertainment industry, but it is worth noting that her entire discography is threaded with references to small towns. Fictional small towns that she uses as a backdrop for her real feelings. I think there is more to this line than a reflection of the entertainment industry’s artifice. I believe this line refers to how her own fanbase perceives her. Everyone knows the entertainment industry is scripted and contrived, so why does the majority of her fanbase always take both Swift herself and the media depiction of her at face value? There is this trend, especially amongst younger fans, of clinging to this narrative of truthfulness and purity, as if Swift would never lie, as if she hasn’t reached the pinnacle of an industry that is built on secrets and disingenuousness. I think “Clara Bow”, especially as the closing track of the main TTPD album, is a message to her fans. Many of her fans believe she is entirely honest and open in their mutual parasocial relationship, but Swift is telling them that they will move on to something new as soon as her shine begins to rust.
There are 31 songs on this album so I’m not going to provide an analysis of all of them, but a song I would really like to discuss is “But Daddy I Love Him”, namely because this is the main song people are using in the album’s paternity test. This song has rubbed people up the wrong way because they’ve interpreted it as Swift being bitter at the backlash she received for associating with a problematic man. I believe that relationship was most likely a PR relationship that backfired, so I went into the song without the assumption that it was about him. (It’s fine if you don’t agree with me on this, and I don’t think she handled that situation well, but that is not what I’m talking about here).
What I found noteworthy about “But Daddy I Love Him” is that it is thematically identical to “Love Story”, her breakout hit. And thematically, it’s not mature. It’s not a song a 34-year-old is likely to write about her current life. There are also aspects of country music in this song, which is a further call back to “Love Story” and her early career. My take on this song is that the backlash she received against her alleged relationship last year combined with the oversaturation of media coverage of her every move was what caused her to snap. Not only has she lived her entire adult life in the public eye, and never had the freedom to love without the millstone of celebrity weighing her down, it is clear from many of the lyrics in her recent album that she is deeply traumatised from the last time the media and general public turned against her. I interpret “But Daddy I Love Him” as her anger at the media/her fanbase’s invasive participation in her love life. I think this song, and the TTPD portion of the album is Swift saying “You told me I am this, so this is what I’ll become”. This theme is explored more explicitly in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” with lines such as “Is it a wonder I broke / Let’s hear one more joke” and “I was tame, I was gentle ‘til the circus life made me mean / don’t worry folks, they took out all her teeth”, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the circus that raised me” and “you caged me and then you called me crazy / I am what I am ‘cause you trained me”. It is also worth noting that “But Daddy I Love Him” is a reference to The Little Mermaid, a story where a girl gives up her voice in exchange for a man. Taylor Swift gives us her voice, and it is drowned out by millions of people chanting the names of men they think are her muse.
Contrast the vocal anger of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” with the bluntly titled “I Hate it Here” from The Anthology, which contains lines such as “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind” and “I’ll save my romanticism for my inner life”. It is clear to me that this album is viscerally about the violent juxtaposition between her personhood, her artistry, her real loves (whoever those people were) and the public image she is forced to perform for the media circus. Celebrities have far less freedom than we believe they do, and the more you learn about the mechanisms of the entertainment industry, the clearer it becomes that even someone as ostensibly powerful as Taylor Swift is incredibly restricted in the face she shows to the world. She has never written about this as explicitly as she does in this album, yet I have seen only two interpretations of it online, either: “I listened to the first two tracks and this album is terrible” or people discussing the men it’s supposedly about and speculating on who did what and when.
It’s been years since the last time she released an album where people were this sure that every song was both autobiographical and set recently, and I forgot just how prominent the man obsession is. I love engaging with pop culture, and I do enjoy reading about celebrity drama from time to time, but I can’t fathom viewing a woman’s art as nothing more than a response to a man. Let alone an artist as prolific as Taylor Swift. People are so quick to reduce her to being something basic and cringe, claiming “Folklore and Evermore were a fluke” as if she hasn’t been a brilliant lyricist since the beginning of her career. Pop music can have depth, silly songs can be satire. And maybe if you don’t get the joke, it’s because you’re the butt of it.
I do agree that the opening tracks are the weakest parts of the album, and that Jack Antonoff goes a bit too heavy on the synth at times, but I almost think it’s deliberate. I think Swift is trying to be off-putting in TTPD so that only people who want to stay will listen all the way to The Anthology tracks. I believe she employs irony and satire frequently throughout her discography. She said that this was an album she needed to make, and I don’t think it’s an album she needs the general public (or even parts of her fanbase) to understand. I have loved Taylor Swift’s music for 15 years, and almost every album she’s released contains at least one song that makes me feel so seen that it evokes a visceral reaction in me. I listened to “I Hate It Here” and felt like she had been inside my head, specifically because it’s a song about being misunderstood. Taylor Swift has spent her entire career making people, especially girls and young women, feel seen and honoured and understood, yet her discography is filled with songs about being misunderstood. So maybe it’s time to consider that there is much more to Taylor Swift’s work than the first conclusions we jump to. Maybe she is deeper than we allow her to be. When we divorce ourselves from media coverage and fan speculation and listen to her own words, the poet is indeed tortured. In this album, she compartmentalises her public persona and separates it from her interior world. The dividing line is “Clara Bow”, the final track of TTPD. She is telling her listener that her famous self is a fleeting mirage; we have to look beyond the veil and enter the world of mysticism and mythology to uncover the tales she truly wants to tell.