From Fortnight to But Daddy I Love Him, Swift's 11th studio album is fantastic.
Taylor Swift’s new double album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, is for Taylor Swift. It isn’t for the charts or the critics or fans. It’s for her. It feels hard to explain, but TTPD is a raw, unfiltered, heartbroken, chaotic catharsis for the 14-time Grammy winner, and it’s unlike a lot of what we may have heard before.
If you came looking for a Joe Alwyn takedown album or an album full of bops and radio hits, you’d likely be disappointed. At its core, TTPD is an era that got its start and its end in one fell swoop.
“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up,” Swift said in her tweet announcing the album was live. “There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
It’s 31 songs and 2+ hours of heavy lyrics, but it’s also the funniest Swift has ever been. It feels odd to say amidst the obvious narration of heartbreak, but songs like “But Daddy I Love Him” and “So High School” give us a glimpse into another side of her mindset. She calls out parasocial fans and media and holds no punches.
With “loml” and “The Prophecy,” you get two of maybe the saddest songs Swift has ever written. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” offers up maybe her best bridge ever, and that’s saying something. “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” serves as the biggest bop on the album, delivering devastating lyrics about performing her Eras Tour shows heartbroken as a happy dance beat masks lines like “I cry a lot, but I am so productive. It’s an art.”
It’s not a perfect album. Maybe Swift and producer Jack Antonoff need to take a little break to freshen her sound. Maybe it’s a little verbose (it is, however, called The Tortured Poets Department). But after living with the sounds and songs for five days, it’s one that will get a lot of play at my house.
Here are the 13 best songs from The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
