Review: Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poet Category Loses Star But Deems Malicious

It’s no surprise that Taylor Swift would write a breakup album.

Over the past 10 records, Starr has taken a scalpel to his private life, unpacking details of affairs, trysts, and heartbreaks to create some of pop’s most memorable lyrics.

For the past five years, she has been in romantic mode. Her songs such as “Delicate”, “Lover”, “Invisible String” and “Lavender Haze” were all inspired by her boyfriend of six years, British actor Joe Alwyn.

They were so close that Swift moved to London and shared songwriting credits with Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) on the Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnight.

Their breakup was announced in April 2023, one month after Swift began her record-breaking Elas tour.

An anonymous source told People magazine that it was “friendly” and “not dramatic.” But when she announced her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, at the Grammy Awards this February, her fans began speculating that it might be in response to the recession. Ta.

They immediately noted how similar the title was to “The Tortured Man Club,” a group chat shared by Alwyn and fellow actor Paul Mescal.

Swift later told the audience at a concert in Melbourne that the album was her most cathartic project to date.

“It reminded me of why songwriting actually helps me live my life,” she said. “I’ve never had a Tortured Poets album that required more songwriting.”

It definitely feels like a cleansing experience.

The singer feels a sense of loss and bewilderment. She has a vulnerability you’ve never heard before.

She sings about being so depressed that she can’t get out of bed, finding relief in eating children’s cereal, and crying at the gym.

You can hear her heart break in Solong, London, as she accepts defeat and moves on.

”I had a nice run / A moment of warm sunshine / But I’m not that person” she laments, with layered backing vocals evoking the sad farewell of city church bells. This song is the best work she has ever written.

And even as she basks in the glow of the Eras tour, the veil of sadness remains.

”I cried and hit the floor /Every part of me shattered as the crowd chanted “more!”” she sings on the deceptively upbeat song “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.”

She then demanded answers, wanting to know “if the purpose was to make my shining summer rust.”

These lyrics appear on the sinisterly titled The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, which begins with a weary sigh and builds to a crescendo of anger and paranoia.

”Have you written a book? / Were you a sleeper cell spy? / Will all this be declassified in 50 years? / And will you confess why you did it?”

In the album’s cover notes, Swift acknowledges both the turmoil of relationships and the sharpness of her pen.

“It was mutual mania. It was self-inflicted. I was quarantined and then went into cardiac arrest,” she wrote, adding: “A smile creeps onto this poet’s face, because the people I write best about are the worst.”

Yes, this is a breakup album. But Taylor Swift didn’t become Taylor Swift by following the rules.

Throughout her career, she has defied expectations, going from teen-queen country star to pop phenomenon to, during the pandemic, a folksy author of complex character studies.

On The Tortured Poets Division, she blurs the lines between her personas, sometimes writing as both diarist and fantasy writer within the same song.

That approach culminates in “But Daddy I Love Him,” a sparkling ballad about a small-town girl who elopes with the local delinquent, terrorizing her family and “all the wine moms.”

But the lyrics also reference the finger-wagging rumors surrounding Swift’s reported but unconfirmed romance with The 1975 lead singer Matti Healy last year.

Some fans were disappointed in the relationship, saying Healy, who has faced accusations of misogyny and racism during his career (which he denies), was a poor choice as a partner.

Swift fires back in the song, declaring:I’d rather burn my life to the ground than listen to one second of this whining and moaning / Say something about my good name, I’m the only one to embarrass.”

Thorny lyrics like this keep the album from becoming sad and boring. But the direction (provided by Swift’s longtime collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner) manages to stifle her more vengeful instincts.

The music is full of pillowy synths and muted drums that captured the hypnotic atmosphere of her previous album, Midnights. It’s fine when she surrenders to melancholy on the delicately penetrating “Bad Down,” but it’s fine when she writes salty, mischievous songs like “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” I am suffocated by the echo and the layer of gauze-like strings.

Some of her vocal quirks have become all too familiar, too — like the staccato pitter-patter of her verses and the hooks she screams for emphasis.

However, some tracks indicate a new musical direction.

Florence + The Machine’s duet, Florida!!! Earns multiple exclamation points with a cacophony of drums and guitars soundtracking a story of fleeing to the Everglades to escape the law.

And the sparse tremolo guitar of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” lays the perfect foundation for Swift’s dark, self-deceptive lyrics.

‘The Tortured Poets’ Department’ is an uneven album, lacking the slam-dunk radio anthems of ‘Anti-Hero’ and ‘Shake It Off,’ but so far Swift has It’s going to sell by the bucketful because it’s pushing pop music to the edge. Leaked the day before release.

And since the singer loves a cliffhanger, he ends the album by hinting at what’s next.

Clara Bow, named after the American movie star who became the first “It Girl” in the 1920s, is a woman whose time in the spotlight is dominated by anonymous “men in suits”. It focuses on how it is shaped and marketed by the entertainment industry.

The last verse and the album’s closing words address pop music’s next young upstarts.

”You look like Taylor Swift / We love it from this point of view / You’ve got an edge and she never has / The future is bright… dazzling.”

This is classic self-awareness, bridging the gap between her self-awareness and the world’s perception.

Swift knows her current world tour is a pinnacle, a once-in-a-career moment of cultural dominance. And there are young (but maybe not as hungry) stars following in her footsteps.

With The Tortured Poets Division, she’s certainly closing a chapter on relationships, but perhaps also on how she lives and works.

Could this be the end of her latest era?

Two hours after the album’s release, Taylor announced a surprise second disc containing 15 more songs.

“I wrote a lot of very painful poems over the last two years and I wanted to share them with you all,” she told fans on social media.

I’ll update this review once I have a chance to read Volume 2.