Taylor Swift, an American singer and songwriter, has been having the best year of her career. A little over a year ago, she kicked off “The Eras Tour,” which spans seventeen years of music, in a mere 3.5 hours. The tour had a massive opening and quickly became a global phenomenon. In October 2020, Swift faced a setback when her first six masters were sold, and she lost the ownership rights to her intellectual property. Subsequently, she re-recorded and released all her previous work again.
At the Grammys, as she got on stage to receive an award for her tenth studio album, Midnights, released in 2022, Swift announced the release of her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. On April 19, the album dropped globally. Two hours later, Swift surprised the fans with a second sister album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” with fifteen additional tracks.
On the first listen, The Tortured Poets Department may not sound like her previous work known for catchy one-liners like “Haters Gonna Hate” and “It’s Me, Hi! I’m the Problem It’s Me.” However, it is widely hailed as her most mature songwriting, and the album has many gut-wrenching lyrics and is filled with themes of longing, heartbreak, and fatalism.
In the track Peter, Swift longs for an old childhood friend. She calls out to “Peter Pan”. With a bridge that will stunningly haunt you, she sorrowfully accepts that she waited for him, but they’ve both grown up and that “the shelf life of those fantasies has expired.” The song ends with acceptance of the end of childhood symbolized by the extinguishing light. The record is filled with clever songwriting techniques, such as the unprecedented and masterful breaking of the fourth wall in the song “But Daddy I Love Him.”
One of the tracks, “Clara Bow,” draws parallels between Swift’s experiences and those of the iconic actress Clara Bow, a prominent figure in the American film industry during the silent film era. Swift uses the song to reflect on the pressures and comparisons women face in the industry, highlighting the challenges of navigating fame and success. The song ends with Swift comparing herself to a future aspiring younger singer. Swift has previously touched upon similar themes of withering stardom and how cruelly those who are past their prime are treated in songs like “The Lucky One” and “Blank Space,” where she satirically calls out the tabloids and the media that caricatured Swift to be a crazy, volatile female.
In the song “How Did It End?” the songstress employs clever imagery of a post-mortem to explore the curiosity surrounding the end of a relationship. In “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” she addresses the cruelty the music industry subjected her to over the years and how it has made her thick-skinned. In her words, “I was tame, I was gentle till the circus life made me mean. Don’t you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth.” Swift equates herself to a circus display, looked at from the outside in, with little to no regard for what she had to endure that got her to a point where she has now become “fearsome and wretched.”
“The Tortured Poets Department” is, lyrically and sonically, her best work yet.
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