Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album with 31 new songs titled The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (TPD) has been released. As is often the case with the singer’s records, it topped the charts, selling 1.4 million copies of the album in one day, and fans are once again speculating about who or what the songs might be about. On the TPD disc, the singer continues to use the country-inspired ballad obscurity in her lyrics, while the disc evokes in us the sound of the Midnights and Folklore studio records at the same time.
The secret of Taylor Swift’s success is being deciphered by many people, it is certain that she designed it in a lavish way to build a complete gossip network among her fans and to keep her followers wondering who she is messing with. He uses social media sophisticatedly and with a very conscious business sense, and communicates with his fans as if they were friends, and also mixes music genres according to trends. At the beginning of his career, he wanted to be a country musician, and he mastered the genre’s ballad narrative to such an extent that people can easily relate to his diary-like lines to this day. She also easily adopts the attitude of a performer of different genres, we have already seen her as the fluffy, curly girl next door in the song Love Story, she has already written a lyrical, indie folk album with songs about the confinement of quarantine, but she has also shown herself to the public as a hot, vengeful woman in Look What You In his song Made Me Do.
It is exemplary for his fans that despite his fame, he reveals his vulnerability in his lyrics, for example, in his song Anti-Hero, he wrapped his everyday anxieties in pop. Although her often slightly salty, uncharacteristic voice is perfectly suited to country music, she did not allow herself to be pigeon-holed as one-string-guitar artists, but instead propelled herself to the title of the world’s most popular female pop singer. In his autobiographical documentary (Miss Americana), presented in 2020, it is clear how much
it is important for him to maintain the image that he is just one of us,
and representing us sings about general human feelings. In the documentary, Swift leans against a brick wall and delivers her well-crafted monologues about her belief system being a good person and her trauma when Kanye West took the microphone from her at the 2009 MTV VMAs. She also talks about her pressure to conform and how hard it was for her to stand by her opinion that she supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump. In the crossfire between Republicans and Democrats, Taylor Swift’s management encouraged the singer to stay away from politics, but she accepted her political affiliation after years of silence.
Fans take photos at Spotify’s pop-up event for Taylor Swift’s new album in Los Angeles on April 16, 2024. Photo: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
Miss Americana suggested Taylor Swift’s image that everything she said was planned, that she was a created pop singer whose personality was supposed to be based on being nice to people.
And although he is badly affected by the press munching on his relationships, he draws his inspiration from his breakups.
The 14-time Grammy Award-winning American singer-songwriter seemed like a doozy to his fans when he taught producers and label heads in 2021 that they were dealing with the wrong person when they sold the publishing rights to his first album for $300 million. The rights to Taylor Swift’s songs were stolen by people whom the pop star also hated, so she re-recorded and released her own songs. This step elicited support and sympathy from the audience, and it was almost a revolutionary move never seen before in the industry. It also shows how beautifully Swift has built the rock-solid Swiftie community, whose members jump at her every command or idea.
He always carefully plans the surrounding of his upcoming records, for example
two hours after the release of his current studio album, he revealed that he was actually releasing a double album.
Once again, TPD serves the purpose of making fans wonder between the lines as to who the guy to whom the given song is addressed might be, and the lyrics revealed quite concretely that the singer was just deep in her life when the songs were written. Swift described the album as a collection of anthology works that deal with both sad and sensational moments.
Since the singer’s indie folk records (Folklore, Evermore), she has been working with Jack Antonoff, who created the typical synthpop mainstream music sound of the 2010s with his production work. The frontman of Bleachers has worked with artists such as Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Florence and the Machine, or The 1975, so his taste world has left his mark on the sound of Taylor Swift’s latest album. With some songs, we can even think that a Bleachers musical background is playing during the different phases of Taylor Swift’s breakup.
The album starts with a surprising but well-functioning contribution. With the song “Fortnight”, it turned out that Swift and Post Malone’s voices sound beautifully together, and the singer makes a serious confession about a tormented love, in connection with which she slipped into drugs and alcohol:
“I was a functioning alcoholic
‘Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic
All of this to say I hope you’re okay
But you’re the reason
And no one here’s to blame
But what about your quiet treason?
I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary
And I love you, it’s ruining my life
I love you, it’s ruining my life”
Of course, fans immediately started speculating who the narcissistic man could be who twisted Swift’s head like this, since the album is covered with lines that hint that someone has inflicted deep wounds on her heart. In the spring of 2023, the singer started a messy but brief relationship with Matty Healy, the frontman of 1975. In the lines of the album’s title song, Swift can send a message to Healy (allegedly referring to him as a tattooed golden retriever in the lyrics), and in these lines, she could hide her 1975 song Chocolate, according to her audience.
“You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate”
Her suffering continues in the song “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”, in which she describes herself as the queen of sandcastles, and her son destroys this sandcastle and breaks his favorite toys. The message remains the same in the song “Down Bad” and it also carries the electronic elements of the Reputation album. One of the disc’s most exciting musical solutions is provided by So Long, London, where the choir’s canon suddenly becomes a pulsating catharsis.
Album cover – Source: Taylor Swift / Instagram
With the song “But Daddy I Love Him”, I realized that the secret of Taylor Swift’s success is that she still looks ageless in the role of Kajla, a teenage girl in love, which at the same time evokes her now nostalgic hit, Love Story. The same context continues in the song So High School, but as a listener, you can certainly get tired of what has to be said about the continuous longing for love for 31 songs. In the case of Olivia Rodrigo, for example, it is charming that she sings about a broken heart at the age of 21 in rhinestone tights, but it is unreasonable for Swift to spin like a teenager about different guys on each of her records.
A recurring element in his lyrics is the general naivety that we can even change an emotionally unavailable person. He wrote about this also frequently occurring human feeling in his song I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can):
They shake their heads sayin’, “God, help her”
When I tell ’em he’s my man
But your good Lord doesn’t need to lift a finger
I can fix him, no, really, I can
And only I can
Swift’s lyricism is highly regarded by many, and according to Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt, the singer has a particularly good sense of knowing when words fit together well. But there are several videos on the Internet where people play the challenge of who wrote it, Taylor Swift or Shakespeare. By the way, music historian Gergely Fazekas also talked about this in one of Telex After’s broadcasts. However, based on her latest album, we certainly cannot place the singer in literary heights, because now
quite often self-repetitive and often downright rude.
The tracks interspersed with synthpop reflect the fresh sound of Midnights, but the album also includes songs accompanied by guitar and piano, where neither the sound nor the lyrics can really be distinguished. The songs Black Dog, Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, How Did It End, I Hate It Here, I Look in People’s Windows or Cassandra are exactly the same.
With this album, Swift once again keeps the audience at a fever pitch, as it is possible to investigate whether the songs are about a fleeting running adventure, or perhaps she is sending these lines to her previous relationship, Joe Alwyn, or to her current love, Travis Kelce. According to them, the topic is not Taylor Swift’s music, but to whom the lyrics wrapped in ballads can be addressed. It is certain, however, that the songs on this album are not considered poetry, they merely describe the experience of a young girl’s love. Again.
