Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department/The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (2024)
Release Date: April 19, 2024
Label: Republic Records
Length: 65:08/122:21
Produced By: Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, Patrik Berger
Rating: 5.9
Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “The Tortured Poets Department,” “Florida!!!”, “Wendy,” “So High School”
Where does one even begin talking about Taylor Swift? Who is Taylor Swift, and I don’t mean in the sense of those big-head kids’ books. It’s just that the woman has become such a phenomenon, such a presence, such a force, it’s hard to approach writing about her without addressing her cultural impact. The fact that there are actual notes involved seems to get lost in the shuffle. This must be what writing about The Beatles was way back when; not that I’m comparing Swift to the Fab Four as far as musical merit and impact, mind, but as far as the culture goes, she’s easily as influential, maybe more in our age where mass media is so advanced the mind boggles thinking about what Brian Epstein could’ve accomplished with similar tools.
So the music. Here we are. Taylor Swift. You all know who she is and you all know who she’s dating. What you probably don’t know is what her music sounds like save probably “Shake It Off.” That’s the funny thing about Swift—all of her impact, and her music doesn’t seem to have penetrated the national psyche the way, say, the music of Michael Jackson (another appropriate comparison) did. Why is that? Is her music bad? I’m here to tell you that no, objectively, it is most certainly not bad. But it is mid.
On her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift works once again with music-whiz Jack Antonoff of fun and The National’s Aaron Dessner, who also share production and songwriting duties. She worked with this duo on 2022’s Midnights and 2020’s twin folklore and evermore albums, so if it ain’t broke, etc. However, familiarity can lead to problems just as much as its opposite. Different problems, but problems nonetheless. Are they present here? At the risk of spoiling this review, yes. These aren’t bad songs, but they’re all very similar. The songwriting, that thing personality and vibe can overcome, maybe, just isn’t working for me. This team has obviously been obscenely successful, but one wonders if a fresh set of ears behind the console might help liven things up a bit. Because this album is a bit torturous to take all at once, and I’m sure I’m the first and only reviewer to make that joke.
Back to the question at hand: Why isn’t Swift’s music as ubiquitous as the woman herself? The thing is, our culture is too large, too diffuse. Our population is too diverse. There is no such thing as an “American” anymore, no common, agreed-upon signifiers as such save for your passport and words on paper. The same mass media, Internet, and telecommunications technology that has allowed Taylor Swift to be omnipresent allows every single niche demographic its own niche musical tastes, and some are more popular than others. Rap and hip-hop, for example, are the sounds emanating from car loudspeakers, dorm rooms, and high-school smartphones. It’s weird to say, but in America you can sell millions of records—or these days, maybe a million, because who buys records anymore besides old white guys like me?—and still be relatively faceless musically. However, I’m reasonably certain that The Tortured Poets Department’s album opener and lead single, “Fortnight,” has been getting play on the usual channels.
I’m not going to hide the ball on you: This is the first Taylor Swift album I’ve ever listened to. I also know very little about her personal life save the Travis Kelce stuff, and that before him she dated the singer from The 1975. You need and advanced degree in Deep Taylor Swift Lore to discern the true stories behind her lyrics, and I don’t have the time or inclination for that. Whatever gaps in my knowledge I feel compelled to fill, well, there’s always the Internet.
I remember Swift when she first came onto the scene as a precocious teenaged country artist whose big draw was that she wrote her own music and lyrics . . . and that her songs were undeniably catchy. “Cool,” I remember thinking back in 2008 (I was 27), when a fellow legal intern was telling me about this awesome young woman. “Good for her.” File it in the memory bank for future reference. And I meant, and mean, “Good for her” sincerely! I love it when people succeed in music, especially when they’re talented. And Swift is! If you expected me to flame this album for clicks, you’re going to be disappointed by this review. You might be disappointed by this review anyway, but hopefully for different reasons.
I am a 42-year-old white male, married, kids, a house, a mortgage, a steady job, the works. I am not the intended audience. But I can understand why a “Fortnight” works. It takes a very recognizable chord progression, the so-called “Royal Road” (IV-V-iii-vi), adds elements of a very recognizable sound (“80s romanticism”)1 and it does it all very tastefully. That’s a good word for this album—taste. Everything is done well. You’ve got your plucked keyboard bass, your heavily gated drums (or maybe it’s a drum machine), your breathy vocals, and your lovelorn lyrics. Post Malone is the big guest here, singing the male “I love you, it’s ruining my life” part of the refrain in a faint, autotuned warble that could be anyone, but it’s all about the name and featuring your friends as guest stars. Respect.
The song, though, just doesn’t do anything interesting. It has a warm, enveloping mood despite the iciness of the subject matter—we’re all suckers for lovers who were not meant to be—but just repeats itself, relying on production techniques to add any tension or drama.
Let’s contrast with at another song similar in mood and tempo: The Police’s smash “Every Breath You Take.” Sting sings a rather creepy set of lyrics over a similarly well-trodden chord progression, the venerable I-vi-IV-V, but resolves to the vi instead of immediately returning to the tonic. Andy Summers plays extended chord voicings, adding the 9, giving the song a unique harmonic quality. The song has a proper chorus with different chords, and then the thing that absolutely makes the song is when they move from the vi, an F# minor, to an F major for the “Since you’ve gone, I’ve been lost . . .” part, creating an entirely different vibe in an entirely different key in an entirely different section. And this is a relatively simple song, structure-wise. “Fortnight” has none of that—the chord progression resolves to the I instead of the iii every other time through the cycle, which is nice, but that’s it.
The Tortured Poets Department is like that. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, out, for most of its 16 songs. A few have bridges. Also, nearly every song is about love affairs, which is to be expected. Also also, nearly every song has a similar feel. Also also also, Taylor Swift swears a lot.
Take “Down Bad.” It’s another moody song about a failed relationship, this time, rather cleverly likening the whirlwind affair to being abducted by aliens and waiting for their return.2 There are some nice touches—the slightly out-of-tune bell-like synths, the subtle robotic effect on some of the background vocals, but “Fuck it if I can’t have him,” etc. in the chorus doesn’t really add much. At least Swift recognizes her own “teenage petulance.”
Also, it’s nice to know that Taylor can handle her shit in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” one of the few up-tempo, semi-bright songs here. But it rings tone-deaf—another celebrity complaining about celebrity, pouring her heart out about relationships and falling to pieces as the crowd calls for “MORE!” There is electronic percussion and skittering synths straight out of “The Safety Dance,” and I appreciate the classic songwriting trope of morose lyrics over a happy beat. But when she intones “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day” and “I cry along but I am so productive” utilizing the “millennial whoop,” it’s like . . . there are people who can’t pay rent or afford food. I wanted to scream when I heard “’Cause I’m miserable/And nobody even knows.” Yes we do, Taylor: you can’t stop singing about it. It’s a level of self-indulgence, nay, narcissism, some may even say privilege, which I’m sure adds to some resentment people may feel towards her. We all love mopeyness—hence The Smiths’ and Morrisey’s continued popularity, but where’s the humor? The cheek? The playfulness?3
“The Tortured Poets Department” is about the only other bright song here, which though it’s a song about a lost love, doesn’t come across like a whiny lament. I like the drumbeat—it reminds me of a Cindy Lauper song or, I don’t know, The Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy”—and the song stands out for being different and fully written. “But Daddy I Love Him,” along with the title track, approaches an anthemic chorus, but it’s so dour, so joyless, it never approaches catharsis.
“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” has some snakey Middle-Eastern-meets-cowboy guitars at the beginning that I wish lasted throughout the whole song. Alas, it’s another downbeat affair. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” has some interesting rhythms in the piano and the vocals, and it’s nice to hear a little time-signature variation, but there’s more light electronic percussion, more cliché chord changes, more similar vocal melodies. It’s all very nice, but very flat. Music made by technicians and not artists. Lyrically, it’s about some dude she doesn’t like, who she claims she’ll forget but will never forgive. That’s not healthy.
I don’t mean to be harsh. Here are some nice things: “So Long, London” has nice a cappella vocal layering in the intro which brings to mind Enya. “Fresh Out the Slammer” adds a hip-hop drumbeat about halfway through, shifting the mood away from moody folk. The vocal melody on “Guilty as Sin?” doesn’t go where expected. But some songs sound like rewrites of others, not from her oeuvre, but from this very album (“loml,” “The Alchemy”). “Clara Bow” has something that sounds like an actual riff—cool!—but the rest is another “emotional” four-chord progression, more lyrics about the travails of the young and talented and famous. Boo hoo. She even name drops herself. Solipsism personified.
Lyrically, Swift is very good, if a bit cloying (the title track, for example, is too try hard).4 She’s obviously a cut above her peers, and is a very intelligent, well-read woman. I get that a big part of Swift’s appeal is setting what sound like diary entries to music; confessional pop has a long and venerable history. But even The Beatles didn’t sing about being The Beatles to this degree, if ever.5
I do like “Florida!!!”, featuring Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine. When they hit those downbeats, it adds some drama and tension. The lyrics are interesting, though the line “Little did you know/Your home’s really only a town you’re just a guest in” makes no sense—home is most certainly not that—sounds to me like an excuse to make a rhyme with “Destin” (population: 14,119). I’ve heard it said that California is where people go to find themselves, and Florida is where people go to lose themselves; the line “So you pack your life away/Just to wait out the shitstorm back in Texas” speaks to this. “And my friends all smell like weed or little babies” is gold, though. Credit where credit is due.
But it’s all so morose, so one-note. Every song is about her. If you drink every time you hear the words “I” or “Me,” you’ll be dead halfway through. Swift comes across as a woman who is not in a good state. Again, I don’t follow her life and it very well could be an act. But I detect a hint of BPD, of the girl with crazy eyes who will burn down your house if you cross her (see “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”).
So there you go. The voice of a generation. It’s perfect, in a way, and I don’t begrudge her or her fans. Everyone has their thing—I wrote a freaking book about Rush for crying out loud, who am I to judge? Yet the stakes of the album, its subject matter, are so small, so insular, so petty. It’s Taylor Swift, superdupermegastar living her superdupermegastar life you totally wouldn’t understand. How could you? When you get to a certain point, I guess, the only thing you can sing about is yourself and the people who’ve done you wrong. Touch grass, Taylor.
So that’s that. But then, shortly after The Tortured Poets Department’s release, Swift dropper another fifteen songs in an edition called The Anthology. These don’t really go anywhere or add much new . . . but there’s so much of it.
There are some highlights. “So High School” features an electric guitar and bass and real drums. More of this, please! It’s a love song, pretty good soft pop-rockMore importantly, some different tones for the listener’s ears. Swift’s voice works well, and an entire rock album would be welcome, maybe with a harder edge. If you want a producer for your next one, Taylor, call me. “Peter” is probably the best song on here, another piano ballad using Peter Pan and Wendy as a metaphor for a woman waiting for a boy who left her to “grow up” but never returns, lost to the “Lost Boys” chapter in his life. In this world of adolescence stretched out to infinity, male as well as female, it hits pretty hard. A real highlight. I wonder why it didn’t make the standard album.
Otherwise, it’s a lot of faceless material that’s pretty but inessential (“Cassandra,” “The Prophecy,” “I Look in Peoples Windows,” “Robin”), more complaining about people who did her wrong, like Kim Kardashian (“ThanK you aIMee,” and yes, I had to look this up), more BPD (“The Black Dog,” “imgonnagetyouback”), and ultimately more should have remained on the cutting room floor.6 “The Bolter,” an acoustic ballad about a commitment-phobe who gets off on running away,7 features subtle pedal steel, an actual bridge, and the F-word prominently in its chorus, which just sounds forced and weird. We get it, Tay, you’re all grown up.
The thing is, too many of the extra songs sound like they’d be breaks between bangers on a well-sequenced album. Here, every song is interstitial. Most of The Tortured Poets Department is the break with the bangers, such as they are, few and far between. Even more interesting songs, like “The Manuscript,” a story song that sounds like it might not about Taylor, a tale of love with an older professor, suffer from being inessential. Maybe it is about her after all—who knows? In this era of autofiction there’s probably a lot of fact mixed in with the distance. Still, some distance is appreciated; it also helps “The Albatross” overcome being otherwise nondescript. It’s different lyrically and it stands out on an album full of, let’s be frank, narcissistic whining. All of this talent, all of the world’s attention, and this is what she does. I keep bringing up The Beatles, whom Swift is supposed to be bigger than, but find me a boring Beatles album—I’ll wait. And no, Let It Be doesn’t count.8 The lads from Liverpool were musically restless, playing with genre, with sound, experimenting with new technology and new ways to create soundscapes. They didn’t all work (“Revolution 9,” anyone?) but at least they were reaching. Taylor Swift plays it safe, which if you ask me is the worst thing you can say about an artist.
The Tortured Poets Department
Fortnight
The Tortured Poets Department
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
Down Bad
So Long, London
But Daddy I Love Him
Fresh Out the Slammer
Florida!!!
Guilty as Sin?
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
loml
I Can Do It with a Broken Heart
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
The Alchemy
Clara Bow
The Anthology
The Black Dog
imgonnagetyouback
The Albatross
Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
How Did It End?
So High School
I Hate It Here
ThanK you aiMee
I Look in People’s Windows
The Prophecy
Cassandra
Peter
The Bolter
Robin
The Manuscript
The sounds of the 1980s are all over this album. What do we call stuff like this? Regressive music?
Some clever turns of phrase here, references to “encounters closer and closer” and people thinking she’d be crazy for talking about the existence of him.
The interesting songs?
“You’re not Dylan Thomas/I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/We’re modern idiots” is okay, but “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” is not.
Calling their fourth album Beatles for Sale is about the closer they ever came to complaining about their celebrity status.
I understand that it’s hard to tell a highly successful artist “No,” but as with novelists—and poets!—musicians too need strong editors.
The autofiction is strong in this one.
Let It Be might feel ramshackle, because it is, but it has so many undeniable songs that are key parts of the Beatles canon, it is anything but boring.
I wonder if the most popular artist of the time tells us most of what we need to know about the time. Swift is narcissistic, petulant, intelligent, educated, and cynical - Pretty much describes the modern world.
When I saw you mention in the review that Taylor Swift had a song called "Cassandra", I got curious about whether it was a cover of the ABBA song of the same name, so I looked it up on YouTube (the Swift one, that is) and listened to it.
It's not the same song, but to my surprise, just like ABBA's "Cassandra", Swift's song is clearly based on the Greek myth of Cassandra (who was cursed by Apollo to always deliver true prophecies but never be believed). In "The Aeneid", Cassandra warned the Trojans about many events pertaining to the fall of Troy, including the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse. They, of course, didn't listen, and their city was destroyed.
Both songs (ABBA and Swift) are about a woman whose warnings went unheeded, and both heavily use symbolism related to the myth of Cassandra in their lyrics.
However, there are some important differences. Swift's song is told from the point of view of the unbelieved prophetess herself, and is angsty and spiteful in tone (a mix of "poor me" and "I told you so"). ABBA's song is told from the point of view of a person who should have believed Cassandra but didn't, and is mournful and regretful in its lyrics. Personally, I find the latter more compelling.
Also, ABBA's song, to my musically untrained but picky ears, is much better musically in every way (composition, voices, instrumentation, etc), and feels shorter than Swift's song despite being 50 seconds longer.