Vipers Dressed in Empaths Clothing
A review of 'The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology' by Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (2024)
I’ve been listening to a lot of Delta and country blues these last few weeks. Too Wet to Plow by Johnny Shines, Lightnin’ Strikes by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hoodoo Lady by Memphis Minnie, and King of the Delta Blues by the hallowed Robert Johnson. It’s great music. As pure and salt of the earth as it gets. I highly recommend it.
So I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t exactly in Taylor Swift mode going into the April 19th release of The Tortured Poets Department. To go from the in-the-soil roots of American music - music written by the sons and daughters of sharecroppers - to a two hour labyrinth written by a self-proclaimed tortured poet billionaire about ex-boyfriends, heartbreak, celebrity feuds, and the grieving process was a musical transition Swift was never going to win.
The juxtaposition also helped solidify for me just how tone-deaf the title to this new album is. There are tortured poets, and then there are people who call themselves tortured poets and endlessly promote it across every social media platform for profit. There are artists who risk their lives trying to get their work out to the world - like many of the original blues men and women did in the Jim Crow South - and there are artists who sell out football stadiums for $1,000 a ticket and fly on private jets. I’m not trying to completely diminish Taylor’s mental health battles, whatever they may be. We all have them. I empathize with her to a degree. It just comes across as pretentious and self-aggrandizing to call your new record that will inevitably be number one on the charts, get nominated for multiple Grammys, and make you millions of dollars the poetry of a tortured soul. But I digress. It’s all relative at the end of the day.
I’ve also tried to let the dust settle a little bit. It’s still very early on in this album’s life. But I’ve listened to TTPD multiple times now - both the standard version and The Anthology - and even after a few run-throughs of trying to better understand its content and context, the record is just too massive to take in and suffers because of it. It’s your classic overblown double album slog.
Don’t take this the wrong way - I’m not just gonna bash on Taylor Swift this whole post. I’m a genuine fan of her when she’s at her best, and do consider peak Tay as one of the 21st centuries greatest songwriters. I’m sincerely in awe of her and all she’s accomplished. The Eras Tour movie was a marvel to behold. She’s a superstar of the highest order.
But I also refuse to let my fandom blind me. I’m a massive fan of U2 - but they’ve certainly had shaky albums, and Bono can be offputtingly full of himself at times. It’s also impossible to deny that their iTunes free / forced album release was a massive fuck up. Some people still only know them from that incident lol. Just a bad move, plain and simple. I love Bruce Springsteen, but he’s had misses over the course of his career and has had periods of creative stagnation. I’ve also been to 30+ Phish shows and spent many years in love with that band, but I’ll be the first to admit that their lyrics blow and the jam band format can be mind-numbing and isn’t for everyone. It’s certainly not an album-centric genre. And hey, even those Delta blues legends I mentioned are a brutal listen for most people. The recordings are grainy and stripped down, the songs subjects are hard to identify with, and often times the melodies are sporadic and the rhythms fall out of time making it tough to latch onto.
You gotta call a spade a spade.
And this new album by Taylor is a spade, folks. A card that we’ve seen her use in past magic tricks. That’s not to say she’s not the grandest magician in the world anymore. It’s to say that her magician’s secret is starting to reveal itself a little bit, and reworking her act soon would be to her benefit.
My main gripe with The Anthology (I’m strictly looking at this as a double album, because both versions were released on the same day and there’s no clear A-Side / B-Side distinction) is that it’s so fucking long. I have a lot of admiration for how much time and energy Taylor has spent curating her album-as-an-artform aesthetic, but she’s taken it to a polarizing extreme at this point. For an average admirer of hers it’s downright overwhelming to get bombarded with a 31-song / 2 hour mammoth LP on a Friday morning. I know, I know - I can just pick and choose which songs I like after a couple run-throughs. But this is an album review. And on an album level it’s blatantly too much, especially for the layman Swift appreciator.
Another critical note is the production. She’s been working with Jack Antonoff for a while now, and their creative partnership is starting to sound noticeably stale. “Guilty as Sin?” and “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart” are two Antonoff collabs that evoke some inspiration. The former has an old-school pop country core to it (thanks to the soaring guitar part) that hints and reaches towards a semblance of her 2010s nostalgia. And the latter lands within her bubblegum pop realm. The drum track is intricate and the chiptune-esque melody on the synthesizer is fun.
But a lot of the other Antonoff productions feel like rehashed dreary synth soundscapes. That worked on the more cohesive and fresher-sounding Midnights (the standard LP is only 44 min long), and it works in certain spots on TTPD. But to run the gloom back again with this many songs is tranquilizing in a bad way. I get that Taylor wants this record to be rooted in sadness, and the spaced-out synthesizers help translate that emotion. That’s fine. Just be more concise with it. Albums aren’t meant to be the length of a movie, especially ones that move this slowly and sadly. I couldn’t help but feel like I was lost in this record’s sea once I was deep into it. And the shore was nowhere to be found.
On the flip side, a solid amount of the Aaron Dessner collabs still have some freshness to them. It’s a less drawn-out partnership, and Dessner’s folky acoustic / piano ballad instincts help Swift reveal her most vulnerable self. It’s one of the best costumes she’s ever worn, and why folklore and evermore resonate with so many. Her lyrics can truly shine in those spots. But still, there was only one instance musically on a Dessner production where I thought to myself damn this is a new avenue of sound for her. “So High School” is as close to indie rock as she’s ever been, and is probably my favorite song off the 31 track behemoth because of it’s singular uniqueness. But Swift and Dessner don’t really explore that motif outside of that one song, and almost all the rest feels like slow and sad déjà vu.
She’s already drank this milkshake. Drainage.
The last of my qualms comes from the lyrical side of things. There are plenty of incredible verses and clever Swiftisms littered across this record. No doubt about it. But there are some painstakingly brutal verses in the mix that stand out like a sore thumb. And when tortured poet is in your album title, people are gonna put the magnifying glass up to your words.
The most obvious one that’s already gone viral comes from the title track / second song on the album “The Tortured Poets Department” and is presumably about her ex-fling Matty Healy: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” That run of words is just asking to be dunked on lol. She’s better than that and we all know it.
“Florida!!!” featuring Florence Welch is another that misses the mark for me. The chorus “Florida is one hell of a drug / Florida can I use you up?” is delivered with a weird and dark cabaret vibe. She really wants to be Lana Del Rey at times, and it can come across as inauthentic (you can spot a goody two-shoes tryna act like a baddie from a mile away lol). And Welch’s opening lines “The hurricane with my name when it came / I got drunk and I dared it to wash me away” are tough to get through. As if it was a rough draft sketch that never got pushed to final form. I like that the song’s meaning is somewhat ambiguous, but outside of that it feels forced.
And on The Anthology side “I Hate it Here” has one of the more dizzying verses on the whole piece, when Swift sings “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid”. I’m not even sure where to begin with that one. Does she just like the fashion from back then? Idfk lol. Whatever it is, it’s clearly wrapped up sloppily at the end in a woke checkbox pander.
Ultimately the lyrical misses on this double LP stand out more than the hits do. And I know that’s unfair, but the standard bearer of poetic pop music should be held accordingly. And when you open up the vault and pour 31 songs out to the world instead of a dozen or so that you’ve carefully cut like a diamond, people are gonna hone in on the faults. This is where a clearer line between A-Side songs and B-Side songs would benefit her a lot. Throw the more blah songs on the B-Side or the deluxe edition later on down the road. Give your A-Side work some time to sink in and marinate with your audience.
With all that shit-talk out of the way 😮💨 lol, I will say there are songs on TTPD that I admire. And a handful that will enter her already bursting-at-the-seams lexicon of greatest hits. Even when she’s not on her A-game she’s still a bonafide pop star capable of delivering a wide variety of gems.
I already mentioned “Guilty as Sin?”, “So High School”, and “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart” - those are definitely three stronger ones from a musical standpoint. Each offers up a fullness of sound that you can sink your teeth into. Sure they have her all-too familiar lyrical tropes and themes within them. And the lyric “touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto” in “So High School” is another moment that immediately stands out in a cringe / sexy baby sort of way lol. But at least there’s some groove to latch onto on those. Idk maybe I’m just a bigger fan of her more rhythmically engaging work. I do tend to lean that way with a lot of the pop I like.
“Down Bad” is another that’s well orchestrated. It’s in the Midnights Era camp with the dreamy / subdued synth tapestries, deep bass drone, and steady muted drum groove. It’s one of Antonoff’s stronger contributions on the record, and it comes early on at track #4 so you’re not drowning in the album yet. Again it’s not something new in terms of sound or lyrics, but it’s well-written and catchy. Especially the chorus. It’s a slow-burner that will grow on you in that T-Swift-tune kind of way.
Then there’s “So Long, London” which is one of the big heartbreakers off the record. It’s most certainly about her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, and is the melancholic sequel to “London Boy” off of Lover. Back then she was starry-eyed and falling for Joe, now it’s over and she’s examining the downfall. It’s your classic T-Swift heartbreak song, with lyrics Swifties will soak in the same way they do a romance novel. These are the songs that helped make her the musical ruler of the world, and it’s definitely one that would’ve slotted in perfectly as a late-album or penultimate soul-crusher on a standard-length LP had she gone that route.
Another on-the-nose one is “thanK you aIMee”, which is clearly about Kim Kardashian when you take two seconds to read through the lines (literally lol) or spend one minute looking up TTPD clickbait articles. I’m not the biggest fan of celebrity diss tracks as a songwriting form, but this one is undeniably a well-crafted beast. Great acoustic guitar work, very strong lyrics, and a hopeful message in its conclusion. Even with the E! News megaphone in your face telling you it’s about Kim, you can still transpose this song to be about anyone you’ve had beef with. That’s the mark of great writing. Well done, madame.
“The Bolter” is another with a simple-yet-effective acoustic guitar melody and vintage lyrics from Tay. She brings back the best of her old-school country and folk sensibilities on that tune. I love the claps and the string arrangement. It’s certainly one of the premier Dessner collabs on the double LP. There’s a lot of folklore on that one and when she’s in the folklorian woods it can be pretty special. It comes super late on The Anthology at track #29 and by then I was completely out of steam. But it’s still great. It’s another that would’ve packed more punch had it been in a condensed format.
So that’s 7 songs that really stood out to me after a few run-throughs. The problem is there are 24 other ones lol. Some of them are good, some pretty meh, and none offer up the breakthrough into a new and exciting Era that some Swift fans had hoped for (there are dozens of us!). Boil it down and this album is essentially a mashup of folklore, evermore, and Midnights. It’s a recycling of her past few Eras, not a forge into a new one.
And when it comes to the bottom line - that’s fine. I’m sure the vast majority of her rabid fanbase wants this style of Swift and will soak it up and dissect every single word no matter what. It’s also a forgone conclusion that this album will break streaming records (editor’s note: records have indeed been broken lol) and it’ll make an insane amount of money all across the board. Good for Taylor and her team. The rich get richer. The tortured become more tortured.
But I’m trying to take her for what she promotes herself as: An artist with an insatiable appetite to create and reinvent herself first, and a world-renowned businesswoman second. If she wants to continue convincing people of that, and continue pushing herself as a singer / songwriter, then she’s gonna have to rethink her direction. New influences in the producer’s seat is the most logical place to do so. She’ll certainly have no problem with recruitment, and she’s more than capable of embracing changes in musical genre and scope. It’s just a matter of whether or not she actually wants to and is inspired enough to do so.
There’s also the uncomfortable matter of her lyrical themes. The ex-boyfriend diss tracks and fairly tale hopeless romantic songs have become an institution over the last 15 years. She’s a master craftswoman when it comes to that specific style of songwriting, and has written the book on how to market them successfully. This is undeniable.
But I’ll be honest - when listening to this album I found myself wondering how much longer she can continue to pull off the coming-of-age / romance-novel-as-a-song format. She’s in her mid-30s now, 40 is just around the corner. Can you still be coming-of-age when you’re in your late-30s and have it feel authentic? There’s gonna be a threshold soon where these first-person fuck-my-ex / always-the-bridesmaid type songs are gonna start to feel out of touch and infantilizing to her aging / maturing audience (if she continues to write them). And I could sense that shift slightly on this record. You can’t be the generational figurehead for teenagers and young woman forever. How do you do fellow kids isn’t that far down the road - and that goes for all of us in our 30s 😬 lol.
A rethinking of lyrical themes should be in the cards too. If Swift wants to keep writing young love breakup songs, she might want to lean more heavily into third-person narratives like she did on folklore and evermore. Remove yourself from being the main character and you can write about almost anything. But I doubt Taylor wants to fully commit to that. She sells herself to the world. Self-perception is her bread and butter.
But hey, this is all just my two cents. And it may boil down to the fact that I’m a guy therefore I don’t / can’t identify with the womanhood of it all. This is true. But I promise you I’d say the same thing if it was a 34-year-old guy demanding to be taken seriously still singing about partying and chasing women like a 20-year-old (and actually touched on that point in my review of the Arctic Monkeys album The Car back in January).
A prime example of songwriter retooling is Bruce Springsteen - one of Taylor Swift’s most comparable peers within the history of pop music from the last half century. Both Taylor and Bruce are masters of the everyman / everywoman image, they both have an innate ability to write personal music that examines themselves and the human condition, and they both have intimate relationships with their respective fans. They are the king and queen of Americana.
In an imperfect and cosmic sort of way, The Tortured Poets Department reminds me of Springsteen’s career crossroads album The River (for you Beatle-maniacs out there, think The White Album). The 1980 double album was too long, felt like a recycling of old material / themes, undeniably had some gems on it, and was ultimately a sign that Springsteen’s formula and creative process had to change soon. He needed to dream it all up again. The Tortured Poets Department is in that same ballpark.
Bruce saw the writing on the wall. And a year later he bowed out of the limelight, locked himself in a room in Colts Neck, New Jersey and recorded acoustic guitar demos that eventually became Nebraska. One of his finest and most daring albums, filled with third-person narratives examining people far removed from Bruce’s Garden State bubble. The album still haunts speakers to this day, as the world still wonders why people find some reason to believe. A few years later he came back to center stage with the pop rock masterpiece Born in the U.S.A. - a seminal work of the 1980s that embraced a new musical direction and had equal parts serious and fun in it. Then a few years after that came Tunnel of Love which further explored the 80s synth sound, but was loaded with new lyrical themes of failing marriages and mid-life crises. Bruce began his career singing with a youthful hope of escape and a longing for love, then by his late 30s he was singing about the grizzle of aging and the trials of divorce.
His songs grew up. Just like he did and just like his audience did as they listened. And Taylor should - and can - pivot in a similar way too. I know the comparison to Bruce isn’t perfect, but maturing with your audience is a very real thing. Especially when you’re digging deep into the emotional side of songwriting the way Swift does. I don’t expect every artist to mature their musical / lyrical themes and grow. A lot of musicians don’t demand that much emotional investment from us as an audience, or ask for that burden. But when a writer pours their heart out the way Taylor does, and creates this gigantic parasocial universe of ballads and drama, it’s hard not to hope for some sort of progression in the story. Her career has been like a romance novel series in music form, or even like Harry Potter in many ways (especially from a pop culture phenomenon standpoint). It’s time for the next story arc.
At the end of the day, it’ll come down to whether or not Taylor Swift the Artist is willing and able to sacrifice a little bit of Taylor Swift the Empire for the sake of creative growth. And maybe she won’t have to surrender much of the empire at all to do it. We'll see what happens. She could continue to crank out her tried-and-true formula, sit back, and watch the money print. Or she could take another leap into uncharted waters.
Even after all my shit-talking in this post, I’d still bet on the latter to happen. There’s no doubt she has the innate / divinely-gifted songwriting abilities to do so. I just hope the machines and levers that surround her aren’t too big at this point, and I hope new sparks of inspiration find her sometime soon.
That’s all I’ve got for this Era. I’m finished. I’m gonna go back to listening to the blues now lol. Thanks for reading, I’ll catch you next time folks.
Much love, and keep on listening <3
-Z.B.