Taylor Swift, either you have them on a golden plinth or you can’t stand them. Swifties think her lyrics are brilliant, honest and recognize themselves in every love song and every breakup song. Opponents find her overrated, find it irritating that she draws all the attention at sporting events and complain about the excessive use of her private jets. In any case, there is no doubt that Taylor Swift is one of the pop figures of recent years. Her famous one The Eras Tour is only half way through after eighty stadium shows and in that three-hour concert we will reflect on her greatest hits and her four most recent albums. Lover, folklore in evermore did not have their own tour due to the corona pandemic and are now together with Midnights and classics like “You Belong with Me“, “All Too Well” in “Shake If Off” presented in a real spectacle.
Halfway through The Eras Tour, Taylor Swift is now releasing a new long player, which makes us suspect that the set list could change soon. The songs on Swift’s eleventh album are clearly based on her breakup with Joe Alwyn (a British actor she dated for six years and sang about on her five most recent albums) and partly on her new relationship with American football player Travis Kelce. The Tortured Poets Department is described by Swift herself as a ‘lifeline album’ that she really had to make and in which the five stages of grief and processing are explored and understood. Taylor Swift started writing this album at some point Midnights was finished and worked with producers and songwriters Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner for the umpteenth time, which is reflected in it.
‘I hope you’re okay, but you’re the reason’, it quickly sounds on opener “Fortnight”. We hear Taylor Swift singing in a rather calm manner, something that occurs remarkably often throughout the record. The softer vocals match the intimate character of both the music and the content. Swift soon makes it clear that she is not doing well and that she has a broken heart: ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’. The backing vocals are provided by Post Malone, an unexpected collaboration that pays off. The music blossoms like a flower and at the end Post Malone adds some magic to the music in his solo piece. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few times magic is present throughout The Tortured Poets Department.
Taylor Swift is known for her writing skills and comes up with some striking lyrics in the second song. ‘You left your typewriter in my apartment / I’ll think some things I’ll never say, like who uses typewriters anyway?’, ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea Motel’ and our favorite ‘You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate, we declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist’. The texts, among other things, come across so flat that there seems to be precious little substance behind them. The fact that the good Taylor Swift has to confirm that she is not the rebellious Patti Smith is undoubtedly an insult to the punk legend. Charlie Puth does the best with this form of advertising, but this text seems to come from the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl who thinks she will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Watch out, Bob Dylan, because Taylor Swift is coming after you!
Many of the songs on Taylor’s eleventh album pass without really making a lasting impression and “Down Bad” is a great example of this. The music is a bit more catchy here, but we end up forgetting the melody once the song is over. Only the way ‘Crying at the gym’ and ‘Fuck it if I can’t have him’ are rhymed makes a lasting impression. The poet in Swift loves to rhyme and so throughout the album ‘You don’t get to tell me about sad, if you wanted me dead you should have just said’ and ‘Good boy, that’s right, I’ll show you heaven if you’ll be an angel all night’ review. The rhymes of ‘sad’ with ‘said’ and ‘right’ with ‘night’ are already nice harbingers of how Taylor uses ‘bar’ and ‘car’ in the simplest rhyme scheme for the umpteenth time during “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”. pour.
“So Long, London” is musically slightly more exciting. They seem to be working towards a climax and the lyrics are also a bit stronger here, but unfortunately the song is already over before that climax is reached. After about twenty minutes things finally get moving with “But Daddy I Love Him”, which is somewhat in the line of Speak Now. The music is quite dramatic and we hear an enthusiastic Taylor Swift who is accompanied by acoustic instruments for a change, a welcome change after all that slower electro pop. Also “Florida!!!” manages to stand out thanks to the recognizable and characterful voice of Florence Welsh. The frontwoman of Florence + the Machine also brings a typical percussion part and knows how to bring a breath of fresh air through the album.
Taylor Swift previously sang on, among others, “Look What You Made Me Do” in “mad woman” already extensively about her reputation and also on “Guilty as Sin?” it is briefly referred to here. Yet the song has little else to offer and musically Taylor Swift does not have much new to offer. Pretty much every song from The Tortured Poets Department would on either Midnights, folklore in evermore can stand there without being noticed and sometimes the similarities are very striking. The tingling sound throughout the new “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is extremely similar to that on “Mastermind“, but manages to leave a much smaller impression than the older song.
Yet we must also give the latter credit, because the song is about how a depressed Taylor Swift, despite the heartache, sings all kinds of love songs about her ex on stage night after night. We also sympathize with Taylor Swift on “loml” and here the singer-songwriter comes up with beautiful lyrics. Where that abbreviation usually stands for ‘love of my life’, here it ends with ‘you’re the loss of my life’. Despite its simplicity, ‘What we thought was for all time was momentary’ is one of the most beautiful lines on the album and falls completely into place on this piano ballad. It seems somehow a counterpart to the beautifully romantic “New Year’s Day“, although “loml” is a little less magical. The magic between Taylor and her ex has clearly been gone for some time, but the emotions are still palpable in an honest and pure way.
For a little over an hour, Taylor Swift takes us into her broken heart and we can only say that she is with The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t have much to offer. We can completely imagine that Taylor Swift had to write off her broken heart, but the added value of releasing this record remains a mystery for now. It all sounds a little too much like knock-offs of the three previous albums. Swift clearly needs a musical revival and new co-writers who challenge her again, because here it sounds as if her relationship with Jack Antonoff no longer has much to offer. Some of the songs with Aaron Dessner may be more to our liking, but overall it is The Tortured Poets Department without a doubt a disappointment. Musically it is often uninteresting and the lyrics also remind us a little too often of supposedly profound Pinterest quotes from 2008.
Those who can’t get enough of the album will be happy to hear that a deluxe edition has also been released with no fewer than fifteen new songs.
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Discover “Florida!!!”, our favorite song from The Tortured Poets Departmentin our Picture of the Plate-playlist op Spotify.
