The Paw Print

By Madeleine Spanbauer

If Taylor Swift could be incapable of anything, it would be disappointing her fans. Her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, dropped on April 19, 2024, and so far it looks like very few people are underwhelmed by the project, as it includes everything that her fans crave, from ingenious lyrics to pop ballads to heartbreaking soliloquies. 

Swift announced the arrival of her album at the 2024 Grammy Awards in her acceptance speech for Pop Vocal Album, which she won with her tenth studio album, Midnights. The internet immediately took off with this new information to create heaps of fan theories that ranged from ludicrous to believable. However, fans were actually able to guess some parts correctly, including the fact that the track “loml” stood for “loss of my life,” rather than “love of my life.”

One of the biggest surprises for Swifties came two hours after the album dropped when Swift released an additional 15 songs to go on a second version of the album, titled The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. An anthology is defined as a published collection of poems or poetry, a fitting title for the album written by the chairman of the department herself.

Sonically, the album is incredibly cohesive with a consistent style throughout. The original album has Jack Antonoff’s signature written all over it, one of Swift’s longtime collaborators. It features smooth synth beats and catchy melodies reminiscent of the Midnights era. However, The Anthology features more of a folksy and lyrical feeling, with folklore and evermore collaborator Aaron Dessner’s sound being more prominent.

Swift has two collaborations throughout the album, including the opening track, “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone),” and “Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The Machine).” Both collaborations opened up new avenues for Swift, as she had never previously worked with either artist, and their vocals and lyrical input significantly brought up the sounds of each track. Florence Welch’s haunting vocals, especially, add a key of tortured emotion that fits nicely with the rest of the album.

The Tortured Poets Department is certainly not free of emotional ballads and the breakup anthems that many associate with Swift’s earlier work. Many songs, surprisingly, seem to be about Swift’s brief relationship with the 1975 singer Matty Healy. Some of these songs are more reminiscent of their relationship and the time they spent together, such as the title track, and “Guilty as Sin?” However, other songs about Healy deal with many of the raw emotions and resentment that Swift dealt with after the breakup, including, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “loml,” “Down Bad,” “Fresh Out The Slammer,” and an anger-filled track titled, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

While many songs focus on Swift’s relationship with Healy, fans have long awaited the tracks dedicated to Joe Alwyn, Swift’s ex-boyfriend whom she dated for six years. While only a few of the songs on the album seem to be about Alwyn, those songs pack a punch with their allusions to how Alwyn allegedly refused to marry her. One prominent example of this is in, “So Long, London,” where Swift opens with ethereal vocals that fans can’t help but associate with wedding bells. 

One track that fans can’t decide who to associate with is “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” a song from the perspective of a child’s toy where Swift sings about her experience with love and loss and all things in between. Although people don’t know who this song is referring to, it definitely gives some insight into how one of her previous partners made her feel unappreciated.

An especially compelling track on the album is track six, “But Daddy I Love Him,” which looks to be a message from Swift to her fans saying that their constant input on her relationships is exhausting and unnecessary. Through this song, Swift clearly communicates how she feels that her decisions are her own to make and how she doesn’t need others to belittle her or her choices regarding her relationships.

While he is definitely not the focal point of the album, Swift’s current boyfriend and NFL superstar Travis Kelce acted as her muse once on the original album. In a cute and laugh-worthy track titled, “The Alchemy,” Swift makes fun and whimsical references to Kelce’s football career that left fans giggling.

Swift has several tracks devoted to her life in the spotlight on the album, as well. One fan-favorite track, titled “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” sounds very upbeat and happy at first, but upon closer inspection is actually an introspective reflection on Swift’s time during The Eras Tour and how it was hard to keep up appearances when she was grieving the loss of her relationship. The final track on the original album, titled “Clara Bow,” makes a comment on the music industry and how it constantly cycles through people and spits them out as soon as they’re no longer interesting or relevant. In another emotional and anger-filled song, “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me,” Swift compares fame to a circus, making a callback to her 2020 track, “Mirrorball,” which followed a similar idea.

In terms of poetry, the most lyrical lines are focused into The Anthology, where Swift demonstrates more of her proficiency with lyrics and metaphors than in the original album. One example of this is in the bridge of, “How Did It End,” where Swift sings, “Say it once again with feeling / How the death rattle breathing / Silenced as the soul was leaving / The deflation of our dreaming / Leaving me bereft and reeling.” This song details a romance kept behind closed doors, and this excerpt gives heartbreaking insight into how Swift felt when that romance ended.

Another track full of poetic lines is, “Peter,” a song from the perspective of Wendy detailing how she felt abandoned and lost while waiting for Peter Pan to return to her. In this song, Swift writes, “And I won’t confess that I waited, but I let the lamp burn / As the men masqueraded, I hoped you’d return / With your feet on the ground, tell me all that you’d learned / Cause love’s never lost when perspective is earned.” This illustrates Wendy’s longing for Peter, and how she thought they could make up for their lost time since he would have matured in his time away. The bridge ends with the line, “But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light,” showing how Wendy decided she couldn’t wait for Peter any longer.

Taylor Swift has once again delivered a dynamic and multilayered album full of everything from her deepest darkest fantasies to her hopes and dreams to her classic heartfelt reflections on life. One thing that so many people admire about Swift is her ability to be transparent with her fans, and she did exactly that in this work. Including both sides of the musical spectrum with heartbreaking ballads and upbeat pop anthems, The Tortured Poets Department delivers everything the public has been waiting on for the last two years, and people can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.