Exactly one month before I moved to Vassar, Taylor Swift surprise-dropped her eighth studio album, “folklore.” It is only fitting that her 11th studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released on April 19, exactly one month before I will graduate from Vassar. Swift has been an integral part of my college experience. Her music has punctuated my time here and connected me with some of my closest friends. We have stayed up until midnight to listen to every one of the albums she has released during our Vassar tenure. It is ritual and it is tradition, and there is no other way I would have wanted to end my time at Vassar.
Before the official release of the album, Swift had shared the tracklist—a 16-song list of quirky titles including, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “But Daddy I Love Him” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”—as well as two unexpected featured artists, Post Malone and Florence + the Machine. These first 16 tracks were expected, but in a move that only Swift could pull off successfully, she surprise-dropped 15 more tracks at 2 a.m. EST, resulting in a 31-track double album that Swift named “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.”
In summation, the album is Swift’s most ambitious, complex and personal artistic endeavor thus far. As the name suggests, Swift put her songwriting (her “poetry”) in charge of this album, rather than an instrumentally-led project. The album was composed almost entirely in collaboration with producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, both of whom have worked extensively with Swift on several past projects. Their hand in this project is a clear signal of Swift’s comfort with her current musical niche and reflects her new unwillingness to reinvent herself just to keep the general public’s ever-critical, never-satisfied attention.
The first half of the album—the half that has been expected for four months now—is filled with moody synthesizers, a clear mark of Antonoff’s production style. On the album’s opening track, “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone, the synth starts off all by itself, weaving around Swift’s dreamy, flowing vocals. As the song progresses, tension builds, with more drums and synths gradually added, reaching a peak after Malone delivers his verse and harmonizes with Swift. Together, Swift and Malone paint a picture of a 14-day relationship. “I love you, it’s ruining my life” is the driving sentiment behind the story of this instant classic album opener.
The fifth track on any Swift album is always her most vulnerable and tragic, and “So Long, London” is no exception. The standard version of the album is infrequently punctuated by soul-wrenching ballads such as this and “loml,” which allow the listeners a look into the death of a relationship. Many have theorized that the relationship in question is her six-year romance with British actor Joe Alwyn. Both songs hint at the reasons behind their unexpected and sudden breakup in April 2023. “You shit-talked me under the table/Talking rings and talking cradles/I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all,” Swift sings on “loml” over backing piano and strings. One almost wonders why, with lyrics that deliver such an emotional blow, “loml” was not picked to be the fifth track.
In a classic Swiftian moment of whiplash, the track after “loml” is “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” a poppy, upbeat track reminiscent of “Supercut” from the album “Melodrama” by Lorde. The instant similarities are unsurprising, given that both of the aforementioned songs were produced by Antonoff. Despite its sparkling, jumpy synths, the song is not a happy one by any means: “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day/ I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague/ I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art.”
I would be remiss to not include the songs on the album that clearly refer to Swift’s brief relationship with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy last summer. While these songs did not rank amongst my favorites on the album, they must be understood in the greater context of the album. The title track is filled with tongue-in-cheek, almost cringeworthy lyrics about her relationship with the Brit: “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.” Other tracks, such as “imgonnagetyouback,” has dynamic production reminiscent of a song by The 1975. The last part of the trifecta of songs about Healy is “But Daddy I Love Him,” a snarky, sarcastic song about her fans’ attempted online interventions into the relationship between the singers. Despite the fact that these songs are eclipsed by other, stronger tracks on the album, they come together to contribute to a cohesive album about the life of a 30-something caught at a crossroads: out of the longest relationship she has ever known, fresh into a short-lived summer fling with an old situationship.
The second half of the album, which came as a complete surprise, is a stripped-down, acoustic counterpart to the first half. It opens with “The Black Dog,” which is, in my opinion, one of the best tracks that Swift has ever written. The track opens with Swift describing her pain at still being able to see an ex-lover’s location on her phone, which they never turned off after their split. It is soft, with little more than backing piano at the beginning. But as the track grows, drums are slowly layered in. Then, just as Swift proclaims, “Old habits die screaming,” a loud, crashing electric guitar makes its appearance before fading back to the starting production.
Another highlight of the second half of “The Anthology” is “So High School.” This track stands out in the album for two primary reasons. First, it is a soft rock song. While Swift has never committed to the genre for a full album, her discography is peppered with songs that could fit into that genre, and it is one that she does exceptionally well. Second, this song is only one of two that are obviously about her current beau, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The primary theme of this song centers around the fact that Swift feels young in a relationship, almost so young that she feels like she is back in high school. This is a sentiment that has been covered in songs for eternity, most famously in “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry. But what makes this song so notable in the context of Swift’s work is that the tracks that precede this song on the album make reference to the fact that Swift’s previous relationships made her feel old: “And I’m pissed off that you let me give you all that youth for free.” Keeping this feeling in mind, it is no surprise that Swift feels like she has been transported back to her youth at the outset of this new relationship. One of the lyrical highlights of this song is, “Truth, dare, spin bottles/ You know how to ball, I know Aristotle/ Brand new, full throttle/ Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” While this line has made the rounds on social media as a silly lyric, I think it is a beautiful example of Swift’s ability to take the most mundane of details about a relationship and make them feel magical.
The truth is that I do not have enough space to do justice to this masterpiece album. There are many more songs that I could go on about. “The Tortured Poets Department,” as Swift noted, is an album that she needed just as much as her fans did. It is a cathartic journey into her inner psyche at a time of relative turmoil in her life. For someone who has grown up with her music, this album comes at a perfect time in my life. I am at a crossroads myself, about to move on from one period of my life to another. This album showcases the best of Swift’s capabilities as a writer. She delivers lyrics that pack a punch, are intricately detailed and a stream of consciousness. It is almost like her 2020 album “folklore” in its storytelling, but this time, the stories are hers, and they are real, instead of about imagined characters and imagined situations. I feel so privileged that these two albums have bookended my time in college, a full-circle moment, and I feel so privileged to have experienced this period of Swift’s artistic growth with some of the people I love the most.