Post mortem on a post-mortem
The true double-album within The Tortured Poets Department
As we rapidly approach the start of The Life of a Showgirl era, we close the proverbial book on The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD). Like many people, I found the album quite long, a little disjointed, and lacking a uniting central theme. I also enjoyed it! I didn’t think it was something revolutionary or a piece of art that pushes Taylor Swift’s artistry forward, but there are many song I like, listen to and connect with.
It’s easy to step back and say that this album is about “Relationships” broadly; it spans the sense of desolation after the end of a long-term partnership, a rebound and a betrayal, and finding new love, all in the public eye.
When released, TTPD dropped with an initial 16 tracks. Then, at 2am, Swift dropped a batch of 15 tracks as The Anthology, billing the package as a “double album.” Truly, I do not see a major differentiator between the first “album” and the second thematically, musically, or otherwise.
That being said, I do think there are thematically two stories being within the 31-song TTPD/The Anthology.
The true double-album theory
As I stated above, the obvious theme is the story of her breakup(s). Swift has said that this was an album that she had to write, that she had something to say, and it helped her process and move on. The songs with these theme are more obvious, this is So Long, London, it’s loml, it’s The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.
There are some incredibly raw feelings throughout the album, about the end of her 6-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, which broke after the Eras Tour started, about her rebound whirlwind love affair with Matty Healy, who ended up being as big a piece of shit as he seemed.
So Long, London stands out as so raw to me. One of my favorite lines from the entire album comes from that song, where she says, “I’m just getting color back into my face/I’m just mad as hell cause I loved this place.” There is this sense of devastation about the breakups — both Joe and Matty are British, and it didn’t work out with either of them — and not only is she losing a partner, but she is losing a place she loved. Who among us cannot go back somewhere because it’s ruined without the people you first experienced it with?
All of these songs are basically Swift exploring her feelings about the breakup(s), and in some ways, she had to go there. She was in a long relationship with Joe that seemed to be circling the drain (folklore-evermore-Midnights was not a run of happy albums), and she is most famous for writing about her relationships. It would have broken form if the album following the breakup hadn’t been a look back.
What was surprising was how few songs seemed to be truly about that, and the majority (as far as we can all tell) were about a month or so during the spring of 2023 that she spent dating the 1975 front man.
There is also no rhyme or reason as to which “album” tracks about Joe or Matty appeared on. It might have made a little more sense if the first drop was clearly about Joe and the second about Matty. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
She had something else she wanted to say
The more interesting album in there, is one that dives into Swift’s experience going through these breakups in the public eye. These songs are a much deeper excavation of how it feels to be one of the most successful pop stars in the world on the singularly most successful world tours ever, and have that be a wildly different experience from her own inner life.
That dichotomy seems to be what has led her to write The Life of a Showgirl, and hopefully now that she is free of mediocre men, she can explore those themes more deeply. While few of her listeners know what it’s like to be so publicly on top of the world, the feeling of seeming successful outwardly but crumbling mentally and emotionally is all too common.
The other overarching message when Swift writes about being in the public eye is that sometimes she hates it! Having hundreds of millions of fans with hundreds of millions of (often stupid) opinions constantly voicing them is annoying! And to have to hear it day in and day out while on this record-breaking tour and going through personally difficult times was difficult to her.
If she truly wanted a double-album where each separate “album” had its own theme, the first would be breakup forward, like everyone expected, with the second being her commentary on her relationship to her audience.
In Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? she dissects the weight of her carefully curated public persona of nice, good girl versus the absolute vitriol she has also dealt with throughout her entire career, and a few instances where she has stood her ground or called specific people/things out. “I was tame, I was gentle till the circus life made me mean/ ‘Don’t you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth,’” she says, illustrating how her and her team have spent the last decade stripping her of edge or controversy, which has opened her up to unending criticism that she is expected to just take without comment.
What’s more, she says, “You caged me and then you called me crazy/I am what I am ‘cause you trained me,” suggesting that she feels that stripping her of any strong opinions and insulating her with lawsuits that protect both her as a person and her art (like threatening to sue the guy tracking her jet, or Olivia Rodrigo allegedly using Cruel Summer in deja vu without crediting Taylor) has actually made her more controversial. And it’s driving her nuts!
Swift’s has a well-documented history of loving and nurturing her fans. She used to interact on social media, invite fans over to her literal house to listen to new albums prior to release. This created an environment for a hyper-parasocial relationship, where fans think they truly know Taylor Swift The Person, and feel entitled to complain and give advice and critique until their requests are met.
Remember in like May 2023 when “fans” wrote a letter asking for someone to end the relationship with Matty Healy on Taylor’s behalf, because she simply couldn’t be in her right mind to date him. (I just got second-hand embarrassed again looking this up). She was 33, mind you. But Daddy I Love Him seems to be a direct response, where she writes, “I’ll tell you something right now/ I’d rather burn my whole life down/Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” She said shut up!
One of the more poignant and moving songs on the album with this theme is How Did It End. On its face, it’s a song reflecting on how a relationship ended, a self-proclaimed post-mortem, literally beginning with “We hereby conduct this post-mortem.”
But that is not the heart of the song. Swift goes deeper, discussing how she is so well-known for only writing about her breakups that when news of one breaks, “The empathetic hunger descends. The idea that she only writes about relationships is also objectively untrue, even here in this breakup album.
Throughout the song, she repeats the line “It’s happenin’ again,” which seems to be referencing the fact that another one of her relationships has ended, once again she is without the love she has been looking for and singing about her whole life. On a deeper level, the line is conveying the feeling of “oh no, not only do I have to process this breakup, but the the press and the fans and the haters are all also going to enjoy this spectacle of my heartbreak.”
This sentiment is echoed as she says versions of “We’ll tell no one/ Except all of our friends/ We must know/ How did it end?” throughout the song, depicting the pleasure with which people consume her very real heartbreak, and the public’s entitlement to the intimate details of her personal relationships. And by the way, she ends the song with “But I still don’t know/ How did it end?” So even she doesn’t know why it didn’t work out — it just didn’t, and yet people are still obsessed with prying.
The Ideal Tortured Poets Department and The Anthology
If I were the one with the red pen to TTPD, it would have looked like this:
Album 1: Relationships with men
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
Down Bad
So Long, London
loml
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
The Black Dog
I Look in People’s Windows
The Prophecy
Peter
The Bolter
The Manuscript
The Alchemy OR So High School
Album 2: Relationship to fans
But Daddy I Love Him
Guilty As Sin?
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
I Can Do It with a Broken Heart
Clara Bow
The Albatross
How Did It End?
I Hate It Here
Cassandra
To note, I also would have cut at least Fortnight, TTPD, Fresh Out the Slammer, Florida!!!, imgonnagetyouback, and thanK you aIMee, because none of those say anything truly different. With Fortnight and TTPD, I can’t even really parse a meaning. It feels like they are so personal to Swift and her experience that they are a nod to something that happened or an inside joke that I am simply not part of. I have analyzed the text! I do not know what she’s getting at, other than the breakup(s) made her feel like she needed to be institutionalized.
Also worth mentioning, there are three songs that don’t fit these themes at all were The Alchemy, So High School, and Robin. The first two obviously are pretty happy songs about Travis Kelce, the last about the innocence of Aaron Dessner’s young son. The Travis songs were sort of a bone thrown, I think, to say “this all sucked but I’m better now, I’ve moved on,” and one of them might have been a good album closer.
Lastly, I want to make clear that I am offering this critique after fully understanding that half of the album’s message is that she’s tired of people critiquing things they don’t know about and she actually doesn’t want to hear it. Fair! After nearly a year and half processing the album, this is the story it tells to me.
As someone who believes So It Goes...is one of her best songs, produced of course by Max Martin and Shellback, I am ready and excited for the next era.