BEN SISARIO Hey, have you guys seen my antique typewriter? I think I left it at someone’s apartment. I swear, I’m so absent-minded …
JON PARELES I’m not sure you want to be associated with that typewriter’s owner, Ben. He doesn’t come off too well on “The Tortured Poets Department”’; by the end, he’s been reduced to “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”
SISARIO Over the years, I’ve trained myself to view Taylor Swift’s work through the eyes of her fans — that’s crucial for understanding Swift, whose connection with her listeners is at the root of her success, and it’s also become part of the art itself. The question is not just what is Swift saying, but what is she telling her fans, and how will they respond to it? And for my first few times listening to “Tortured Poets,” it seemed crystal clear to me that this album would rally fans intensely. This is an epic of romantic martyrdom, a cry of revenge greased by tears of rage. She’s pushing Swifties’ buttons, and I could imagine stadiums on every continent screaming in unison: “I love you, it’s ruining my life!”
The sound, too, seems perfectly calibrated. Over much of the last decade, Swift has kept parallel musical paths: moody electro-pop with Jack Antonoff, and raw, delicate indie-folk with Aaron Dessner. She split the difference here, engaging both producers, and I think Swifties vote yes.
PARELES It’s not just one Taylor Swift, though. It’s at least two: the world-conquering billionaire superstar who has stadiums chanting “More!” and the vulnerable girlfriend whose heart explodes when a guy teasingly slips a ring on her ring finger. It’s also the Swift who can’t help gathering writerly details for her next song, and the Swift who’s very deliberately planting autobiographical clues and Easter eggs for the fans to find. The tension between Swift as a shrewd, workaholic cultural colossus and Swift the 34-year-old woman seeking a worthy, committed partner — and, she suggests, marriage and family — is stronger than ever on this album, and makes it a real jumble of agendas.
CARYN GANZ I have long found it baffling that some Swift observers are hellbent on inscribing her into a queer narrative. To me, she is by far our most heteronormative pop star, with a catalog of songs longing for the kind of straight, fairy tale romance that ends in traditional marriage and children. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) While it’s never wise to speculate about a public figure’s sexuality, Swift has made her romantic life the overt text of her work and is nearly demanding that fans read “Tortured Poets” as historical record — including lyrics about her current boyfriend, the paradigm of American heterosexuality: a football player. The tracks on the new album, like so many in her catalog, insist that no accomplishment is worth more than, or worthwhile without, that happy ending. The things that threaten it — immaturity, insincerity, addiction, chaos, lack of commitment, enemies tarnishing her reputation — are evils to be vanquished. “Tortured Poets” is quite bloodthirsty, which I enjoy in doses, but its power is blunted by its sonic and thematic repetition. Nobody here knows when to say when.
LINDSAY ZOLADZ My opinion of this album, which I reviewed on Friday, really hasn’t changed with repeated listens, and if anything I’ve backed even further into the corners of my initial praise and criticism. I have entered a handful of its songs into my personal Swift pantheon (the title track, “Guilty as Sin?,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Black Dog,” “Fortnight” and “Florida!!!,” in precisely that order), and I believe that everything else needed at least a few more minutes in the air fryer.
I hear only two unique concerns on this album that separate it from any other Swift release. The first is being in love with a person who is struggling with their mental health and possibly an addiction — the manic highs, the feverish promises and the sudden abandonment she describes all feel incredibly vivid and give the material its emotional arc. She puts it succinctly in one of my favorite moments here, when she ends the song “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” with a halting and even comic “Whoa, maybe I can’t.”
And then, of course, there is Swift’s fascinating pushback against her more judgmental fans. She’s defiant on the much-discussed “But Daddy I Love Him” — “I’ll tell you something about my good name, it’s mine alone to disgrace,” she tells all the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs” who clutch their pearls when Swift is seen with someone they don’t approve of — but I’ve also been thinking about its sister song on the second LP, the forlorn “How Did It End?” On that one, Swift woefully braces herself for all the chatter that will accompany the public announcement of a breakup, with all the people she knows and millions she’ll never meet demanding, “We must know, how did it end?”
That sounds exhausting, yes, but I would also love to hear Swift grappling more with her own role in that dynamic. Because even while she is bemoaning that kind of intrusiveness, I don’t know if she’s ever released an album that so explicitly lends itself to the kind of lyric-by-lyric analysis of whom she’s singing about. How do you all square the desire for privacy she seems to crave in many of these songs with the simultaneous Easter egginess of it all?
PARELES Lindsay, I wouldn’t call it a craving for privacy — not when she’s spending three hours a night onstage, walking red carpets and enjoying a public display of affection at the Super Bowl. Rather than privacy, the theme is more like seeking autonomy under the spotlight: the right to make good choices and bad ones, to learn — or not — from mistakes, to wreak vengeance or come to terms with regrets (the way she does in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”). I’ve never been a big fan of the pains-of-fame album, which can easily tilt into self-pity; it takes a songwriter as great as Joni Mitchell to come up with a song as telling as “For the Roses.” To me, a line like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” is a lot more resonant than “I was hitting my marks.” Somehow Swift has managed to get her fans to identify not just with her heartaches but with career pressures that, at this point, are self-imposed.
SISARIO I don’t see the duality of Swift’s on/offstage personae as a conflict as much as fodder for the enterprise. Yes, the dissonance between the outward triumph and joy of the Eras Tour, on the one hand, and the interior agony she was apparently going through at the same time, is intriguingly jarring. But the theme running through so much of her work is performative misery, which she turns into gold by celebrating it with her fans.
PARELES One thing that’s virtually absent from this album is the playful but self-questioning touch that Swift brought to “Anti-Hero.” The songs on this album are pretty much just sad or angry. The upbeat moments, like “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” or “But Daddy I Love Him,” still lash out at targets, and even “Imgonnagetyouback,” which is at least partly a wordplay exercise, has pushback at its core. After the self-reflection of the last few albums, are we headed back to teenage petulance?
SISARIO Something that “Tortured Poets” drove home for me is that perhaps Swift’s greatest strength is how she has melded songwriting and journaling. Even she admits she’s no Patti Smith. But her gift is conveying the sense of honest intimacy, letting her feelings spill out in ways that seem straight from the heart. Her most powerful lyrics often involve telling details — a scarf, a cardigan — that are like burning memories.
And the journal is an inherently messy model. It has no end. Its purpose is to be a repository of the thoughts and feelings that are too raw, too personal, to say in public. (Well, at least to conceal while you are singing along with 80,000 people about those intimate details from a previous album.)
For a lot of Swift’s career, I think she has been a master of taming this chaos with the discipline of song. And it still happens here: the tight verse-chorus-verse of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” could almost fit on “1989.” But overall — and definitely on the “Anthology” tracks — the journal sprawl wins out.
ZOLADZ Swift has in recent years pivoted to a release strategy that has more in common with rappers than other pop stars, and she seems to be following the lead of someone like Drake in her more-is-more approach. I do wonder, though, if her tour’s emphasis on her many different “eras” has only underscored how long this particular one has gone on. Sonically, the material on this album feels like an extension of either “Midnights” or “Folklore” and “Evermore.” Contrast the evolution here with the colorful reinventions between “Red” and “1989,” or between “Reputation” and “Lover.” To reference a hue she mentions on “The Prophecy,” too much of it feels like varying shades of greige.
PARELES There are some magnificent moments among the synths, especially with the vocal harmonies in songs like “So Long, London” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” But some of the sameness also comes from tunes and cadences that are starting to feel too familiar. One that especially stuck out to me on this album is the way a sustained verse melody gives way to a choppy pre-chorus, or chorus, that arrives in two-syllable bursts, the way it does in “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Fresh Out the Slammer,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “The Prophecy” and “The Bolter.”
When Swift started using that device, it brought some fresh hip-hop percussiveness into songwriting that was rooted in country. But now it’s standard practice for Swift and her many emulators. Swift is 11 albums and umpteen bonus tracks into her recording career, so it’s harder for her to evade echoes of her past. The songs near the end of this album, especially, start to sound like outtakes from “Folklore,” pretty as they are. But no one is forcing her to put 31 songs on an album, either.
GANZ It is simply too much, Jon, and for the first time in a while, listeners and critics are having honest conversations about it. Being a fan has come to mean unequivocal support in the stan (or superfan) era, with no room for criticism or questioning of any kind. The “Tortured Poets” moment is an interesting test — it has cracked open the door for debate and perhaps humanized Swift once again in the process. It’s been fascinating thinking about this album in contrast to Beyoncé’s supersized latest release, “Cowboy Carter,” which is diametrically opposed in nearly every way, though she is also the curator of a passionate fan base. (She is also eight years older.) At such a fraught moment in the world, Swift’s focus has grown exponentially insular. There can be comfort and safety in that for both artist and listener, but it only strengthens that parasocial relationship.
ZOLADZ To Ben’s point about the fans, and to crib a phrase from the streaming economy, this feels like an album designed for her top 5 percent of listeners — the ride-or-dies who will defend her every move and pore over her every lyrical clue. Everyone else seems either puzzled or underwhelmed by it as a whole. But Swift is someone who thrives off feeling underestimated and misunderstood, so maybe the mixed reception of this album will be the creative rocket fuel that launches her into her next era. Only time will tell if “Tortured Poets” represents a turning point in the cultural narrative about Swift, or if the mixed reception will be washed away by her next inevitable triumph. Appropriately enough, one of the two albums she has left to rerecord is “Reputation,” a defiant album she made during a time when her approval rating had dipped some. Suffice to say, I think we’re now ready for it, again.
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