On The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift Is Still Rejecting Your Judgment

The arrival today of Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, is a fitting capstone to our collective year of Swift hysteria, which launched with the Eras Tour and peaked at the Super Bowl in February. Her fledgling relationship with Travis Kelce somehow managed to make the most famous person in the world even more famous, and the streak of football dominance for the Chiefs meant she became a fixture in the last part of culture she hadn’t already touched.

But that kind of ubiquity has its downsides, and on The Tortured Poets Department, Swift approaches her outsized role in society with a bit of venom that gives way to acceptance. Over 16 tracks and a few bonuses, it seems to be dealing with what was happening behind the scenes in the year before her relationship with Kelce began. Just by looking at the leaked lyrics, online commentators saw plenty of references to her brief spring 2023 relationship with hell-raiser and The 1975 front man Matty Healy and a few to the dissolution of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn.

Recalling Swift’s year of omnipresence and overt romantic turmoil can help a listener parse the record on a musical level. As with 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, it is bifurcated between two musical styles. On songs like “LOML” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” there are hints of the twinkling piano refrains we might have once associated with William Bowery, the nom de plume under which Alwyn cowrote songs on Swift’s last three albums. Healy’s musical DNA bursts through on “The Tortured Poets Department,” the album’s emotional apex, and the charming and beguiling “Guilty as Sin?” It’s bookended by a joyfully strange reference to the 1989 song “The Downtown Lights” by British sophisti-pop band The Blue Nile, which Healy has called his ”favorite band of all time.”

These two styles roughly align with the approach of Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, the album’s two producers and Swift’s two main collaborators since 2020. The Dessner songs feel like a melding of the folk-pop of Folklore and the punchy post-emo she experimented with on Speak Now (2010). On the Antonoff songs, the lyrics feel more improvisational—and occasionally clunkier—and the synthesizers bear his ’80s-chasing hallmarks, while still establishing that Swift and Antonoff are on the hunt for a new direction to push pop music.

Swift is a lot cooler than most of her fans might understand—but to maintain her approachable appeal, she has made a shtick out of seeming uncool. That never presented more of a challenge for her than when she was romantically linked with Healy. His history as a somewhat unsuitable guy—which only intensified after he displayed what was viewed as tiresomely racist behavior on a podcast—brought Swift in for public opprobrium. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” Swift sounds genuinely angry for the first time, and though the song’s lyrics focus on parental judgement, it’s hard not to hear lines like, “All the wine moms are still holding out. But fuck them, it’s over” as references to America’s paternalistic—though occasionally correct—concern for her moral well-being.

For as long as she has been a public figure, Swift has used her lyrics to address public misconceptions about her character, most notably the litany of complaints she worked into the verses of 2014’s “Shake It Off.” This fixation on correcting the public record occasionally distracted from moments that could have otherwise foregrounded her lyrical skill and musical growth. Still, public perceptions obviously preoccupy her, and implicating her audience into feeling savvy for knowing her truth is one of the ways that she builds genuine rapport with them.

On Midnights (2022), “Karma” and “Lavender Haze” evoke this pose most elegantly, and on early listens, I read them as the satiated expressions of a person coming to terms with the misunderstandings. But over time, I heard a deep discontent in that album, and those songs now sound like the work of a wounded person. In hindsight, it was an album built around the sublimated depression and anxiety of someone who is beginning to deeply doubt the life they have made for themselves. On The Tortured Poets Department, we hear what happens when that person decides to tear it all down and start again. It sounds as if Swift has given up on trying to correct the record. Instead, we see characters coming to terms with the fact that they are probably the architects of their own destruction, that those public opinions may well be right.

As Swift has aged, she has become more comfortable creating fictional characters (like Betty, James, and Inez in the Folklore song cycle, or Este in “No Body, No Crime”) and sprinkling in the true, telling details that could make for a gripping short story, without too much regard for signposting what is real and what isn’t. (You can call it autofiction, or if you’re Tavi Gevinson, you might choose the word satire.) On The Tortured Poets Department, a listener emerges with a sense of what Swift’s life has been like over the last two years, even as many of the specifics—the people on the lam in Texas and the ones pining for a condo in Destin you hear about on “Florida!!!” for example—are clearly fictional.

The ambiguity is Swift’s great skill as an entertainer, but there are moments on the record where she winks at her trickster ways. Most alluringly, Taylor Swift herself becomes a character in the album’s final song, “Clara Bow,” joining the ’20s actor and Stevie Nicks in a lineage of dream performers that a small-town girl might aspire to one day become. The song ends with lines that are cutting and optimistic at the same time: “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it. / You’ve got edge she never did. / The future’s bright, dazzling.” It’s a clever bit of self-referential creation, both acknowledging and pushing against the constant critique leveled at her, that she is cautious or too safe, while also implying that Swift is already a pop culture idol of the past.

Listening to The Tortured Poets Department, I was reminded of the oddest recent instantiation of our public Swiftiemania. Earlier this year, Michigan mother Jennifer Crumbley was tried on four counts of involuntary manslaughter after her son killed four people in a school shooting. During her opening argument, Crumbley’s defense attorney, Shannon Smith, brought up the pop star in a circuitous way. “Driving into court today, I blasted Taylor Swift to warm up my voice and calm my nerves, and there was a line in one of her songs that summarized what this case is about,” she said. “Band-Aids don’t stop bullet holes,” she continued, misquoting the “Bad Blood” line “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes.” The argument here was that prosecuting Crumbley was an insincere attempt to atone for the shooting by a municipality with a guilty conscience. The defense didn’t work, and Crumbley was convicted on all four counts and sentenced to 10 to 15 years earlier this month.

Smith’s reference was a display of just how omnipresent Swift’s cultural output has become. Swift’s music—and, perhaps more so, her antics—function a bit like cultural wallpaper for us now. She’s the only artist you can really bring up in court, even though you obviously shouldn’t. She might be the only artist to become subject of government genuflection. In the January 2023 Ticketmaster hearing, senators from Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal all the way to Utah’s Mike Lee fell over themselves to display their knowledge of her music.

It was also a reminder that when Taylor Swift is feeling judgment, it isn’t just from music journalists, young fans, or coastal elites, it’s the local defense attorneys of small-town Michigan. It’s every single person who knows about pop culture. That is a lot of public pressure for anyone, even if she was the mastermind, the first billionaire to reach that milestone only through her music. Swift’s albums have always been events. But as her career goes on, they have also become the moments where she checks in with herself and tries to figure out if it was all worth it.

Perhaps serving as the source of quasi-religious joy to people of various backgrounds and life experiences has given her unique insight into the deep boringness of collective humanity’s innermost desires. Imagination seems to be the way she survives online abuse, surveillance, constant scrutiny, and whatever it was that happened when she was at Antonoff’s wedding to Margaret Qualley last summer (which all sounds to me like an unimaginable hell). What cements her as an era-defining artist is her ability to use close observation of the mundane and physical to transform these very peculiar experiences into something universal. When she succeeds at it, as she does on The Tortured Poets Department, it is because she is inventive enough to present the unrelatable as the most obvious thing.