Taylor Swift opens the pages of her diary to her latest album The Department of Tortured Poets.
On the emotionally raw record, the pop superstar, 34, details a tumultuous period in her personal life as she reached another career peak.
While fans expected the album to be entirely inspired by her six-year relationship with ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, Swift once again surprised the world with a number of tracks that seemed like they were written about her brief romance last year with 1975 musician Matty Healy.
“It was really a lifeline for me – just the things that I was going through, the things that I was writing about… it kind of reminded me why songwriting helps me get through my life “, she explained to her fans about her new music. during a tour earlier this year. “I’ve never had an album where I needed to write songs as much as I did on Tortured poets“.
Indeed, some of Tortured poetsTracks are laced with longing and heartbreak, while others scream (literally) with anger and disbelief – not just at her ex-lovers, but also with the public’s dissection of her love life.
On opening track “Fortnight,” Swift wistfully reflects on becoming a stranger with a former lover. “And no one here is to blame/But what about your quiet betrayal?” she sings of fleeting romance. “I took the miracle drug/The effects were temporary/And I love you, it’s ruining my life.”
Then on the title track of the album, the singer makes more specific references. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re going to ruin everything with me/But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever left,” she sings, apparently referring to Lucy Dacus of Boygenius, who is friends with Healy .
“And I told Jack that about you so I felt seen/Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be,” Swift continues, likely referring to her longtime friend Jack Antonoff, who also produced the song.
In “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” Swift sings about being played by the object of her affection. “Put me back on my shelf/But first, pull the string and I’ll tell you he runs because he loves me,” she sings in one verse. (Alwyn has faced heat from fans since their breakup, as she seems to shy away from the attention that comes with dating a superstar like Swift.)
“I felt more when we were playing pretend than with all the Kens/ ‘Cause he took me out of my box/ He stole my tortured heart/ He left all these broken pieces/ He Said I was better/But I’m not,” she sings later in the song.
In “Down Bad,” Swift reveals that she was “crying in the gym” (she previously detailed her tour prep in Timesharing that she trained at Dogpound).
“Did you take all my old clothes just to leave me here naked and alone/In a field in my same old town that seems so hollow now,” sings Swift, who shared her 2020 Miss American documentary that she had fallen in love with Alwyn and his “wonderful, normal, balanced kind of life” away from the spotlight.
But now, “How dare you think it’s romantic/Leaving me safe and stranded,” she sings on the song.
On “So Long, London,” one of the album’s most heartbreaking tracks, Swift details her attempt to salvage a failing relationship and the loneliness she struggled with.
“I stopped trying to make him laugh/I stopped trying to break into the safe,” she sings, later referencing the “house on the Heath” she left behind. (In her Time Covering the interview, Swift talked about moving to a “foreign country” — likely London, where she often spent time with Alwyn — amid her public feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.)
“And I’m pissed that you let me give you all this youth for free,” she sings, mirroring what she had said Time to want to live freely. “I locked myself away in my house for many years – I will never get that time back,” she told the outlet.
In “Fresh Out the Slammer,” Swift further shares how isolated she felt in her relationship. “Another sheltered summer / Thunder rolls, it doesn’t understand me / Back broken in winter / Silent, bitter dinner, he was with her in dreams,” she sings.
Later in the track, Swift sings about “running” to another lover who was waiting for her. “Now we’re at the starting line/I’ve done my time,” she sings, perhaps referring to The Starting Line, a band often covered by The 1975. (On the bonus track “The Black Dog”, a heartbroken Swift makes another Starting Line reference.)
Swift appears to allude to Healy again on “Guilty As Sin” as she sings about someone sending her “downtown lights” as she “drowns in the Blue Nile.” (Healy once called Scottish band The Blue Nile his “favorite band of all time.”)
The pop star seethes in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” once again accusing an ex of disappearing. “You tried to buy a friend of mine some pills/But they just ghosted you/Now you know how it feels,” she sings.
“And I don’t even want you back/I just want to know/If the goal was to rust my bubbly summer,” she continues. (Swift and Healy’s breakup was made public just weeks after they first hooked up in early May, while she was on tour.)
On “Loml,” Swift expresses regret over rekindling a relationship with a “con artist” who sold her “a plan to get love fast” and left her more hurt than ever.
“You talked to me under the table talking about rings and talking cradles/I wish I could remember how we almost had it all,” she sings. “The coward claimed he was a lion/I comb through the braids of lies/’I’ll never leave’ ‘Whatever.'”
On “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” (a surprisingly melodically upbeat track), Swift seems to call out to two lovers who have promised her forever.
“He said he’d love me all his life/But that life was too short,” she sings at the start of the song. Then later, “He said he would love me forever/But that time was pretty short.”
In “Smallest Man,” Swift reaches a fever pitch: “You said normal girls were ‘boring’/But you were gone in the morning.”
“You turned off the stage lights but you’re still playing/And in plain sight you hid/But you are what you did/And I’ll forget you but I’ll never forgive you/The smallest man who ever lived,” she said. sung.