Taylor Swift lifts the curtain a little on her legendary pen.
When The Department of Tortured Poets was released on April 19, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter provided special commentary on the record – as well as detailed information on a selection of songs, including “Clara Bow,” “Fortnight” and more – during from the premiere of iHeartRadio.
Swift gave even more insight into the already critically acclaimed album to Amazon Music for her special Department of Tortured Poets listening experience: Taylor Swift Track by Track.
Introducing the record on iHeartRadio, she said that “a lot of the songs on The Department of Tortured Poets treating the idea of grief or loss in a metaphor for something else.
“Down bad”
In “Down Bad,” for example, Swift said she likened “the idea of being love bombed where someone, you know, turns your world upside down and dazzles you and then kind of abandons you to being kidnapped alien where this girl was kidnapped by aliens but she wanted to stay with them and when they like take her back to her hometown she says to him, “Where are you going I liked it there, it was weird?” but it was cool, come back!”
“The character in the song was just saying to me, ‘I’ve just been exposed to a whole other galaxy and a universe that I didn’t know was possible, how can you put me where I was before? ‘”
“Fifteen days”
Discussing opening track “Fortnight,” which features Post Malone, Swift told Amazon Music that it “features a lot of common themes that recur throughout this album,” with one of the most prominent being “fatalism – desire, wasting away, lost dreams.
“I think it’s a very fatalistic album in that it has a lot of very dramatic lines about life and death. ‘I love you, this is ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic and dramatic things to say,” she said. “It’s that kind of album.”
In her comment on iHeartRadio, she added that she “always imagined this taking place in this American town, where the American dream that you thought would happen to you didn’t happen, did it ?”
“Florida!!!”
The second guest acts on The Department of Tortured Poets comes to “Florida!!!” – a haunting track that Swift wrote and sang with Florence and the Machine Florence Welch.
Reflecting on the “starting point” she used to write the song with Welch, 37, during the record’s premiere on iHeartRadio, the Midnights The singer said: “I think I had this idea of what happens when your life doesn’t work out for you, or your choices that you’ve made catch up with you, and you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgments, and circumstances haven’t led you to where you thought you would be, and you just want to escape everything you’ve always known, is there somewhere you could go?
“I always look like… Data line, people commit these crimes, where do they immediately leave the city and go? They’re going to Florida,” she said. “They are trying to reinvent themselves, to have a new identity, to integrate.”
“And I think when you’re going through heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all .’ .’ »
“Clara Arc”
Closing track “Clara Bow” – whose namesake is an actress from the silent film era – is “a commentary on what I’ve seen in the industry I’ve worked in over time” , Swift revealed to Amazon Music.
“I used to work at record labels trying to get a recording contract when I was little,” she said. “And they would say, ‘You know, you remind us…’ and then they would name an artist, and then they would sort of say something derogatory about her: ‘But you’re this, you’re so much better d ‘one way or another.’
“And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, like, ‘You could be the new replacement for this woman who did something great before you.'”
So, when deciding who to name in the song “The Lucky One” (Stevie Nicks, Bow and Swift herself), the singer said that she “chose women who have done great things in the past and who have been these archetypes of greatness in the entertainment industry.
Clara Bow, Swift noted, “was the first ‘it girl,'” while “Stevie Nicks is an incredible icon and example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”
“Who’s afraid of little old me?”
“Who’s afraid of little old me?” — whose words “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where I was raised” spawned the album’s first viral meme — was born from a moment of bitterness, Swift revealed during Amazon Music’s track-by-track experience.
Swift said she wrote the track alone, while “sitting at the piano in one of those moments where I felt bitter about everything we do to our artists as a society and in as a culture”.
“There is a lot about this particular concept on The Department of Tortured Poets,” she continued. “What are we doing to our writers and our artists and our creatives? We have put them through hell. We watch what they create, and then we judge it.
“We love watching artists suffer, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we cause that pain and we just watch what happens.”
“My boy only breaks his favorite toys”
As the name suggests, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is told “from the perspective of a child’s toy,” the singer said during iHeartRadio’s first commentary.
The song, which she wrote alone, is about “being someone’s favorite toy until they break you and don’t want to play with you anymore — which is how many of us feel.” We find ourselves in relationships where we are so valued by one person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden they break us or devalue us in their minds.
“We’re still holding on to ‘No, no, no.’ You should have seen them the first time they saw me. They will come back to it. They will come back to it. So it’s kind of like a song about denial, really,” she said, “so that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”
The Department of Tortured Poets is out now.