Music Review: Taylor Swift
The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (19 April 2024)
Taylor Swift crafted her April 19, 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, to evoke powerful emotions. This musical storybook in black and white with Roman numerals unfolds in a variety of styles, from spaghetti Western score to a dreamlike aura in synthesized or machine-based music. The muted meaning of the story becomes clear.
Read Scott Holleran’s complete song-by-song album review
Swift’s is a daring album, despite the safety of its minimalism, because it rejects what grief author and psychologist Megan Devine refers to as “the cult of positivity.” Swift counters the pervasive oversimplification that life, including romantic love, necessitates compartmentalizing everything into positive or negative.
This prevalent attitude—that living every day means incessantly, instantaneously judging everything that happens like it’s a glass that’s either half-full or half-empty—is dogma that one must be permanently “positive,” which positivists use as a cudgel to scorn anyone who holds or expresses a negative sensibility, especially an emotion that’s frowned upon. According to this cultishness, one must strive to be a docile, pleasant, sedated conformist, finding good in any calamity, heartbreak or injustice. In this cultural order, which advocates hustle and pitch as reasonable, everyone who is not positive is toxic, pitiful or difficult. Anyone who scrutinizes, questions and doubts the cult of positivity is suspected or accused of being negative.
Swift shreds this false dichotomy in songwriting that’s emotional, romantic and melodramatic. She’s not dark, angry and distraught for the sake of being contrarian on this bestselling album; she’s as airy in expressing rage as any honest person striving to find and nourish true love. She’s not cynical. She’s also not expressing jubilation for confusion. Swift’s felt the hurting. She writes about loss. I can’t honestly call Taylor Swift’s artistic philosophy romantic realism, but it’s near the ballpark.
Though comparisons are contextual, Taylor Swift writes and performs with the searching curiosity, depth, lightness and verve of the best popular recording artists—Alanis Morissette, Jackson Browne, Ed Sheeran, David Bowie and Olivia Newton-John, each an individualist, come to mind—with incisive, profound lyrics and pop music voiced with sweet, feminine strength and valor. The Tortured Poets Department, which I’ve listened to as a full anthology since its debut, holds the supremacy of lyrics over music. Though I prefer instrumental music with orchestration, Swift’s music aligns with and supports the lyrics, not the reverse. This goes against today’s contempt for concepts. The result is an insightful mood album about losing a loved one—including losing the loved one.
In each story on The Tortured Poets Department, a man may not be the One. He may later choose to become the One. These attuned foils, trials and fables capture the elusive man avoiding and/or detaching from romantic love. In one relevant song, the one she loves sabotages himself, destroying his highest values. The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift—the Anthology—emits sadness, grief and, in its pauses and silences (and always underneath the surface), the hollowness unique to losing the bond with one’s highest reverence, often for tragic and trivial reasons.
As usual, musician, singer and composer Taylor Swift sings to her signature, sparse electronic music in an ethereal stream of confession. With ample profanity, which is contextually on point, she integrates vocal phrases with the melody. Repeat listening clarifies and differentiates each tune. The whole production, co-written with various artists, mostly Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, affords an album with thought given to the placement of each song as part of an overarching plot progression.
In anguished, rhyming poetry fringed with triumph and defiance, Swift writes and sings as if tending to romantic grief. The Tortured Poets Department is not made to cultivate victimhood or self-pity; the goal, as ever with this mid-Pennsylvania native, is acquiring wisdom, understanding and happiness through self-awareness and introspection. In a breathy, naturally expressive voice, Taylor Swift maintains softness; she’s neither hard and bitter nor cruel.
Displaying anger and melancholy, the arch The Tortured Poets Department is musical, though purists and those who disregard music made with machines may disagree. Scattering literary references—about Aristotle, Dylan Thomas, Charlie Puth—and mentions of the writing process and technology, Swift, who plays piano and guitar, cedes that “[w]e're modern idiots.” Songs end as abruptly as her storied relationships. Hers is a conversational tone. Taylor Swift records without pretense.
Most tunes—some are like interstitials—form as gentle waves. Songs tend to be cold, punctuating Swift’s warm, deliberate, lyrical sentimentality by contrast as if to stress a sense of recovery. Swift’s softness animates each song’s sharpness. The byproduct is resilience and reflection. The Tortured Poets Department, like most of Swift’s songs (especially “The 1,” “Marjorie,” “Clean,” “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” “Delicate” and “Anti-Hero”) knits strength with vulnerability, making her songwriting seem more willowy than it is, which, in turn, makes it easier to dismiss Taylor Swift’s music. I changed my opinion of almost every song after repeated listening; usually with a higher estimate of each tune.
The Tortured Poets Department ends with a song called “The Manuscript.” Swift seals the short, optimistic forecast with sorrow—again, ditching both suffering for its own sake and the pap of pseudo-affirmations—completing the album as a literary loop.
Proclaiming herself in disc and vinyl notes as “Chairman of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY,” Swift sports androgyny with flair—in a motif of weddings, vows and matrimony—not celebration. The aim is to gain a husband. Securing a good mate, as you may know, amid feminism and terrified, emasculated and avoidant males, seems like it’s getting harder. Swift writes and sings as if she knows this—billowing slow, sad, sensual songs with explicit lyrics about the agonizing grief that comes from lost romantic love.
Again, and beware of the comparison, The Tortured Poets Department is similar to her somber, exquisite folklore. Swift writes and performs as though she knows what it’s like to be accused of being “too much,” “too heavy,” and “too serious” about love.
On “Clara Bow,” she confides: “It's hell on earth to be heavenly. Them's the breaks, they don't come gently.” Taylor Swift’s success lies in how she sings—and syncopates—what she writes. I challenge the reader to listen to this song. Wait for the lyric. Be ready for the rhyme. In an age of shallow show-offs toiling to impress others with pleasing facades and empty gestures instead of making love, consider the simple tragedy of someone being rejected because she’s lovable, worth wanting and good.
This is how Swift lets the audience in on what makes her grief more profound, never forcing the listener to sympathize. She accentuates her loss by showcasing the prospect of romantic love; she creates the portraiture of what might’ve been.
On one of her most poignant songs, “Guilty as Sin?” Swift co-writes and sings:
What if the way you hold me
Is actually what's holy?
If long suffering propriety
Is what they want from me
They don't know how you've haunted me
So stunningly
I choose you and me
... Religiously
I recently met someone who, upon learning of Swift’s then-new affair with the athlete (with whom she remains romantically involved), voiced concern that the 34 year-old artist is “too sensitive” and, subsequently, at risk of being jilted in romantic love.
Like today’s modernists, he may evade or ignore that, by virtue of being willing to love—wearing her ‘heart on her sleeve’, as the saying goes—Taylor Swift pursues happiness with enthusiasm and egoism. Here, she does so in poetry fused with sincerity, as if tending to her grief—with her own words, for her own sake.
Whomever can write with the caliber of what Taylor Swift writes on The Tortured Poets Department cannot sustain living in a state of torture. Swift writes as if her capacity for finding and naming—and beholding—man as exalted revolves on an axis of enduring love. It’s a rare quality rooted in selfishness which some, probably most, men choose not to learn to appreciate.
Taylor Swift’s newest album’s made for the deserving, the undaunted—those who dare to risk—which means risk losing—romantic love. The Tortured Poets Department neither ruminates upon nor exploits lost romantic love. She performs in grief for lost values; this in itself is a lost art. Whatever the state of one’s grief, including whether you know you’re grieving, grief comes and goes around and around again. As it arrives, this album’s available as a valve, a balm and, living up to its title, a systemized place to process and tend to grief.
Reclaiming what’s been robbed that belongs to you—or could belong to you—is not entirely up to you. Choosing to replenish or restore your capacity to love is. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department makes simple poetry of what the rational one can activate, practice and ritualize between pain and inner peace.
Note: Read Scott Holleran’s exclusive song-by-song review of The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift
