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Nearly 16 years ago, on the day her second album Fearless was released, Taylor Swift told us for the first time what it felt like to be dumped by a celebrity.
“When I find that person that is right for me, he’ll be wonderful,” she told Ellen DeGeneres, who had asked about her pop star ex-boyfriend, Joe Jonas. “And when I look at that person I’m not even going to remember the boy who broke up with me over the phone in 25 seconds when I was 18”.
And I, for two years, had orbited, idolised, worshipped this teenage country singer – ever since I found her on MySpace when all she’d shared with the world was four songs and a blog. I was furious. I hated him. I decided her pain was mine and swore him an enemy with an evangelical loyalty that back then made me part of a secret club, but would come to define a new era of celebrity fandom.
But it is not Joe Jonas I think of when I listen to “Forever & Always”, the song that phone call inspired. This smart screed full of adolescent righteousness perfectly distils the injustice, confusion, and grasp for evidence that follow a dumping, over fiddles that soar, a menacing guitar solo and angry, foot-stomping percussion.
Swift opens it with a gasp and a “Once upon a time” that sounds so urgent it’s like she’s just hung up the receiver, still in shock. She swings between questioning herself and tearing the boy apart with what would become a trademark directness. “It rains in your bedroom/ Everything is wrong/ It rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone”.
“Forever & Always” is the last song Swift wrote for Fearless. She recorded it in October 2008, pleaded with her record label to include it the day before the deadline, and released the album in November. That last-minute, fast turnaround would come to define Swift’s process of weaving her life into music in real time. The song’s famous subject made a good headline, but it was never what made it special. It was that she had captured what it felt like to be a teenager and to be wrong. You didn’t have to have dated a Jonas brother to understand.
In the decades since, Swift has grown from prodigious songwriter to industry-defining billionaire, to a kind of exposure beyond comprehension and without precedent. Her artistry has grown only more refined, the men only more famous, Swift’s self-mythologising only more deliberate, and an obsession with knowing more about her than the abundant detail she offers in song only more rabid (we now have a term for that all-consuming obsession I left behind once I got some life experience of my own: “parasocial relationship”).
And though Swift’s teenage USP was “I write songs about boys and name them”, leaving clues in her liner notes for fans like me who tracked down the “Corey” and “Drew” namechecked on her debut album and added them on Facebook, there is now an entitlement to every detail of Swift’s life and a dedication to decoding her songs that threatens to undermine her body of work. It is not, and has never been, important who Swift’s songs are about. What is, is how she refracts her experiences to tell us about our own.
Swift has always spun the specificities of her life into something that feels universal. As I have grown up, 17 months behind her, I have found truth, peace and comfort in the ways her albums deal with themes like love, yes, but also ambition, power, immaturity, mistakes, fear, ageing, friendship, illness, success, sexism and regret.
Swift articulates the everyday in a way most of us cannot, and elevates it to something that feels meaningful: a slamming car door, a silence in a crowded room, dancing in the kitchen in the refrigerator light. That she has become the most famous person on earth and it has not thwarted her ability to feel relatable but instead strengthened it is precisely what makes her so unique. It is a powerful and liberating thing to feel that Taylor Swift understands you.
That remains true on The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th record, a 31-song surprise-double album processing the end of one relationship (Joe Alwyn, the British actor she was with for six years) Swift’s launching into another (The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, a rumoured 10-year flirtation that appears to have culminated in a month-long tryst) and the dawn of a third (with Kansas City chiefs tight end Travis Kelce). All while touring Eras, the biggest show on earth which begins its European leg next month.
Naturally, paternity testing every song, speculating about which man each is written for, has displaced discussion about the music itself. Is Healy “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” who tried to buy pills from a friend of a friend after ghosting her? He must surely be the bad boy, ill-advised subject of the magisterial “But Daddy I Love Him” – though its targets are plainly the fans, the “vipers dressed in empaths’ clothing”, hysterical about the match. Is Alwyn the ship she abandoned, the man whose quiet resentment so scared her, on the haunting “So Long, London”? Is he the “loml” (loss or love of her life)?
Does that song – a gorgeous, excruciating work of devastating Swiftian simplicity, “I can’t get out of bed/ ‘Cause something counterfeit is dead” – become any less timeless a study of loss if it turns out to be written about a fated rebound, rather than her longest adult relationship? No. Lines like “What we thought was for all time was momentary” and “I wish I could unrecall how we almost had it all” so acutely evoke that grief you can’t believe you haven’t heard them before.
The Tortured Poets Department has not been as roundly celebrated as Swift’s other recent work. And consumed as a whole, it is long, self-referential, dense. But a fixation on what tiny details Swift has revealed about the breakdowns of her relationships is a distraction from the real revelations of this existential album, which are greater than one man (or three).
For the first time, 34-year-old Swift is grappling with the prospect that she might not have the future, the family, the fairy-tale happy ending that has inspired so much of her work. It makes this one of her most excoriating and validating albums yet.
When Swift was a teenager she wrote songs about white horses, high school sweethearts who stood the test of time, “Love Story”. It was clever and literary, it was melodramatic, it was also full of hope. She assumed those things would still come.
The stakes are higher on The Tortured Poets Department as, robbed of the security and the future that long-term relationship gave her, she wonders if they might not. She is bitter about her lover “talking rings and talking cradles”, she is “pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free”.
This is a messier album than Midnights (2022), evermore (2020), and folklore (2020). It’s mad, petty, wounded. Of course it is: she is. A single adult flung into the unknown, freed but not carefree, caught between “stages” of life. As she puts it on “Down Bad”: “Everything comes out/ Teenage petulance”. The serene sophistication and polish of those other records from the last four years is spiked with moments that recall the wild defensiveness of her adolescence. On “thank you aIMee”, “imgonnagetyouback” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” she returns to her old urge to triumph over those who leave or doubt or hurt her.
Lyrics like “All my friends smell like weed and little babies” on “Florida!!!” are satisfyingly literal in their description of the splitting paths, as you wonder if yours matters less if it is not yet – or will never be – one towards partnership and parenthood.
Swift has never hidden that she wants those things. As an adult, admitting to that is commendably vulnerable when in adolescence, it made her an idealist. She makes desperation feel like poetry when she sings, “Hand on the throttle/Thought I’d caught lightning in a bottle/But it’s gone again,” on “The Prophecy”. “A guess a lesser woman would have lost hope/ A greater woman wouldn’t beg.” Swift’s crises, her fear that time isn’t stretching out in front of her, her compulsion to prove her purpose while she feels undone, is more exposing than any name-check.
I think insecurity is behind Swift’s world domination. The less sure she is of her future, the more she leans into her past. Her Eras tour in which she plays her past selves, her masters re-recordings and songs “from the vault”, her album which chronicles emotional chaos with such immediacy. If her romantic life leaves her searching for her life’s meaning, her music becomes a legacy within her control that proves all of it was worth it, because it meant something to the rest of us. If we reduce it to forensics and lore and clues, she is defeated. Her celebrity has eclipsed her art.
And that would be a tragedy for Swift. Because while her life and her secrets are not for us, she has told us many times that her music is.
The Tortured Poets Department closes with the sparse piano vignette “The Manuscript”. In the vein of “All Too Well” or “august”, it introduces a cast of characters, a reflection on youth and naivety and trust, a new perspective on a pain that only age has afforded her. Then she offers it up to us.
“And at last
She knew what the agony had been for.
The only thing that’s left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I reread the manuscript
But the story isn’t mine anymore.”
