The story behind each song on Taylor Swift’s new album — and The Anthology
Album rating
★★★★★
Who would be a former boyfriend of Taylor Swift? Accurately or not, love songs from the biggest pop star on the planet are inevitably pored over by her millions of fans for clues on the perceived failings or virtues of her old flames, from Jake Gyllenhaal to Harry Styles to Tom Hiddleston. Now she has come back with an entire album’s worth. The Tortured Poets Department is an ultra-confident, ballad-heavy, poetic yet grounded reflection on love in all its forms: destructive, blissful, fantastical, embittered and idealised. And although plenty of the scenarios are imagined, these poetic visions of love’s tangled strands come alive because they are grounded in real feelings.
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Even the title hints at lived experience — another Swift ex, Joe Alwyn, the Englishman best known for mumbling his way through the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends in an Irish accent, was in a group chat with fellow actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott called The Tortured Man Club. Swift exonerates herself pre-emptively in a prologue poem in the liner notes, In Summation: “All’s fair in love and poetry.”
On top of this, just when you thought 16 new Taylor Swift songs was enough for anyone to cope with, in the middle of the night came another 15, the entire 31 making up the loftily titled The Anthology. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” said Swift in a social media post, but this isn’t simply an act of creative abundance. It is now commonplace for the biggest artists to flood the streaming services with new material to grab a bigger market share, while also opening all kinds of possibilities for a vast array of physical product. Much of this bonus material doesn’t match up to the quality of the original songs, which mars what is otherwise a five-star album.
The real purpose of Swift mining her romantic experience is to mirror the lives of her fans. Perhaps they too have had their hearts broken, or have harboured borderline inappropriate fantasies about someone. Swift has mastered the art of using small details and evocative couplets to bring universal themes to vibrant life, and there is drama throughout this album: prison, the gallows, death, despair. We seem to be getting the real person, while actually getting a stylised evocation of familiar affairs of the heart with enough depth and wit to bring narrative thrust.
The musical style is also perfect for Swift at this stage in her career. Having come through the perky teenage pop of Shake It Off, the would-be hipster edge of Bad Blood and the lockdown-friendly indie folk of Cardigan, she has arrived at the all-conquering adult mainstream. Taking in synth pop, Eighties power ballads and the emotional AOR of Stevie Nicks (who offers her own poem on love gone wrong in the liner notes), these songs are delivered with Swift’s trademark gusto and megawatt professionalism. The bonus material, meanwhile, harks back to the pop country of her earliest days, alongside plenty of Adele-style piano balladry and acoustic folk reverie. What torture, then, is this less-than-starving poet going through, and how much does she put the boot into the old boyfriends?
The Tortured Poets Department reviewed, track by track
Fortnight
The album begins with a downtempo, Eighties-tinged electro-pop number that sounds quite a lot like Swift’s fellow singer-in-despair Lana Del Rey. Perhaps that’s down to it being co-written with Del Rey’s favourite songwriter, Jack Antonoff, who is also a long-time collaborator of Swift’s and worked on about half of the tracks here. It’s the sad tale of someone who splits with her true love, only to move in next door to him once he’s married; something that as far as we know has not happened to Swift. “Your wife waters the flowers. I want to kill her,” she confesses, an effective exercise in subdued menace. Face-tattooed superstar troubadour Post Malone provides backing vocals.
Song ★★★★☆
Former Boyfriend Bashing (FBB) ★☆☆☆☆
The Tortured Poets Department
The big tearjerker of the album really gives it to a self-regarding old flame suffering from a nasty dose of pretentiousness. “Who uses typewriters anyway?” Swift asks after this would-be Tennyson leaves his arcane tool of creation at her apartment. “You’re not Dylan Thomas. I’m not Patti Smith. We’re modern idiots,” she adds. The details will be pored over — who are Lucy and Jack, the friends the former lovers confide in? — and there’s actually something quite sweet about the tone, which gently mocks, not castigates, the human weakness of self-deception. With its singalong chorus, this is a keeper.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★★★★★
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
A standard-issue moody synth-pop backing doesn’t match the intrigue of the lyrics, in which Swift addresses a complicated man who, once he gets what he wants, must destroy it. “He saw ‘for ever’ so he smashed it up,” she says of this lover of chaos who stole her tortured heart, left her in broken parts and generally messed with her mind. “Once I fix me, he’s gonna miss me,” she promises. But who is he? Not Tom Hiddleston, the upper-crust Brit actor with whom she once enjoyed a weekend in Suffolk? Definitely not, actually.
Song ★★★☆☆
FBB ★★★★☆
Down Bad
The oddest song on the album, a blend of cosmic weirdness and saccharine balladry about meeting a handsome, mysterious alien. Unless Swift experienced an interplanetary romance she has so far neglected to mention in interviews, we can file it as fantasy. The tryst leaves the narrator in a state of petulance, wondering what to do next and deciding nobody else will match up. “They’ll say I’m nuts if I talk about the existence of you,” she says of the man who fell to earth. Did she take inspiration from David Bowie, or perhaps the 1978 space-disco classic I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper by our own Sarah Brightman?
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★☆☆☆☆
So Long, London
As all her fans know, in 2019 Swift wrote London Boy about Joe Alwyn. How sweet were those days when all she had to do was hang out in the pub with his mates and catch the Tube to his place in Highgate. Well, it’s all gone wrong. “You left me at the house by the Heath,” she laments on a song written with Aaron Dessner of the National, another trusted collaborator who contributes to several other tracks on the album. “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days,” Swift adds, the suggestion being she really was in love with this gloomy guy and being abandoned to wander Hampstead Heath on her own was just wrong. Heartfelt, tender and poetic, this is a real tearjerker.
Song ★★★★★
FBB ★★★☆☆
But Daddy I Love Him
“Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” Swift sings, addressing her own success on an upbeat pop banger reminiscent of earlier hits such as Blank Space and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. The story of a teenager meeting a bad boy her parents definitely don’t approve of, this is a top-down, on-the-road anthem made for running away to — at least until the money runs out and you have to call Mum and Dad for help.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★☆☆☆☆
Fresh Out the Slammer
The eerie, slow-paced charm of Twin Peaks colours a tale of a woman coming out of prison to return to her man. Swift has spent time in many places but jail is not one of them, so this story of a world of “grey and blue” and “fights and tunnels” is essentially an addition to the crime-romance fiction genre.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB n/a
Florida!!!
Florida is a place where people generally go for two reasons: to retire or to disappear. Swift addresses the latter option on this duet with Florence Welch, who wrote it with her. By turns atmospheric and belting, it’s about someone who, sick of their friends who “smell like weed or little babies”, runs away for a new life among the swamps and alligators. There is an appealing sense of desperation, not typical of the generally wholesome Swift.
Song ★★★★★
FBB n/a
Guilty as Sin?
Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? Swift has, if this romantic epic about forbidden fruit is to be believed. “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh only in my mind?” she frets. The earnest, thoroughly American delivery mars the eroticism somewhat, but it comes straight from the Fleetwood Mac school of pop-rock inspired by disastrous romance.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB n/a
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
In 2017 Swift rejigged her image and went for celebrity nihilism on her Reputation album, a look that didn’t suit her. She returns to that spirit in a spooky tale of an avenging angel, escaping the gallows to wreak havoc on an old adversary. “You caged me and then you called me crazy,” she sings, addressing either a former boyfriend, the media, or the entire world. Despite it all, she will never be a diva as fearsome as Madonna. Or Miss Piggy.
Song ★★☆☆☆
FBB ★★☆☆☆
I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
“The jokes that he told across the bar were revolting and far too loud,” Swift sings about an uncouth oaf whom she aims to house-train. A big tough dude who packs a pistol and drives down Texas highways, he sounds like a concoction, although there may be a touch of her present beau, the American football star Travis Kelce, in this forgettable mid-album moment.
Song ★★★☆☆
FBB ★☆☆☆☆
Loml
A melancholic, piano-led ballad with a twist: I won’t give it away but let’s just say there are doubts on whether the man Swift is singing about really is the love of her life. “When your impressionist paintings of heaven turned out to be fakes, well, you took me to hell,” she sings of an artistic fellow who let her down — another Alwyn heartbreak number?
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★★★★☆
I Can Do It with a Broken Heart
The most personal song on the album, the tale of a superstar who can put on a show for the fans every night like it’s her birthday while dying of loneliness inside. “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd shouted more,” she sings, a great line to go against the celebratory, big pop sound. This will be a future live favourite, an ideal song for fans who love Swift because they feel they know the real her.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★★☆☆☆
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
Maximum masculinity shrinkage in action. “Gazing at me starry-eyed in your Jehovah’s Witness suit … who the f*** was that guy?” Swift asks over a witheringly small piano part, before painting a portrait of someone who only wanted her as a trophy girlfriend and wasn’t worth bothering with in the first place. She doesn’t sound upset, more annoyed. Could it be about Matty Healy of the 1975, with whom she had a fling? There will be a lot of guessing on this one.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB ★★★★★
The Alchemy
At last, a happy ending. A dreamy, romantic, Stevie Nicks-style pop-rock tale of true love on which all roads lead to Swift’s all-American hero: Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. “I’m making a comeback to where I belong,” sings a woman who started her career as a teen country star in Nashville. By the time we get to the men on the benches, winning streaks and being the greatest in the league, all bets are off about the subject of this song. It’s excellent — epic but intimate, like the final scene in a blockbuster. Cue Swift and Kelce riding off into the sunset together.
Song ★★★★★
CBP (Current Boyfriend Praising) ★★★★★
Clara Bow
But wait, there’s more. Clara Bow is a lush, orchestrated reflection on fame, wrapped in a tale of a homecoming queen heading to Hollywood to make it. Everyone says she looks like the 1920s movie star Clara Bow, then Stevie Nicks … then Taylor Swift. “You’ve got edge she never did,” the people of the town tell her, a touch of self-deprecation on an album that finds Swift at her peak — globally famous but still that small town girl inside.
Song ★★★★☆
FBB n/a
The bonus tracks
The Anthology version begins strongly enough with The Black Dog (★★★★☆), a sad ballad about an old boyfriend hanging out in the bar of the song title, meeting a younger woman and forgetting Swift ever existed. The emotion is impactful, the music pulsating enough to reflect rage and upset. Imgonnagetyouback (★★☆☆☆) reverts to adolescent fantasy about either being with a guy again or ruining his life — she’ll get him back, geddit? — and sounds like the kind of thing a neophyte pop star would come up with, not the most famous singer on the planet. The Albatross (★★★☆☆) is evocative of Swift’s earliest days as an artist: a winsome but indistinct pop-country tune about a woman a man cannot escape. Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus (★★★★☆) is a wordy lament for an old boyfriend who “needed me but you needed drugs more”. The pain feels real. At a guess it is another one about Healy.
From there we’re into How Did It End? (★★★☆☆), which adopts an overused minor-key piano arpeggio for yet another tale of doomed love. “We were blind to unforeseen circumstances, we learn the right steps to diffеrent dances,” is a good line on a song that is otherwise like a more self-conscious version of Adele’s Someone Like You. There is a quick stop for some mediocre indie rock on So High School (★★☆☆☆), complete with fuzzy guitar and memories of playing spin the bottle, before things pick up with I Hate It Here (★★★★☆) in which a gentle acoustic guitar backs a poetic fantasy about longingly dreaming of other worlds. Then we’re on to memories of being bullied at school in thanK you aIMee (★★☆☆☆), a Nashville country tune in which Swift lays out success as the best form of revenge, singing: “I wrote a thousand songs that you find uncool, I built a legacy which you can’t undo.” Didn’t a few of those thousand songs feature this exact message already?
I Look In People’s Windows (★★☆☆☆) is another sad tale of an old lover, which could have remained on the studio floor. This one paints the unlikely scenario of Swift wandering the streets, sticking her head up against people’s homes in the hope of spotting her ex, quaffing wine with strangers. Better is the folky The Prophecy (★★★☆☆), which goes back to her by now massively overdone theme of doomed love, but in a more poetic fashion. Cassandra (★★★☆☆) manages to address another subject — being the unwanted bringer of bad news — before Peter (★★★★☆) returns to teenage heartbreak on a piano ballad about Peter Pan coming to Wendy’s rescue … or not. Recalling the earnest, heart-on-sleeve balladry of the Swift classic Love Story, this sounds like a future favourite.
The Bolter (★★★☆☆) may well take inspiration from Frances Osborne’s book of the same name about Lady Idina Sackville, an Edwardian aristocrat who left her rich husband for a penniless officer. Then again, as a nice enough country tune about a woman who hotfoots it every time a relationship turns out to be less than perfect, it could simply be autobiographical. Robin (★★☆☆☆) features some allegorical words about bloodthirsty animals, but the unchanging piano melody has too little going on to hold the interest. Finally comes The Manuscript (★★★★★), the best of all the bonus material. A novel in four-minute form, it tells the story of an affair with an older man against a simple, almost discordant piano. “He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was, soon they’d be pushing strollers,” is just one great line in a song that illustrates Swift’s greatest gift. She’s a storyteller, and when she writes songs about her own life that apply to the lives of millions of others, you can see why she is the biggest star in music.
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