“The Tortured Poets Department” by Taylor Swift, Sunday, June 2, 2024

Last year Taylor Swift was in the middle of a whirlwind romance with the frontman The 1975, Matty Healy, allegedly. This romance came after Swift broke up with actor Joe Alwyn after a six-year relationship. Swift and Healy’s relationship has never been confirmed by Swift or Healy, but the press surrounding the two and neither’s denial of the affair has cemented the relationship in pop culture canon. The spring fling was said to have lasted for a month, possibly a fortnight. All of this was happening in the middle of Swift’s Midnights Era—songs about life experiences that supposedly happened in the past. Some listeners have interpreted Midnights as a breakup album.

LIKE A TATTOOED GOLDEN RETRIEVER.  Fans were eagerly awaiting for Taylor Swift to reward their Easter Egg hunt with the release of The Tortured Poets Department, the album that she announced when she won Album of the Year at the 2024 Grammy Awards. The Easter Eggs Swift gave fans and the press led listeners to believe that Swift was going to release a confessional album about the erosion of her longest documented and some would stay stablest relationship. There were details about Swift’s unhappiness in the relationship and a few against the character of Joe Alwyn. Swift’s latest offering was slated to be a tell-all slanderous memoir against the private English actor, starting with the name of the album, a play on a group chat Alwyn was in, called “The Tortured Man Club” with fellow English actors Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. Instead, the title track and many of the songs on the album seem to deal with Swift’s complicated relationship with Matty Healy. The Swifty scholars on the Internet are mixed on this opinion, but a larger percentage believe that the title track is about Healy, which begs the question, why does he earn a title track when fans thought they would be getting a break up album about Joe Alwyn? 

WHO ELSE DECODES YOU? As Taylor Swift is one of the biggest celebrities in 2024, there is simultaneously so much and so little known about her. Like an excellent writer, she only gives the details we need—facts to establish background—the things we know about almost every celebrity from their place of birth to the first song they sang on stage. But somewhere along the way, Swift became an expert of keeping personal details closely under wraps. She gives paperazzi a show, publicly spending time with men she apparently has dated and women whom she supports—this is not to discount Gaylor theories. Everything else she reportedly covers in NDAs—staff, friends, lovers, lovers’ family members. Also, Swift reportedly makes ex-boyfriends sign a statement that she is allowed to use details of their relationship in her songs so that she is not sued for libel later and that they do not reveal their side of the story. Interestingly, some sources claim that Matty Healy never signed an NDA. Still, details about Healy seem mostly positive on the album—a misunderstood artist who has alienated himself from Taylor’s fanbase and her famous friends, such as Ice Spice and Lucy Dacas. The details of the relationship disappear in a lavender haze, but could it be that Swift chose her friends and fans over her “tattooed golden retriever?” Although Swift has extricated herself from London and its love triangles, I think that more of this story will come out eventually. It’s far too interesting of a story to be footnotes in a mediocre anthology of poetry. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.