The publication of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ of Taylor Swift It has also come with a surprise: after the leak this past Thursday of the 16 cuts that were to make up the complete album, there have finally been 31 songs that make it up and in them his personal life constitutes once again his favorite material to build songs on.
“They reflect events, opinions and feelings of a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time, one that was both sensational and painful in equal parts,” she herself commented on her networks after the publication about “a chapter that is closed and walled up,” in which “there is nothing to avenge and no scores to settle once the wounds have healed.”
Rumors about the possible thematic core of the album began since Swift herself (West Reading, 1989) revealed the title at the last gala of the Grammyvery similar to an “online” chat that your ex Joe Alwyn shared with the actors too Paul Mescal and Andrew Scottcalled ‘Tortured Man Club’.
That is also the title of one of the outstanding cuts, in which Swift blurts out to her interlocutor with the pretense of a writer (it should be remembered that Alwyn co-wrote some of the singer’s songs in the past): “You are not Dylan Thomas and I am not “I’m Patti Smith.”
Likewise, the geographical coincidence between the British nationality of his ex and the inspirational source of the song does not seem coincidental. ‘So Long, London’one of the most tortured along with ‘Florida!!!!‘. Regarding this, there are those who have pointed out that this was the state in which the tour stopped ‘The Eras Tour’ when in April 2023 the couple’s breakup was made public.
The reproaches continue in one of the potentially most radiable topics of this batch, ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ (in Spanish, my child only breaks his favorite toys), in which the artist announces the moment in which she gives up on a relationship that is not prospering: “I abandon building castles that he destroys.”
Among the surprise songs that appeared two hours after their official release time are those that were to be included as extras in the four special editions of the album, that is, ‘The Black Dog’, ‘The Albatross’, ‘The Bolter’ and ‘The Manuscript’, which closes the more than two hours of music.
Heartbreak conceptually covers the entire album and, with it, melancholy becomes strong, but without despair in either its words or its forms, rather acceptance, with spaces for irony and sarcasm in cuts like ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ or ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’.
It is that, almost at the end, one of the few reliefs of accelerated and eighties “bpm” that can be found in this ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, marked by the emotional density of the songs, co-produced by the author with her inseparable Jack Antonoff. Under her criteria, synthesizers and electronic arrangements largely replace the organic textures that accompanied the melancholy that also permeated previous works such as ‘Evermore’ or the previous one ‘Folklore’both from 2020.
In the midst of all this, from time to time glimpses of Swift from the “country” era emerge, such as when she recovers the ukulele and old melodic structures from that time, see in the dynamic and long ‘But Daddy, I Love Him!’.
The two collaborations on this album, which was published without a prior cover letter, deserve special mention: on the one hand, Post Malone in the initial ‘Fortnight’ (in which he is vocally relegated to more accompaniment work) and, on the other, Florence + The Machine in the cathartic ‘Florida!!!!’, with a more balanced vocal relationship between the two performers.
With ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Already on the streets, Swift will begin the European leg of her ‘The Eras Tour’ in Paris on May 9, 10, 11 and 12. There will be fifty performances until the end on August 20 at Wembley Stadium in London, with stops such as those on May 29 and 30 at the renovated Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid.
