Fans often call Taylor Swift’s music “diaristic”: at their best, her lyrics feel like the delicate and sometimes ugly truths most of us don’t dare utter aloud. “And I hate to make this all about me,” she sings in a song about her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, “but who am I supposed to talk to,/ what am I supposed to do,/ if there’s no you?” It’s a great lyric, in part, because it’s a horrible thing to say.
But have you ever actually read a diary? They’re self-involved and sentimental. As Lena Dunham’s Girls character once said, “ ‘Diary’ implies a 13-year-old girl who rides horses and is obsessed with her mom.” Diaries are typically repetitive, trite, rambling, imprecise. They don’t get edited.
And, by the sound of it, neither did Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, released on April 19. Like a diary, it has some gems, but they’re buried underneath all the superfluity: 31 songs that run 122 minutes.
On the titular track, Swift sings: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger/ And put it on the one people put wedding rings on/ And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.” What a mouthful. We learn so little in so many words. It’s the opposite of one of Swift’s best lyrics — “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” — in which we learn about two lifetimes in 10 words. Swift, when she soars, wields an economy of language that’s exhilarating in its simplicity.
The creative process is often misunderstood as merely generative: Jack Kerouac, hopped up on amphetamines, banging out line after line of that infamous screed that would become On the Road. This is a nice image. But, as any editor can tell you, it’s not realistic. Creation is just as much about subtraction and elision, cutting out what doesn’t work so that the good stuff can really sing. In the law, omission implies dishonesty — in art, it is often the surest way to arrive at truth.
Occasionally, on The Tortured Poets Department, Swift gets there. The album starts off strong with “Fortnight,” a synth-pop ballad featuring the rapper Post Malone. The sexy trilling beat coyly belies Swift’s unflattering confessions: “I was a functioning alcoholic/ ’Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic.” During the Eras tour, in which she became the most ubiquitous person in the world, Swift spoke to stadium audiences about her pandemic-induced drinking problem with the casual intimacy of pillow talk. The song captures her uncanny ability to expose herself and then move right along. Her darkest truths are no big deal.
Swift has long tried to be funny, but her attempts have yielded more cringes than laughter. In “But Daddy I Love Him,” she finally, as they say, kills. “I’m having his baby,” she sings over plucky strings, and then, after a long pause, “No, I’m not/ But you should see your face.” Since she and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs have become the prom queen and king of the U.S.A., fans have speculated that Swift is ready for motherhood. Her bait-and-switch lands: my jaw dropped, but then I found myself smiling.
The song contains more Swiftian marvels on an otherwise flat-footed album: “Growing up precocious/ Sometimes means not growing up at all,” she sings, a reflection on how early fame can mean arrested development. And then, in the bridge, Swift yells in her long-lost twang: “I’ll tell you something right now/ I’d rather burn my whole life down/ Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning.” The lyric arrives like sweet vindication.
The Tortured Poets Department is Swift’s sixth collaboration with Jack Antonoff, the music producer behind Lorde, Lana del Rey, Clairo, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the soundtrack to Minions: The Rise of Gru. Writing in The Drift, Mitch Therieau identifies Antonoff’s talent as an “ability to produce stylishly forgettable content.” Antonoff makes music the way IKEA makes furniture, and Swift’s lyrics strain to wrap themselves around Antonoff’s prefab productions. Much of The Tortured Poets Department sounds like one monotonous song, an interminable drum machine.
Except, that is, for the album’s diamond in the rough, “Florida!!!,” featuring the witchy and regal vocals of the British singer Florence Welch. The song is about how flaccid the American dream is: “So you work your life away/ Just to pay for a timeshare down in Destin/ Florida!!!” In the song, those three exclamation marks become smacks on actual drums, and the song is as close as Swift has gotten to rock music. It’s a headbanger: “F*** me up/ Florida!!!” Swift and Welch scream. As banal as a timeshare in Florida is, Swift — and the rest of us — clamor for one anyway. In America, as on The Tortured Poets Department, you take what you can get.
