You Left Your Typewriter at my Apartment

Straight from the Tortured Poets Department

The long-awaited, much-anticipated eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, by Taylor Swift is here at last. With the out of this world fame generated by the popularity of the Eras Tour, the re-recording of her back-catalog, and the commercial success of Midnights, no matter what the sound of this album was, it was going to be a mixed public reception. Swift is oversaturated in media - people are tired of talking about her. When an artist is “everywhere,” especially when that artist is a woman, is becomes remarkably difficult to produce anything that will be publicly beloved the way the hit records of old were.

The Tortured Poets Department reminds me deeply of when reputation was released, because the reception was lukewarm in a similar way. So many people were upset by the jarring sound and departure from 1989’s vibe. But, we have to remember that reputation served a specific purpose in her career. She refused to explain it in an interview - she wanted it to speak for itself. It was a similar kind of cathartic release, and a similar amount of explanation (or lack thereof). She had something she wanted to get off of her chest and she did it in the way she knows best. As a result, the reputation album was incredibly polarizing when it dropped. I will point out that years later, it is regarded as a fan favorite, and one of the most highly demanded re-records among her core fan base. I remember attending the reputation stadium tour and seeing scores of empty seats in Gillette Stadium. Has anyone seen a single empty seat at an Eras Tour stop? The times….they have a-changed.

There’s a definite group of fans who are taking to this era positively (I count myself in this bucket), a definite group who are disappointed in the end product, and a group of music journalists who are similarly split. There’s a lot of criticism towards the a-side of the album which was mostly produced by Jack Antonoff and a lot of praise for the b-side produced by Aaron Dessner. The critique making the farthest rounds across the internet comes from the New York Times stating that Taylor Swift “needs an editor.”

I think what this critique ultimately misses is the entire point of the album - the point is that she did not want to edit this album one bit. It’s clear that a 31 song cathartic release was exactly the intention, with jabs at Kim Kardashian (sorry, I mean Aimee), and a somewhat surprise focus on her 2 month situationship-rebound with Matty Healy that was heavily criticized because…well, because it’s Matty Healy. Taylor Swift, like all of us, has been under the pen of an editor for her entire career. It was revealed after her split from Big Machine Records just how heavily her first six albums were edited from her original wishes - some of which, as we can see from the vault tracks on the re-records, for the worse.

We should all be allowed to make art for art’s sake, but few can actually make a career out of it. Swift is at the point in her career where she’s able to do just that, and she should take full advantage. Most of our beloved musical heroes of past and present did the same thing. How many Springsteen albums can the average American name besides Born in the USA? When you think of Joni Mitchell, do you think of Blue first, or Hejira? How many of Paul McCartney’s (many) solo albums have you listened to? Let’s take a more recent example - when you think of Noah Kahan, do you think of his back catalog, or Stick Season? My point is that not every album Taylor Swift is going to put out is going to be 1989, and frankly, that is a ridiculous ask of any human being. It’s exhausting to watch the same conversation occur over all corners of the internet whenever she puts a new album out - the central question being when will people tire of Taylor Swift? I think the most realistic answer is that albums like Tortured Poets are going to resonate with some people and not resonate with others, and the constant questioning of “which album will be the downfall” of one of the most successful pop artists of our generation is tiresome and wholly unnecessary. She’s not going anywhere. She’s going to keep making albums because, as she’s mentioned time and time again, creating art is how she makes sense of the world.

Listening to music is how I make sense of the world. Nothing makes me feel less alone in a remarkably lonely world than music. For a brief moment in time, I tried to be a professional musician, but quit because I realized how the commodification of your artistry can quickly make you hate the art itself or the process of creating art. It’s one of the major life decisions I’ve made that I don’t regret at all. Few musicians reach a level of fame where they can decide to stop catering to the edit that will make their music more radio-friendly or appealable to the masses - but how lucky are Taylor Swift fans that, regardless of if you like the newest record or not, we get to live in an era where one of the best lyricists of our time gets to put out a record of completely unhinged, full-send thoughts, without having to edit them down for everyone else?

And yet, everything I’m saying here should be balanced with a healthy amount of nuance. It’s fair to critique the musicality of her albums or give an opinion that may be less than glowing related to her work (see also: every post I’ve ever made about Lover and Speak Now, both of which rank as two of my least favorite albums in her catalog yet are beloved by tons of fans). But, I don’t think you get to make sweeping statements painting the people who do like the album, or the artist as a person, as less-than or as people with poor taste just because you don’t love the album. I think Taylor Swift’s plea in Tortured Poets is abundantly clear: remember that she is a human being and not a machine. What might be an objectively mediocre album to one person cuts like a knife for the next listener.

What I find fascinating about the release of this record is that everything that fans have loved about this artist suddenly seems to be the thing that people dislike most about this body of work. TTPD is Swift’s most lyrically dense album yet. For an artist that has made her fortune off of being lyrically dense, she has outdone all previous efforts to create the most specific and pointed lyrics. It’s so lyrically dense with such difficult topics at the focal point that I think it threatens to do something that most people hate from their artists: it takes a larger than life character and makes her painfully human.

Idolizing these pop stars often means that we idolize their life. Many of the songs most beloved in Taylor Swift’s catalog - Cruel Summer, Getaway Car, It Is Over Now?, to name a few - depict aspects of Swift’s life that feel dramatic in an exciting and sexy way. Let’s face it - most of us do not have lives this exciting. We listen to music, read books, or watch films as a form of escapism from the day to day tedium. We enjoy being transported into the perspective of another - and who wouldn’t want to be transported into someone who seems to have it all? But albums like TTPD ruin the aesthetic of that fantasy because they force us to remember that this is just another person writing about her human experiences.

In explaining the crushing weight of a particular series of losses among some other serious (and more public) wins, Taylor Swift decides to scrap her code words and just tell us exactly how it feels - brutal and all. And God, do I love her for it. Because if the mega-giant superstar that is Taylor Swift can feel crushed over finding out that a friend is actually a foe, then it’s not so weird that I’m crushed by it either. The thing that draws most Taylor Swift fans to her music is the very essence that her basic struggles are often universal experiences which are described in such deep magnitude that you can’t help but be pulled in by their flourish and polish. For example, in one of the most cutting tracks on the album, The Prophecy, Swift laments a life of constant dating around all while wondering why she hasn’t yet found the stable life partner she craves. Taylor Swift is a billionaire heralded as one of the best songwriters of our generation with supermodel-level good looks - if SHE has the same fears about loneliness as I do, then my circumstances by comparison feel a whole lot less my fault and a whole lot more just a shared experience among humans that we are all just trying to navigate our way through.

I can’t imagine what bravery it took for Swift to let her guard down on this album. She has been so heavily edited in a way that I think a lot of women can relate to, but on an even grander scale because if she so much as shows up to a football game, op-eds are written. But I think there’s a piece of the criticism against her that is just that of being a woman: Be less this, and more that. No, that’s too dramatic. You’re being oversensitive. Can’t you lighten up? It seems like you should’ve moved on by now. Be smaller. Take up less space. Actually, no, be bigger, because you should stand up for yourself. Oh no, I didn’t mean in that way, I meant in THIS way. And while you’re at it, can you grab me a cup of coffee?

People needle each other in this way because it makes them feel more powerful, or like they have a roadmap, but the older you get the more you realize that no one - not even Taylor Swift - has a roadmap. On top of the reality of our own lives, we also have the rest of the world to contend with. Pretending that we are all thriving in a world where innocent children are starving, peaceful protests are needlessly escalated, and our planet slowly becomes inhabitable is fruitless. Taylor Swift refuses to act like she is thriving when she isn’t, and perhaps we should all take a note from her diary and be honest with each other. It’s not all Instagram highlights or pop hits - this is real life, and it’s fucking hard. That’s what this album was about. We’re all just trying to put on a brave face and act like we can do it with a broken heart. Because of that, I think you do get to run with your dress unbuttoned and scream “But Daddy, I Love Him,” or lament being Down Bad. I think you get to feel whatever you are feeling with bravado. I think you get to publish your diary set to music if you want to, and I think we should all give each other a little more license to do so because why not?

Time is the most finite resource that we have. We are born knowing that we are due to run out of it but are never told the deadline date. We continue to live while watching friends and family pass their deadline date. We spend our most precious resource investing in people, jobs, places, hobbies, and relationships. What TTPD is about (to me) is that moment when one or more of those things begin to fail and you realize that you made a bad investment of said most precious resource. I think we’ve all been there in one way or another - it’s a guaranteed aspect of the human experience to place a metaphorical bet that something will work out only to later find out that it didn’t. No matter how many times it happens to us it is crushing every single time. The most human response to that pain is wanting it to be seen. In writing The Tortured Poets Department, Swift let us see her pain in an intimate way, and if you identify with that type of pain, then this is an album that will help you feel remarkably seen.

In conclusion, my hot take is that Taylor Swift doesn’t need an editor and neither do you.