Taylor Swift revolutionized the world with the release of her eleventh album “The Tortured Poets Department.” The album, which ended up being double with the immediate release of a second part titled “The Anthology”, delves fully into the intimacy of the breakup of the singer and Joe Alwyn, from whom she separated in 2023 after six years of relationship.
The launch had been announced in February, during the Grammy Awards, and while Swift thanked her for the Best Pop Vocal Album award for her previous work “Midnights.” Finally, it was launched worldwide last Friday, April 19. In Argentina, it could be heard on platforms from 2AM (Spotify offered a countdown timer for each country), and many fans waited until dawn to be able to enjoy it as soon as it came out.
As Swift usually does, the premiere came with a surprise: the long-awaited album ended up being a mega album of 31 songs in total. “I had written so much tortuous poetry in the last two years that I wanted to share it all with you,” the artist wrote on her networks along with the news of “The Anthology.”
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For this work, Taylor worked with two of his favorite producers of the last era: Jack Antonoff (from the band Bleachers) and Aaron Dessner (from the band The National). It featured contributions from Post Malone on the opening song “Fortnight” and Florence Welch, from Florence and the Machine, on the song “Florida!!!”.
In the press release that accompanied the launch, Swift stated that “The Tortured Poets Department” is “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and feelings from a fleeting, fatalistic moment in my life, one that was sensational and sad at the same time, in equal parts.”
“This period of the author’s life is now finished, the chapter closed and buried. There is nothing to avenge, no debt to settle once the wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, many of those wounds turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer has the firm conviction that our tears become sacred in the form of ink on a page. Once we have told our saddest story, we can free ourselves from it,” the artist said in the text.
“The Tortured Poets Department” and the vital faith in telling stories
From the first song of Taylor’s new album, the imprint of what is to come is clearly printed: an intense and raw narrative of love when it ends. The singer makes it clear, from her choice of words in the lyrics (as in “Down Bad”, where she openly repeats “Fuck it if I can’t have him”, a kind of “Fuck everything if I can’t be with him”). ”, but more explicit), which is not going to save music on subtleties.
On this new album, Swift affirms her faith in the power of storytelling, which is also one of her greatest strengths as an artist and one of the keys to her success, that which distinguishes her and stands out above other artists of her generation and her musical genre: knowing how to narrate all the emotions, in a way that each song becomes a captivating and unmissable episode of a story where there is both melodrama and humanity with which to empathize.
In addition, Taylor more than honors another of her characteristics: intensity. Throughout her career, she wrote heartfelt (and now anthems) songs to many of her ex-boyfriends from her twenties. To Joe Alwyn, whom she was with for six years and almost married, she directly write an anthology with your heart held tight in your hand.
Although in the official statement with which the album came out, Swift offers a conciliatory view of closed wounds and total absence of resentments, she also realizes that to get there she had to write this album, tell this story, put body and soul on the table, on the melodies. It is so On songs like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Taylor mercilessly takes aim at her ex’s flaws and the damage he did to her.
In others, like “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” he focuses on the difficulties of going through a breakup while constantly under the media spotlight.and in the middle of a marathon tour such as “The Eras Tour”.
Musically, throughout the 31 songs, Taylor remains faithful to her confessional singer-songwriter style more typical of her period of “folklore”, “evermore” and “Midnights”, with simple instrumentalizations (sometimes just guitar and/or piano), with some slightly more upbeat exceptions (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”) that allow her voice to be underlined and, of course, the central protagonist of the album: the story that is being told.
