Taylor Swift didn’t release the breakup album people expected
A beginner’s guide to The Tortured Poets Department
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As someone who’s spent the past year and a half deep-diving into the Taylor Swift phenomenon, I knew what fans were expecting from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department: A cathartic breakup record about the end of her six-year relationship with boyfriend Joe Alwyn. One that would “spill the tea” on what actually happened and allow Swifties to leap to her defense over another man who wronged her.
What we got instead was something quite different—a raw, manic recounting of her one-month rebound with the scumbum British indie rocker, Matty Healy. A cringey public fling that even Taylor’s most ardent fans would prefer to pretend never happened. In the lead up to the album’s release, Swifties eagerly theorized about why Taylor might dismissively label Joe as a tortured poet. It turns out they were looking in the wrong department.
Of course, it’s always a double-edged sword to discuss Taylor’s music in relation to her real-life dating life—a lens she’s both righteously critiqued and actively cultivated over the years. But the truth is that while Taylor has some legitimately fantastic songs in her discography, much of her work gains its power from its diaristic, voyeuristic quality, rather than its musical prowess alone.
As an album, The Tortured Poets Department is just okay, with standout songs like “Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” buried amidst too much of the same-y synth sound that producer Jack Antonoff has brought to all their recent collaborations. (In other words, it sounds just like Midnights and the 1989 vault tracks.) And while I got a lot more out of a second set of folk-inspired songs produced by Aaron Dessner, the overall effect is just a lot of music (31 songs!) in search of a stronger throughline.
But between Taylor’s deep love of easter eggs and her fans’ even deeper love for searching her music for “clues” about her life, she’s become a cinematic universe as much as a musical artist. And Matty Healy is one of the most unexpected players to enter her musical canon in years.
For the uninitiated, Taylor and The 1975 frontman were first linked back in 2014, when they flirtily supported each other around the time she released 1989. As far as we know, they never actually dated back then, however, and Taylor went on to have relationships with Scottish DJ Calvin Harris and Loki star Tom Hiddleston before settling down for a quiet, private life in London with English actor Joe Alwyn. (She does, indeed, have a type.)
In fact, Taylor and Joe seemed so solid for so long that it came as a genuine shock when they confirmed their breakup in April 2023, just three weeks into the Eras Tour. The combo of that nostalgia-fueled concert and the headline-grabbing breakup catapulted Taylor into a whole new level of fame. And whereas she’d spent the past six years largely hiding from public attention, this time she leaned into it—soft launching her relationship with Matty just a month later; mouthing “I love you” to him onstage; and gushing “I just sort of feel like my life finally feels like it makes senses” to a rain-soaked crowd in Boston.
It all felt vaguely unhinged at the time. And when the whole thing flamed out by June (amidst no small amount of controversy over Matty’s problematic behavior), fans mostly just seemed relieved. By the time Travis Kelce entered the picture in September, the weird month-long Matty blip was all but forgotten. So it’s both baffling and kind of brave for Taylor to revisit that messy time so overtly on Tortured Poets.
It’s been equally fascinating to watch the fan response to this massive swerve in expectations. Some are in full denial that Taylor could write such intense, sorrowful songs about a guy she only dated for a month, attributing any and all emotional songs to Joe. Others see Tortured Poets as a sort of Rosetta Stone for unlocking a hitherto unknown side of Taylor’s romantic life—reframing Matty from a random fling to the great “what if” flirtation who’s haunted the fractured moments of her long-term relationships for years.
Since Taylor never officially weighs in on who her songs are about (nor even confirms that they’re about particular people at all), there are no definitive answers here. But a poem she included with the Tortured Poets CD provides some insight into her intentions for the album. She pleads “temporary insanity” after she “tore down the whole sky” with a long-time lover, only to find herself “out of the oven and into the microwave” with an old flame who ultimately never understood her:
“In summation, it was not a love affair!”
I screamed while bringing my fists
to my coffee ringed desk
It was a mutual manic phase.
It was self harm.
It was house and then cardiac arrest.
A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face
Because it’s the worst men that I write best.
Of course, anyone who thinks Taylor can’t mine a short-lived romance for hours of creative inspiration should remember that she once wrote an entire album about a relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal that only lasted three months. And while some fans are confused about how Taylor can so vehemently come to Matty’s defense on songs like “But Daddy I Love Him” only to turn around and dub him “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” that kind of temporal displacement has always been her thing too.
Her 2010 album Speak Now, for instance, includes both the sweet love song “Ours” and the brutal breakup ballad “Dear John,” both allegedly written about the same person. Yet the existence of one doesn’t negate the other. Taylor sees her songs as diary pages that capture a specific moment in time, even if her perspective changes before the album is finished. That’s why the bad boy muse of Tortured Poets can exist as so many different things at once: An object of lust in “Guilty as Sin?,” a safe escape in “Fresh Out the Slammer,” an endearing boyfriend in “The Tortured Poets Department,” a frustrating shitshow in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” and ultimately a heartbreaking loss in “loml.”
(For his part, Matty is reportedly feeling “relief” about how he’s depicted on the album, which is absolutely the funniest way he could’ve responded to this whole thing.)
Tortured Poets throws listeners into the real-time mania that characterized Taylor’s 2023, only slowing down for a more rational, contemplative perspective in its (much stronger) second half. And though I do think Matty is her main muse, I also think her broader goal is just to unpack what it’s felt like to be Taylor Swift for the past few years—from escaping like a criminal to “Florida!!!” after her breakup (her first show after the Joe news broke was in Tampa) to plastering on a smile to get through her concerts in the hilariously upbeat “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” (“Lights, camera, bitch, smile” / “Even when you wanna die”).
In the electrifying “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”—my favorite track on the album—Taylor rages against what it’s like to have immense cultural power mixed with intense public scrutiny. (“I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me / You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”) In “Clara Bow” she reflects on how the entertainment industry is always eager to move onto the next young starlet they can worship then throw away. In the pointedly capitalized “thanK you aIMee” she delivers an empowering “fuck you” to her bullies. And in “The Prophecy” she mourns what it’s like to be perpetually unlucky in love when you so desperately want it.
The Matty stuff is a headline-grabbing hook that’s sent fans into a frenzy. But the heart of the album—and most of its best songs—exists elsewhere. In her lyrical closer “The Manuscript,” Taylor imagines her messy romantic history as one long tale she’s transformed into something else by putting it down in music: “Now and then I reread the manuscript / But the story isn't mine anymore.”
(Travis Kelce, meanwhile, inspires some of her worst lyrics in years, including the somehow not-a-parody verse, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle / Brand-new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.”)
As for poor Joe, he does get at least two songs on the album—the bittersweet goodbye “So Long, London” and the heartbreaking “How Did It End?” in which Taylor imagines how hard it will be to publicly explain a breakup she doesn’t fully understand herself.
But for those steeped in Taylor’s music, there’s also something fitting about the way the Joe goodbye doesn’t fit neatly into one self-contained album. Since the beginning, Taylor’s relationship with Joe has been “off-cycle” from the neatly divided “eras” that make up her career. Her sweetest love songs for him appear on her vengeful “goth-punk” clapback album, Reputation. Her anxieties about the relationship pop up in the candy-colored “lover letter to love,” Lover. And in retrospect, it’s clear that the fictional stories of her two pandemic albums contained plenty of autobiographical experiences too.
From “Tolerate It” and “Happiness” on Evermore to “Bejeweled” and “You’re on Your Own, Kid” on Midnights, it feels like Taylor has spent years processing the slow dissolution of a relationship where two well-intentioned people “learnеd the right steps to different dances.” Her most explicit breakup commentary arrived last spring, when she randomly released the bonus track “You’re Losing Me” (a song she reportedly wrote back in 2021). And I’d argue her most poignant goodbye to the relationship actually came at one of her Australian Eras Tour concerts earlier this year, when she performed a mashup of “New Year’s Day” and ”Peace”—two Joe love songs written from different vantage points.
Despite what fans expected, The Tortured Poets Department is less of a breakup confessional than it is a post-breakup post mortem, one that charts the unique mania that comes from ending a relationship and jumping right into another one only to realize that you can’t outrun your own feelings. As an album, it’s not Taylor’s best work. But as an entry in her cinematic universe, it’s quiet poetic.
To round things out, here’s my ranking of all 31 Tortured Poets songs:
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
“The Black Dog”
“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”
“thanK you aIMee”
“How Did It End?”
“But Daddy I Love Him”
“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”
“The Manuscript”
“The Tortured Poets Department”
“Clara Bow”
“Peter”
“loml”
“The Albatross”
“The Prophecy”
“So Long, London”
“I Hate It Here”
“Florida!!!”
“I Look in People’s Windows”
“Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”
“So High School”
“The Bolter”
“Fortnight”
“imgonnagetyouback”
“Down Bad”
“Guilty as Sin?”
“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”
“The Alchemy”
“Fresh Out the Slammer”
“Cassandra”
“Robin”
“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”
Other stuff I’ve worked on lately: For The Daily Beast, I reviewed Roku’s new take on The Spiderwick Chronicles—a YA show they inherited from Disney+.
This is perfect, helps me appreciate the mess a little bit more
Great read, Caroline! I listened to the double album yesterday and was underwhelmed by the first half but really liked the second half. I wasn't surprised to learn about the Antonoff/Dessen split that explains the sounds, but I was surprised to learn that it was mostly about Matty and not Joe, as we all expected! I'm still looking forward to digging into it. Midnights grew on me after my initial listen and I'm sure this one will too, but it's a very frustrating release for me.