Traditionally, Taylor Swift has not been massive on correct nouns. She’ll throw the names of cities into her lyrics, and generally she’ll specify neighborhoods or parks or streets. Each now and again, she’ll toss in a namecheck, like James Taylor on “Start Once more.” However most of her songs are in regards to the relationships between an apparent “I” and an unspecified “you.” The identification of that “you” isn’t secret.
Swift has typically pulled cute little methods — capitalizing letters in her lyric sheets, as an example, to spell out already-obvious meanings. (Final evening, she introduced that conference again for “thanK you aIMee,” her newest bonus observe about how she’s nonetheless not over the entire Kim-and-Kanye scenario.) In the event you’re an off-the-cuff fan, perhaps these are simply songs that you just like. Possibly you don’t even take into consideration the identification of their topics. In the event you’re an obsessive fan, you may map out each “you” on each Swift tune. More and more, Taylor Swift doesn’t have informal followers. Possibly that’s why she’s utilizing so many correct nouns now.
On her new album The Tortured Poets Division, Taylor Swift reels off a couple of place names — Manhattan, London, LA, Florida, Texas, Destin — however these aren’t the correct nouns I’m speaking about. I’m speaking in regards to the names that present us Taylor Swift’s body of reference, the names that carry a lot of the lyrics’ weight. Dylan Thomas. Patti Smith. The Chelsea Lodge. Charlie Puth. Lucy and Jack — no final names given, however I believe we’re supposed to grasp that she means Dacus and Antonoff. Peter — no final identify once more, however she’s positively utilizing Peter Pan as a literary machine. Sarahs, Hannahs, and varied different first names used for generic functions — these ones don’t have final names, however they’re simply stand-ins, for precise folks, for an ex’s potential hookups, or for the disapproving “wine mothers” in Swift’s viewers. Kens, as within the boyfriends of Barbies. The Blue Nile and “The Downtown Lights.” God, a bunch of instances, although by no means in a worshipful sense. A Jehovah’s Witness go well with. The Beginning Line. Aston Martin. Cassandra. American Pie. Aristotle, which rhymes with “contact me whereas your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” Clara Bow. Stevie Nicks in ’75. Taylor Swift.
That final identify, making its first look within the lyrics of a Taylor Swift tune, pops up on the finish of “Clara Bow.” It’s the final tune on the proper-album first half of The Tortured Poets Division, and it may also be the very best. On that one, Swift stops singing about issues of the center, breakups and forbidden urges and so forth, and as a substitute considers the goals of some small-town artist who longs to stun the world. She takes conferences, and folks inform her the issues that she needs to listen to. Possibly they’re blowing smoke up her ass, or perhaps she actually is a world-changing drive ready to occur. Both approach, superstardom sounds empty: “You’re the brand new god we’re worshipping… It’s hell on earth to be heavenly/ Them’s the breaks, they don’t come gently.” Then, somebody pays this particular person a noteworthy praise: “You seem like Taylor Swift on this mild, we’re lovin’ it/ You’ve received edge she by no means did/ The longer term’s brilliant, dazzling.”
“Clara Bow” might be about somebody particular, and loads of folks can have enjoyable speculating who. However that’s probably not the purpose, is it? The purpose, appears to me, is that Taylor Swift, at the least on some degree, is prepared for someone else to select up the burden of being Taylor Swift. This can be a shock. For greater than half the time that she has been on this planet, Taylor Swift has endured ranges of public consideration that would cut back most individuals to gibbering madness. In all of recorded historical past, only a few musicians have achieved the extent of omni-cultural presence that now belongs to Taylor Swift. My grandmother died a couple of months in the past. She was 103 — sufficiently old to recollect horse-drawn buggies and silent movies and polio. The final dialog that we ever had was about Taylor Swift. My grandma was a reasonably plugged-in particular person, even on the finish of her life, nevertheless it’s not like she ever requested me about Drake or Morgan Wallen or Olivia Rodrigo or anybody else who was working within the pop-music area after her a hundredth birthday. However she knew Taylor. Everybody is aware of Taylor.
Within the face of all of this consideration, and even only a fraction of this consideration, most individuals would go bugshit fucking nuts. We’ve seen totally different variations on that story many times. Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson have sophisticated and divisive legacies, however I believe we are able to all agree that they weren’t regular folks. Taylor Swift has at all times conveyed the impression that she’s a traditional particular person. It’s her superpower. She was capable of play a main-character position on this 12 months’s Tremendous Bowl with out ever touching a soccer, and she or he nonetheless has hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers who consider her as a pal, whether or not or not she’s ever met them. Final summer season, I watched Swift carry out an interesting mixture of gratitude and pleasure as tens of hundreds screamed their heads off for her. She does that many times, evening after evening in metropolis after metropolis.
On her new album, Taylor Swift would love us to know that this was an act. She needs us to know that she’s an enormous weirdo, a crazy-passionate self-saboteur who has come to resent the gilded jail of overwhelming fame. She’s labored so exhausting and carried out a lot, and in consequence, hundreds of thousands of individuals really feel entitled to tut-tut her life decisions. That’s the message that I’m taking from The Tortured Poets Division, anyway. That’s a reasonably fascinating message, however it might be extra fascinating if it got here connected to some bangers.
Taylor Swift was writing bangers earlier than she was sufficiently old to drive a automobile. By means of each stage of her profession, she’s made bangers. Greater than the rest, these bangers are the rationale why folks care about Swift’s private life. Every time she’s encountered a transcendent second of pleasure, heartbreak, anger, worry, confusion, exhilaration, or the rest, her response has been to write down a banger about it. However now, the lore has come to swallow the music. With some exceptions, the songs on The Tortured Poets Division are merely not robust sufficient to help the burden of all that fucking storyline. It’s beginning to really feel just like the lore is all now we have. It’s not sufficient.
It appears that evidently Taylor Swift has discovered her aesthetic consolation zone. This can be a drawback. Musically, Swift has fallen right into a holding sample of soft-thrumming synthpop and even softer quasi-folk. The sounds and patterns — the mild keyboard twinkles, the tick-tock drum machines, the shivery chords, the murmuring multi-tracked backup vocals — are all performed out. Swift continues to be working with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the 2 collaborators who’ve been serving to her steer the ship for at the least the previous half-decade. (This time, Antonoff labored on a lot of the correct Tortured Poets Division, whereas Dessner assisted on the majority of the second disc tacked on to final evening’s shock drop The Tortured Poets Division: The Anthology.) Swift continues to sing nearly every part in her sleepy, whispery, conversational decrease register, going for some model of Lana Del Rey’s languor. The sound is fairly. It’s wealthy and pillowy and reassuring and low-energy, and it’s what we’ve heard from her again and again. Previously, Taylor Swift albums have introduced some new concept, some sonic development or wrinkle. Not less than for now, that’s over. Swift stays within the Midnights zone, and what we get is what we get.
Now: Taylor Swift can write a tune. You realize that. You realize that even in case you’re pretending that you just don’t. The tracks on Tortured Poets are, for probably the most half, immaculately constructed. A number of the bridges completely kill. The quietest songs nonetheless construct as much as soft-thunder finales that may be really beautiful. The manufacturing presents nearly nothing new, however there’s an entire lot of magnificence in its genteel layers. On “Down Unhealthy,” Swift crams in tons of syllabic syncopation with out sounding like she’s making an attempt to rap even a bit of bit, and she or he achieves the type of offhand melodic grace that few of her would-be friends may hope to the touch. The title observe manages to make a full-on earworm out of its barely labored lyrics about the way you’re not Dylan Thomas and she or he’s not Patti Smith. Leadoff bonus observe “The Black Canine” clashes Swift’s current manufacturing model together with her old-school Nashville-honed storytelling chops, and the distinction works properly. “I Can Do It With A Damaged Coronary heart” arrives late within the correct album and presents what could be, at the least for Taylor, a brand new aesthetic concept: A nervous, refracted house-music thump that matches her supply and her keyboard-swirls fantastically. That tune’s received a musical vitality and inventiveness that I want I heard on extra of the file.
For probably the most half, although, The Tortured Poets Division sticks with the percolating wispiness that’s come to outline an excessive amount of of Taylor Swift’s music in recent times. It’s not unhealthy, nevertheless it doesn’t seize me, both. These songs would possibly develop on me, however on early listens, my consideration wanders. That’s not an excellent signal. It’s particularly regarding when Swift pulls the too-cute transfer of including one other album’s value of bonus tracks a few hours after launch, turning her new file right into a drowsy marathon.
Swift has evidently determined that she’s not making any massive musical statements with this album. As a substitute, she’s making all of her statements together with her lyrics. The writing on Tortured Poets performs round with fictional signifiers. On opening observe “Fortnight,” for instance, Swift imagines herself unhappily married, residing subsequent to an also-married ex, ruminating on what would possibly’ve been. However she’s not making up characters or tales right here. She’s not singing, even obliquely, about different folks. As a substitute, she’s chronicling a dense, chaotic interval of her private life, and she or he’s actually moving into the messiness of all of it. If solely the messiness got here via within the music.
For all the correct nouns that seem within the Tortured Poets lyrics, there are a couple of individuals who Taylor Swift by no means immediately names. It will be enjoyable to faux that we don’t know who’s she’s singing about — picturing Travis Kelce banging away at an vintage typewriter in some nook of Swift’s condominium — however that stuff ought to all be instantly plain to anybody who’s even midway been paying consideration. On many of those songs, Swift sings in regards to the finish of a relationship and the blame that have to be portioned out within the aftermath: “You say I deserted the ship, however I used to be taking place with it/ My white-knuckle dying grip holding tight to your quiet resentment.” You realize who she’s speaking about there.
Elsewhere, Swift sings a few giddy whirlwind affair with a charismatic dirtbag: “He was chaos, he was revelry/ Bed room eyes like a treatment.” You realize who that’s, too. That dalliance goes to some enjoyable locations in little sketches that really feel like they need to’ve occurred in actual life: “You tried to purchase some drugs from a pal of buddies of mine/ They only ghosted you/ Now you understand what it seems like.” Travis Kelce, the third man on this equation and the one one who has no evident sad-artist sensibility, solely will get a couple of vaguely sly big-game allusions on “The Alchemy” and the aforementioned Aristotle/Grand Theft Auto rhyme on the pretty-good bonus observe “So Excessive Faculty.” That tune makes this man seem to be a blessed reduction, nevertheless it’s frankly troublesome to think about Swift conjuring flowery language to explain any experiences that she could be having with him.
The entire poetry angle behind The Tortured Poets Division — the Spotify-stamped parchment being strategically positioned in locations the place it’ll be photographed, the precise poems being promoted — might be the least fascinating factor in regards to the file. It’s probably not all that necessary to the ultimate product, however Swift brings main English-teacher vitality to a few of her writing right here: “My buddies all scent like weed or little infants,” the road about “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies.” A few of that stuff is a bit of bit a lot, nevertheless it’s overwritten in an endearing approach. The Swift lyrics that originally grate typically reveal themselves to be probably the most enjoyable ones after a number of listens. I like that she’s actually making an attempt with that stuff. Greater than that, I like that she’s now directing a few of these lyrics at her followers.
The folks sanctimoniously performing soliloquies? These are the Swifties, the individuals who profess to like Taylor Swift. They’re the individuals who have made her a billionaire and who now have extremely-online parasocial relationships together with her. They’re those devoting huge numbers of Reddit threads to her romantic choices. If I’m studying Tortured Poets proper, Swift is sick of this association. Repeatedly, she sings in regards to the “most judgmental creeps who say they need what’s finest for me,” the village elders telling some man to steer clear of her, and the gilded cage that she as soon as preferred simply effective. There are solely so many ways in which one can interpret this line: “I’ll let you know one thing proper now, I’d relatively burn my entire life down than pay attention to at least one extra second of all this bitching and moaning.” That’s a bar. Like so many people, Taylor Swift is uninterested in the Taylor Swift discourse.
