Dear Reader,
Where were we on April 19? Listening to Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” Taylor took us by surprise with a double album at 2:00 a.m., “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional songs.

This album was categorized as a synth-pop, borrowing heavily from rock and folk sounds. Inspired by Taylor’s six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, which ended on April 9, 2023, fans expected an album of lost love and self-discovery. Rising to our expectations, Taylor delivered with songs like “The Black Dog” and “loml,” which fans realized meant “loss of my life” rather than the usual acronym for “love of my life.” These heartbreaking ballads prove Taylor’s Shakespearean lyricism with lines like “You talked me under the table/Talking rings and talking cradles/I wish I could un-recall/How we almost had it all,” “Our field of dreams, engulfed in fire/Your arson’s match, your somber eyes/And I’ll still see it until I die/You’re the loss of my life” and “How you don’t miss me/In The Black Dog/When someone plays The Starting Line and you jump up/But she’s too young to know this song/That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming/Old habits die screaming.”

With fifth tracks typically being her most vulnerable songs on her albums, Taylor struck again with “So Long, London,” a direct reference to a popular song about the heartbreak prince, “London Boy.” This song features gut-wrenching lyrics like “And you say I abandoned the ship/But I was going down with it/My white knuckle-dying grip/Holding tight to your quiet resentment,” “Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away/My spine split from carrying us up the hill” and “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues?/I died on the altar waiting for the proof/You sacrificed us to the god of your bluest days/And I’m just getting color back into my face/I’m just mad as Hell cause I loved this place.”

While the majority of the songs on the album are slower and less upbeat than her previous albums, like “1989,” a few songs stood out with their fast rhythms and funky beats, including “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “Down Bad,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Florida!!!,” “The Alchemy,” “imgonnagetyouback” and “So High School.” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” particularly stood out to us, with a stark juxtaposition between the lyrics and the beat. While the beat is incredibly upbeat and cheery, the lyrics are thick with loss and indecision. In this song, Taylor reveals how she was forced to hide her true feelings and depression after leaving Joe during The Eras Tour. She uses EDM-style music to conceal the true meaning behind the lyrics, further emphasizing the song’s message.

In this album, Taylor collaborated with two artists, Post Malone and Florence + the Machine, to produce songs “Fortnight” and “Florida!!!,” respectively. The opening song on the album, “Fortnight” was also released with a music video directed by Taylor herself. The music video not only featured Post Malone as Taylor’s “lover,” but also depicted cameos from Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles, costars in the “Dead Poets Society,” which inspired the name of the album. In her second collaboration with Florence + The Machine, “Florida!!!,” Taylor drew inspiration from true crime cases. The song expresses Taylor’s desire for escape from the camera flashes.

Of course, we cannot conclude this review without discussing her newest golden love with Travis Kelce. She alludes to their budding relationship with “The Alchemy” and “So High School.” With lyrics like “These blokes warm the benches/We’ve been on a winning streak/He jokes that it’s heroin but this time with an ‘E’/Cause the sign on your heart said it’s still reserved for me/Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?” and a direct reference to her time on the bleachers with the lyrics “Shirts off, and your friends lift you up over their heads/Beer sticking to the floor/Cheers chanted, cause they said/There was no chance, trying to be/The greatest in the league/Where’s the trophy?/He just comes running over to me.” If you are up on your Swiftie knowledge, you know that after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, Travis and Taylor celebrated under the confetti as the crowds went wild.

Since the album’s release, Swifties have taken to the internet to help decode each song. One notable observation found that several songs have background melodies taken from songs in other albums. For example, the piano intro of “loml” is reminiscent of “Soon You’ll Get Better,” from the “Lover” album. Additionally, the intro of “So Long, London” follows the beat of the intro of “Call It What You Want,” from the “Reputation” album. While these comparisons might be tied by an invisible string, they could also be further prophecies to Taylor’s relationship with Joe, as both “Lover” and “Reputation” were written about their relationship.

Call it what you want, but this album is the perfect depiction of life after a sad, beautiful, tragic love affair.

XOXO,
The Taylor Trackers