All of us knew we were in for a new era when Taylor Swift walked into the GRAMMYs ceremony earlier this year. Donning a cleansing white gown with long black gloves, she was elegant and severe. Little clues like a swapped profile photo on IG, now in greyscale and now the visual manifestation of longing, convinced her fan base aka the world that we were getting reputation (Taylor’s Version) stat.

And, as with many predictions about Taylor Swift, we were all wrong. She told us about her new album, The Tortured Poets Department (henceforth TTPD), after her first GRAMMY win that night. Initial reactions to the news ranged from excitement through huh? How did she find the time to travel the world on a blockbuster tour, produce a concert film, attend all of the Chiefs playoff games, and write and record an entirely new album lately, many wondered. No doubt, journalists were already writing early drafts of TTPD reviews to talk about the hasty work she’d done to get the album out. How she’s too driven, too capitalistic, too much.

What struck me about the TTPD news was the title. All of Taylor’s albums, with the exception of her self-titled debut, were a single word (or number, okay). Here we had a multi-word, highly syllabic title to consider. It was a departure. It was a mouthful. And now that the album has been out in the world, we know it was intentional.

Initial reviews focused on the superficial aspects of the album, such as OMG she wrote so many songs about Matty Healy!!!

Taking a closer look, there’s more to the story.

Although she’s covered her stratospheric stature in the world on prior albums, TTPD is her most explicit examination of her truly singular experience of being Taylor Swift. She’s fearless (or is it fearsome?). And she’s peerless. It’s no surprise that many early takes of the album conveyed, This is not for me. I can’t relate. This is too different.

In reality, that’s the entire point, one that she punctuates by positioning “Fortnight” – an eerie track where the engine of the bass-forward melody pulls her affectless singing along – as the opening song.

As time has gone by, people have come to rally around her experiences outlined in TTPD and draw meaning for their own. Just as she’s done on every album, across TTPD, she communicates her own experiences with textured specificity yet the effect is universal. You – a working professional living in the suburbs – too, can do it with a broken heart.

At the same time, across TTPD, what we discover is that, in a way, this peerless existence is her birthright, a prophecy she’s fulfilling, which may or may not be forced upon her by a money-hungry industry.

In this review, I cover how the songwriting approach and lyrical content of TTPD stunningly intertwine to communicate the often shocking, sometimes soul-crushing, and thoroughly rare experience of being Taylor Swift.

Reimagined song structure and rhyming schemes

First, let’s talk about what we’ve seen with her songwriting approach to provide context for how beyond the norm her TTPD work is.

In terms of song structure, Taylor has long been innovating and continues to test the limits of features to include (or jettison completely) in her songs throughout her canon.

With Fearless, we saw her taking a more traditional country songwriting approach, where the structure would go something like this:

• Verse 1
• Verse 2
• Chorus
• Verse 3
• Chorus
• Bridge
• Chorus

Once she moved into a pop sound, starting with Red (see “Treacherous”) and then 1989 (see many songs, may as well look at “Blank Space”), she started experimenting with a more mainstream songwriting structure, leveraging the kind of predictability many listeners are accustomed to:

• Verse 1
• Chorus
• Verse 2
• Chorus
• Bridge
• [Verse 3, as needed)
• Chorus/outro

You can see this pattern on many Beatles songs, if you want a point of reference.

“All Too Well” is a distinguished departure from most songs (not just Taylor’s) in that, although the chord pattern repeats itself where you’d expect a chorus, she changes the lyrics every time it occurs. The only continuity are the words “all too well” so it’s less a “chorus” and more a “chordsus,” yet another marker of her continued innovation.

When we moved into the hygge-forward folklore and evermore eras, we saw her stark experimentation with songwriting structure, something I’ve covered at length – including on TV albums, in vault tracks of prior eras (like “Now That We Don’t Talk” from 1989 TV, as noted in my review) – where she left behind the bridge altogether and repurposed the outro to serve the purpose of the gut-punch emotional impact traditionally served by the bridge. “Illicit affairs” and “august” are great examples of this.

Throughout her canon, she wields other songwriting features, like a pre-chorus and outro (meaning not the “bridge outro” she essentially invented but more a soft close to the song that you might find on other songwriters’ works).

On TTPD, she brings all her songwriting tools to the table, often extending songs to include three verses, three choruses, a pre-chorus, and an outro, for a supercharged, unusually protracted experience, an approach in stark contrast to the de rigueur format of albums today that condense each song and the entire album in as few seconds as possible. “But Daddy I love Him” – a song that covers the panopticon experience of her existence and her newfound outward disregard for publicly held opinion – is a stellar example of using all the tools in her toolkit.

In addition, for much of her canon, her rhyming schematic typically followed a common sequence designed to build intrigue and tension within verses and the chorus, an approach shared by many other songwriters.

It might go something like:

• Line 1 ends with sound A
• Line 2 ends with sound B
• Line 3 ends with sound A
• Line 4 ends with sound B or C

Here’s an example from “Lover”:

We could let our friends crash in the living room (A)

This is our place, we make the call (B)

And I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you (A, approximately)

I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all (B)

Songs like “Enchanted” used couplets, which, for those who haven’t taken a Lit 101 class lately, are two lines using similar or identical meter joined together by rhyme.

Interestingly, she was already experimenting with going beyond a couplet and joining more than two lines by rhyme during the Fearless era, which we now know from the vault track, “Mr. Perfectly Fine.”

Here’s the first verse:

Mr. “Perfect face” (A)

Mr. “Here to stay” (A)

Mr. “Looked me in the eye (B)

and told me you would never go away” (A)

Everything was right (C)

Mr. “I’ve been waiting for you all my life” (C)

Mr. “Every single day until the end, I will be by your side” (C)

I’ve well-covered my hypothesis that the vault tracks are actually blueprints for her future work – a kind of training ground and safe space to experiment with uncommon songwriting approaches she’d intentionally roll out later, and we’re seeing that happen on TTPD.

The unusual stringing-together of three lines by shared rhyme demonstrated above shows up frequently on TTPD, to an almost excessive point. In fact, in my estimation, more than half the songs on TTPD Anthology (meaning at least 16) use couplets at a minimum, and some songs use three or more rhyming lines in a row. In total, the effect of the endless rhyming may potentially feel alienating.

“Peter” is the most obvious example of this endless rhyming schematic. It’s important to note that “Peter” contemplates her own preoccupation with the Peter Pan idea – of never growing up and the unusual experience of arrested development she may face, a topic she’s covered throughout her canon and also provided a shout out to on “cardigan.”

Let’s look at the opening verse for “Peter” to witness the rhyming repetition, which confers an almost hypnotic experience:

Forgive me Peter (A)

My lost fearless leader (A)

In closets like cedar (A)

Preserved from when we were just kids (B)

Is it something I did (C)

The goddess of timing (D)

Once found us beguiling (D)

She said she was trying (D)

Peter was she lying (D)

My ribs get the feeling she did (C)

And I didn’t want to come down (E)

I thought it was just goodbye for now (E)

As you listen to “Peter,” you almost feel like you’re hurtling down a river with whitewater rapids and one lonely oar: Where exactly is the rhyming going to turn next?

What’s intriguing is that when I went back to listen to her catalogue, she had rarely done this on core albums, perhaps with the notable exception of the song “Red.”

Now that we have a common understanding of her typical songwriting approach, let’s dive in to a selection of tracks from TTPD (the Anthology) that show how she took the road less traveled on this album to communicate the road she travels that no other human has seen.

“Down Bad”

What I find interesting about this song is that it shows that somewhere along the way she’s had a lover that she relates to in an uncanny way (“like I lost my twin”), and the experience was so unusual to her as to be “cosmic love,” something she’s long sought after throughout her work and life.

In “Down Bad,” she picks up on a theme that has been covered elsewhere in her canon, as well as on this album (later in “Peter,” for example): reckoning with her experience of arrested development.

In the chorus, she notes it:

Now I’m down bad crying at the gym

Everything comes out teenage petulance

In “But Daddy I Love Him” (strategically placed next), she picks up on the idea of being a “precocious child” that’s later referenced on “The Prophecy” (both covered in more detail in this review). Running along the current of the unusual experience of her existence all throughout TTPD, she is coming to terms with needing to generate a fully formed emotional self (“teenage petulance”).

Later in the song, she covers the idea of her true self, using the metaphor of “clothes” to represent the armor she wears (“Did you take all of my old clothes / Just to leave me here naked and alone”). Brene Brown often talks about armor we build and wear as an impediment to connection with another person, the obstacles you place in your own path to mitigate the risk of vulnerability. For Taylor Swift, “clothes” are the armor she wears to protect herself but also represent the layered narrative about her that the world has constructed. You can see how much she identifies with this complex idea in the Eras tour, where each album has its own wardrobe change associated with it, using outfits as a signifier of meaning. Only her lovers – including the muse for “Down Bad” – know her as “naked,” or vulnerably real. Based on the narrative of “Down Bad,” this experience of exposure was transformative, leaving her “heavenstruck”

In the second half of Anthology, she covers this topic again in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” where she sings, “And you saw my bones out with somebody new.” The “bones” – meaning what’s not covered with clothing or even skin – is the authentic, real Taylor Swift, not the brand as manifested through her outfits. She goes on to talk about the shapeshifting she did to fully rid herself of her complicated relationship, including changing her clothes:

I changed into goddesses, villains and fools

Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules

All to outrun my desertion of you

And you just watched it

In this excerpt alone, you can see how she weaves in couplets to this song, as well.

“But Daddy I Love Him”

Where to begin with this one? Well, first, it’s obviously a bit of a fuck you to the world. But, digging deeper, it demonstrates this transformative path she’s been on to recognize her unusual life, while tossing off the shackles of the court of public opinion.

In the second verse, we see her interest in the recurring theme of destiny on TTPD:

Dutiful daughter, all my plans were laid

Tendrils tucked into a woven braid

Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all

The middle line – “tendrils tucked into a woven braid” – speaks to the coercion she felt to mold to the path she’s taken (“plans were laid” like a “prophecy” cited elsewhere), as covered later on the album, such as on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me.” Touching on “growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all” dovetails with “Peter” and her long-held interest in arrested development. How can I grow up if I never had a childhood to begin with?

From talking about “saboteurs” to “wine moms” (“fuck ‘em”), the song rails against the world’s obsession with her every move, an experience rarely felt by most people. In the chorus, she sings:

God save the most judgmental creeps

Who say they want what’s best for me

Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see

What I find really interesting – aside from how she somehow got “sanctimoniously” and “soliloquies” to work in an easy-to-hear meter – is where she lands: she’ll never see the social media nonsense about her. It speaks to how insular her world must be, something many of us may experience in a less exteme way. Think about it: If there were two zillion results when someone googled your name, would you, too, shut all of it off, so you never, ever hear what some Sophia or Marcus has to say about you? I mean, I would. As it is, I barely maintain LinkedIn since I do speaking engagements for my job so random people constantly follow me – and, you know, I didn’t sign up to be Taylor Swift or anything.

As noted, this song has an extensive, varied song structure, clocking in with three verses, three turns of the chorus, pre-chorus, bridge with an extension (???), and an outro!

“Guilty as Sin”

On the surface, “Guilty as Sin” sounds like it’s about anticipating a yet-to-be-consummated relationship with a lover. Looking a bit deeper, it more closely hews to the ongoing struggle Taylor faces between having a widely understood public persona – and well-documented parasocial relationship with her fans – in the context of ever having intimate relationships, picking up on a narrative at the center of 1989.

In the first verse, she sings about how a new lover conjures a revelation in her, helping her reflect on the prison of celebrity and the possibilities beyond:

My boredom’s bone deep

This cage was once just fine

Am I allowed to cry?

I dream of cracking locks

Throwing my life to the wolves

Or the ocean rocks

Crashing into him tonight

He’s a paradox

I’m seeing visions, am I bad?

Or mad? Or wise?

As we’ve long seen in her work – going way back to the Speak Now era, as evidenced by the vault track “Castles Crumbling” – her unusual, eclipsing-any-norm celebrity stature feels like a “cage” that she now fantasizes about escaping (“cracking locks / throwing my life to the wolves”). The first question she poses is a bit tongue-in-cheek: Am I allowed to cry? Here she’s contending with the tension between feeling shackled to the rollercoaster of fame and an identity the world has spun of her against her own internal revelations, and wondering: What would the world say if I told them I hate this? Is it acceptable? Later in the verse, some of the questions she throws out are not ones she asks but rather her awareness that these are the types of questions the public will ask, as her “guilty as sin” behavior will be called into question: Has Taylor Swift gone mad? (Likely a headline from May 2023.) But then she closes the verse with her own conclusion: Perhaps coming to terms with this life and breaking free from it, thanks to the mirror she’s found in her lover, is in fact wise.

As with many Taylor songs, the bridge is the key to unlock the riddle of the song:

What if I roll the stone away?

They’re gonna crucify me anyway

What if the way you hold me

Is actually what’s holy?

If long suffering propriety

Is what they want from me

They don’t know how you’ve haunted me

So stunningly

I choose you and me

… Religiously

I noticed at least one TTPD review cited her identification with Jesus Christ as absurd and perhaps a bit much. Yet, is she wrong? Given the media’s breathless, needling coverage of her brief relationship with some guy in a band, doesn’t she have a point? To me, she’s being realistic about her stature in the world – one that is literally peerless – as well as her well-defined image (“long suffering propriety / is what they want from me”). I think many of us paying attention to social media and the broader press in spring 2023 would agree they did “crucify [her] anyway.”

Consider that for a moment: Here is a person, just like you and me, who happens to be talented and successful (perhaps also like you and me). Yet her every movement, conversation (perhaps clarifying why she’d digitally track her lover’s location as covered in “The Black Dog”), and relationship are analyzed through word vomit articles and endless hashtags, dissected with as much scrutiny and investigation as a researcher finding the root cause for cancer. It is an existence not one of us can relate to. Yet it is hers, and as thematically covered elsewhere on this album – including the intentionally placed next song – it is exhausting and fraught. She’s continuously asking the question: Is this [relationship / behavior / outfit / dance movement] at odds with who they think I am and is it worth the risk? Now she thinks, maybe it is.

“Guilty As Sin” also uses the couplets rhyming schematic to deliver a hypnotic experience as she travels through the narrative of being an Other.

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

For me, one of the most fascinating strategies Taylor Swift deploys is how little she talks about her music and her own existence in the popular press or on social media. If you were wondering how she feels about the experience of being continuously surveilled, picking up on the “Guilty as Sin” theme, this song is all you need to hear.

While the entire song smartly covers the extraordinary tension between the world’s perception of her and her own experience, as well as the impact of the path she’s been on, I’ll focus on the second turn of the chorus and the bridge (one for the record books).

When the chorus comes around the second time, she adds a few lines, so it goes:

… So I leap from the gallows and I levitate down your street

Crash the party like a record scratch as I scream

“Who’s afraid of little old me?”

I was tame, I was gentle ’til the circus life made me mean

“Don’t you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth”

Who’s afraid of little old me?

Well, you should be

She recognizes the amount of power she yields, thanks to the decade plus growth of her fanbase, record-breaking career trajectory, and carefully curated public persona. Yet she seems to be saying here that the path she took wasn’t entirely in her control, and perhaps that’s attributed to a combination of “birthright” and “prophecy” at play, or something else entirely. She may have started out, with her country roots, as “tame” and “gentle,” but the capitalistic industry lords continuously carved out her image and made decisions about her music that she may have disagreed with (“the circus life,” which I actually think her Taylor’s Version project reinforces where she’s released songs of an era that may have been intentionally excluded initially as to not contradict the public’s narrative and understanding of her – so that her albums would be more commercially successful – as highlighted in my review of Speak Now TV). The entire experience has left her bitter, and understanding her larger-than-life existence in the collective unconscious, she’s ready to wrest back control (“Who’s afraid of little old me?”), which may be another hat tip to the Taylor’s Version projects.

In the bridge, she goes even deeper to elaborate on her dissonant experience:

… So tell me everything is not about me

But what if it is?

Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me

But what if they did?

Here we see her grappling with whether it is paranoid to think that she’s always watched, scrutinized, judged (“So tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is?”). It’s fair to assess – based on the sheer volume of social and media coverage of her every action – that her world is a panopticon, yet unlike the prisoners in Foucault’s asymmetrical surveillance world, she knows she’s being watched. But that doesn’t bring any comfort. She signals the almost gaslighting experience she has just in her everyday existence as a result to this non-stop surveillance.

She also acknowledges this well-founded paranoia on “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” in the bridge:

Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead?

Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed?

Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy?

In fifty years, will all this be declassified?

Here the tension between her stratospheric fame and her interpersonal relationships intersects, as it did throughout 1989 and empathically on “Is It Over Now?” from the vault tracks on that album. And now we have the tinge of paranoia that crops up in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” to further complicate the narrative. For any celebrity, dating must carry a wide set of risks. For Taylor Swift – someone with no peers in the world today – it is even more fraught, as she understands how valuable private information about her would be to others (“Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In fifty years, will all this be declassified?”).

Back to the bridge of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” she covers how unique and unrelatable her entire existence has been:

… 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

So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs

I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?

That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn

That I’m fearsome and I’m wretched and I’m wrong

Putting narcotics into all of my songs

And that’s why you’re still singing along

She reflects back what the public thinks of her: a hollow existence (“my house with all the cobwebs”), as well as the perception that she’s always ruefully writing about the wrongs her lovers have committed and constantly seeking revenge (“I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said? / That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn”). I love the end of this bridge where she punctuates just how ridiculous the collective narrative of her being conniving and capitalistic is, as though she’s malignantly getting her audience addicted to her and her music by “putting narcotics into all of my songs.” If you’re wondering if this narrative exists, just check out the Billie Eilish hot take about how Taylor games record sales stats (under the guise of sustainability concerns, of course). And, keeping in step with being afraid of little old her, see how Taylor responded by (intentionally?) releasing new versions of TTPD on the eve of Billie’s new album launching, so TTPD, although more than a month old, would compete with the new Billie album on the record charts.

“I Can Do It with a Broken Heart”

An irrefutable bop, this song covers the necessity of her existence, for better or for worse: fulfilling the globe-trotting, chart-topping duties of an ultra-mega-superstar while experiencing personal emotional pain (“I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can do it / With a broken heart”). What I love to see here is how she’s picked up on that willingness to own how magnificent she is that we first saw in “Bejeweled” from Midnights.

As noted in the introduction to this post, this song has become shorthand for the modern woman’s experience, even though not one of us has sold a billion dollars in concert tickets, albums, and merch. The public’s identification with this song – though chronicling an experience literally none of us will ever, ever have – is yet another marker of Taylor’s mastery of the human experience and connection to her listeners.

Interestingly, this song has a highly unconventional structure: two verses and two turns of the chorus, with no bridge at all. In the outro, she underlines just how rarefied she is by sing-laughing the last line – as well as reinforcing that “you should be” afraid of little old her: “Try and come for my job.”

“Clara Bow”

Positioned as the last track, “Clara Bow” feels like a continuation of “The Lucky One” from Red – where she openly wondered if disappearing someday may be the right move – as well as emblematic of the themes across TTPD of the so-called prophecy that guides her existence.

In the first two turns of the verses, she picks up on what any industry maven may have said to her at some point about her future success as a pop star. If you haven’t read the internet lately, Clara Bow was the original “It Girl” from the Silent Era who eventually exited the industry to become a rancher of all things (very much has “The Lucky One” vibes).

Throughout these first few verses, we can see how hopeful and exciting to hear this type of comment (such as comparing her to Stevie Nicks) was and how she might “die if it happened.” This narrative is against the backdrop of the other songs – “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and later “The Prophecy” – where she more or less feels that she’s been compelled into an existence that has no facsimile. To underscore the point that this existence may not be all it’s cracked up to be, she covers it in the bridge:

It’s hell on earth to be heavenly

Them’s the breaks

They don’t come gently

Here’s the last verse, which is cynical, but perhaps not for the reasons you’d guess at first glance:

“You look like Taylor Swift

In this light

We’re loving it.

You’ve got edge she never did

The future’s bright

… Dazzling.”

One way of reading this is to see her anticipating that her star will eventually decline and some other starlet will eclipse her rocket ship.

Taking into consideration all that we hear on TTPD, my hypothesis is that this is what the same industry overlords who architected her fame pathway are saying to other up-and-coming artists, to lure them in to the idea of a tantalizing future filled with possibilities, such as what Taylor Swift has achieved. There’s a note of cynical irony to end the core album on this verse considering how beyond-the-norm her career has been, as covered in detail across TTPD. You could be like Taylor Swift, they’ll say, when the truth is nobody could be. Thus, she’s raising the alarm on this insidious tactic to protect others from the “asylum” that raised her. In a voice note about this song, Taylor said that she intended to communicate how sexist it is that women can never just be great for being them, yet, to me, it’s more a blinking warning light for others.

“The Prophecy”

Given what I’ve outlined in this review, you, too, may feel naming a song “The Prophecy” is a bit on the nose.

The surface-level reading of this song is that she’s been unlucky in love and it’s her destiny to be so. Yet, hearing what we’ve heard elsewhere on the album – including the coercion she experienced being raised in an “asylum” of the music industry on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” – it isn’t a huge leap to consider that it’s this singular journey she’s taken that has eclipsed her ability to secure the one thing she’s wanted: a faithful, equal relationship.

In the first verse, she sings:

Hand on the throttle

Thought I caught lightning in a bottle

Oh, but it’s gone again

And it was written

I got cursed like Eve got bitten

Oh, was it punishment?

She may be saying that she thought she found “the one,” though it could be that the “lightning in a bottle” she caught is her stratospheric rise to fame. The idea of her path – unmatched by any other person on planet Earth – being “written” as a prophetic text is a theme we see throughout TTPD. Though her world is rare, it is not all good (“I got cursed like Eve got bitten”).

The recurring chorus forms a coda on her path as birthright, as one she didn’t fully choose:

Please

I’ve been on my knees

Change the prophecy

Don’t want money

Just someone who wants my company

Let it once be me

Who do I have to speak to

About if they can redo

The prophecy?

If you’re reading this song in the spirit of “I’m tired of all these shitty dating app experiences,” sure, you may also say “change the prophecy … just someone who wants my company.” Yet Taylor Swift’s experience of finding a mate is not yours. Yes, finding a match that’s genuine and worth pursuing may feel like finding a needle in a haystack. Consider adding the paparazzi tracking, panopticon social experience, and commercial viability to the mix – not to mention what a potential lover has to put up with in a similar vein – and suddenly you can no longer relate. Though she’s not complaining about what she has per se, she is pleading to “redo / the prophecy” to offer more choice in her path (that is, of being a self-made billionaire at the top of the world) and lower the entry fee to partnering with her.

**

The more I listen to TTPD, the more awestruck I am. It is no surprise that so many reviewers missed the mark on first listen given how layered the entire album is, ranging from her unusual songwriting choices to the lived experiences few of us will ever see. While I’m willing to be wrong, if TTPD earns awards, it will be more about the songwriter and less about the album itself. An album like this is not made to fit into any box, and that may be why it’s one of her most masterful works.