Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” may just be her most self-referential work to date.
Swift herself described the album as “a summary of my findings” after two successive heartbreaks — and a lifetime in the spotlight — full of “muses, acquired like bruises, talismans and charms.”
Swift is known for lacing her music with clues about her personal life and callbacks to her previous work. Early in her career, she left messages by capitalizing certain letters in lyric booklets, incentivizing fans to examine her writing. Swift abandoned that strategy several albums ago, but make no mistake: The Easter egg hunt is still on and more extensive than ever.
Keep reading for a breakdown of the standard tracklist, including key lyrics and themes.
The first single “Fortnight,” which features Post Malone, muddles romantic memories with anguished delusions.
“There are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death, like, ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life,'” Swift explained in a series for Amazon Music. “These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
“I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me,” Swift sings to set everything in motion.
This lyric seems to pick up where “Midnights,” Swift’s previous album, left off. The “Til Dawn” deluxe edition ends with “Hits Different,” a song about heartbreak’s grisly aftermath: “Is that your key in the door? / Is it OK? Is it you? / Or have they come to take me away?”
The “Fortnight” music video makes this allusion explicit, opening with Swift trapped in an asylum. This imagery will reappear in track 10, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” (“You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”).
“Fortnight” also introduces themes of fatalism and violence. In the chorus, Swift seems to suffer hallucinations: She imagines her ex becoming her neighbor and fantasizes about killing his wife. She also wants to kill her own cheating husband (who doesn’t exist), possibly as a callback to the “Evermore” murder epic “No Body, No Crime.”
In the song’s outro, Post Malone sings, “Another fortnight lost in America / Move to Florida,” foreshadowing Swift’s feverish meltdown in track eight, “Florida!!!”
Most references in the title track are obvious by design. Matty Healy is likely the one depicted as a “tattooed golden retriever” while Charlie Puth gets an explicit shoutout, as do the iconic poets Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith.
The song’s third verse, however, is slightly more layered.
“At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” Swift sings.
The prospect of marriage is a recurring motif in Swift’s discography, dating all the way back to “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” (2006) and “Love Story” (2008). The title track from 2019’s “Lover” was written to resemble a wedding song. In that same album, Swift pledges to marry her partner with “paper rings.”
Her recent works have explored a more nuanced, cynical view of the institution. The 2020 album “Evermore” was full of apathy and betrayal, which Swift described as an “anthology of marriages gone bad.” In the “Midnights” opener “Lavender Haze,” Swift denounced domesticity as “the 1950s shit they want from me.”
Swift obviously has ambivalent feelings about marriage, but when a ring is dangled in “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift is overjoyed: “That’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”
As the album progresses, it becomes clear the gesture wasn’t sincere. In context, this scene becomes one of casual cruelty, rather than romance.
“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is one of two songs on the standard tracklist written solely by Swift.
Swift compares herself to a toy, “the sickest army doll,” possibly as a nod to the “Midnights” vault track “You’re Losing Me” (“My face was gray, but you wouldn’t admit that we were sick … And all I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier”).
Meanwhile, she compares her past lovers to male Barbies, singing, “I felt more when we played pretend / Than with all the Kens.” She previously used this metaphor in “Hits Different” (“I used to switch out these Kens, I’d just ghost”).
Another line in the chorus, “He saw forever so he smashed it up,” recalls the scathing “Fearless” standout “Forever & Always” (“Did I say something way too honest, made you run and hide / Like a scared little boy?”).
“Down Bad” opens with a surreal depiction of getting “love bombed,” which occurs when a new partner lavishes attention before abruptly leaving.
Swift sings of getting beamed up by an alien spaceship, where she’s enveloped in “a cloud of sparkling dust” and embraced as “the chosen one.” But in retrospect, she realizes it was only an experiment.
“For a moment, I knew cosmic love / Now I’m down bad crying at the gym” she sings.
Swift uses this juxtaposition to illustrate the outcome of her breakup: She was exposed to a glittering universe, but when her cosmic lover left, she was forced to return to her miserable normality. She underscores this point in the chorus: “Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up.”
Another line, “Down bad, waking up in blood,” seems to borrow reddish imagery from “Maroon” (“I wake with your memory over me”).
She also flips a line from the “1989” bonus track “New Romantics” so that “Leave me stranded, it’s so romantic” becomes the exact opposite plea: “How dare you think it’s romantic leaving me safe and stranded?”
Most interestingly, Swift repeatedly refers to her lost lover as her “twin,” recalling a key lyric in the “Evermore” bonus track “It’s Time to Go” (“Not a twin from your dreams / She’s a crook who was caught”).
Swift employs a double entendre in “So Long, London,” so the title is used to bid farewell to her lover and to connote the length of their relationship. The city is almost certainly a reference to Joe Alwyn, Swift’s ex-boyfriend of six years, for whom she relocated to London in 2016.
“I kept calm and carried the weight of the rift,” Swift sings in the first verse, nodding to the British wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
She continues to detail her relationship’s slow demise: “I stopped trying to make him laugh.” This could be a callback to “Mirrorball,” the seventh track on “Folklore” (“I’m still on that tightrope / I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me”).
The song contains several parallels to “You’re Losing Me,” including the lines “I stopped CPR, after all it’s no use” (“I can’t find a pulse, my heart won’t start anymore for you”) and “How much sad did you think I had?” (“How long could we be a sad song ’til we were too far gone to bring back to life?”).
Once again, Swift includes a notable reference to marriage, singing, “You swore that you loved me / But where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” Similarly, in “You’re Losing Me,” she implies hope for a proposal that would never come (“I wouldn’t marry me either”).
The altar also doubles as a reference to religious sacrifice, which Swift exploits in the following line: “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.”
Alwyn has long been associated with the color blue in Swift’s songwriting, as in “Delicate” (“Oh damn, never seen that color blue”), “Paper Rings” (“I’m with you even if it makes me blue”), and “Peace” (“Don’t want no other shade of blue but you”).
Finally, in the outro, Swift delivers the final tragic blow: “Had a good run / A moment of warm sun / But I’m not the one.”
After Swift’s split from Alwyn made headlines last year, she swapped the love song “Invisible String” on The Eras Tour setlist for “The 1,” an existential breakup ballad (“It would’ve been fun / If you would’ve been the one”).
“But Daddy I Love Him” is a grandiose declaration of love, painting Swift as a melodramatic and rebellious heroine.
“I’m telling him to floor it through the fences / No, I’m not coming to my senses,” she sings in the chorus, conjuring the image of “Getaway Car.” “I know he’s crazy but he’s the one I want.”
Swift sounds like the character she played as a teenager in “Love Story” (“Romeo save me, they’re trying to tell me how to feel / This love is difficult, but it’s real”) and even acknowledges this resemblance, making note of her enduring immaturity: “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all.”
After the brutal bridge, in which Swift seems to condemn her own fans as “judgmental creeps,” she employs a classic Swiftian twist at the final hour.
Much like the final chorus in “Love Story” (“I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress”), “But Daddy I Love Him” ends with Swift’s character earning parental approval (“Now I’m dancing in my dress in the sun and / Even my daddy just loves him”) and the promise of marriage (“Time, doesn’t it give some perspective / No, you can’t come to the wedding”).
In the outro, Swift repeats a prickly lyric from the bridge, reveling in her happy ending: “If all you want is gray for me / Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice.”
Swift has repeatedly used black, white, and gray as a metaphor for common fare, while color is used to signal an intense and extraordinary love, as in “Out of the Woods” (“The rest of the world was black and white / But we were in screaming color”) and “Illicit Affairs” (“You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else”). She has also described herself as “like a rainbow with all of the colors” in the 2019 single “Me!“
Swift cites this song title in the album’s “Summary Poem,” which is included with physical copies.
“And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave / Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave,” she writes. The couplet refers to her exit from a long-term relationship and hasty leap into a new one.
And so “Fresh Out the Slammer” introduces the album’s outlaw trilogy, followed by “Guilty as Sin?” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).”
These songs use twangy guitar and criminal imagery to tell the tale of two ill-fated lovers on the run, evading capture and common sense. (The dynamic recalls “Cowboy Like Me“).
The first verse of “Fresh Out the Slammer” seems to run through a litany of references to previous songs in Swift’s catalog. “Splintered back in winter” is an echo of the cabin creaks in “Evermore,” while “Silent dinners, bitter” is an apt summary of “Tolerate It.”
“Gray and blue and fights and tunnels” is a likely nod to Swift’s gray face in “You’re Losing Me,” juxtaposed with Alwyn’s blue eyes.
“Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine” is a clear callback to the “moment of warm sun” described in “So Long, London.”
In the second verse, Swift seems to recall The Eras Tour kicking off last year with “camera flashes, welcome bashes.” (It marked her first series of live shows since 2018).
Shortly after the tour began, Swift’s breakup with Alwyn was reported. “Get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she sings, drawing a parallel with “Ivy” and its passionate scenes of infidelity (“It’s a goddamn blaze in the dark / And you started it”).
In the final verse, Swift’s new lover calls her “the girl of his American Dreams.” The album isn’t ordered chronologically, so we already have an inkling this will all fall apart, thanks to the foreshadowing in track one (“Another fortnight lost in America”).
She then draws a parallel between their long-awaited reunion (“Now, pretty baby, I’m running / To the house where you still wait up and that porch light gleams”) and the young lovers from the “Folklore” love triangle, James and Betty, calling back to “Cardigan” specifically (“I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired / And you’d be standing in my front porch light”).
Swift also refers back to the mock wedding scene in the title track. After getting out of jail, she sits in the open air with her paramour, “wearing imaginary rings.”
“Florida!!!” is positioned as the aftermath of “Fresh Out the Slammer.”
At this point in the story, Swift’s character is either a fugitive or a convicted criminal with newfound freedom. So naturally, she runs away to a swampy town in no man’s land.
“People have these crimes that they commit. Where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida,” Swift explained in the Amazon Music series. “They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in.”
Swift and Florence Welch, who’s a cowriter and featured artist, describe Florida as “one hell of a drug,” teasing out their destructive impulses.
“Me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time / Yes, I’m haunted, but I’m feeling just fine,” Welch sings, an apparent nod to Swift’s hit single “Anti-Hero” (“When my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the room”). Additionally, “Haunted” is the title of a track from “Speak Now.”
Welch also includes a winking callback to Swift’s murder fantasy in “Fortnight” (“And your cheating husband disappeared, well / No one asks any questions here”).
Bonus detail: Emma Stone, Swift’s close friend of many years, is credited in the liner notes for “oddities” under her birth name Emily Jean Stone.
“Guilty as Sin?” is the second track in the outlaw trilogy, though chronologically, it seems to precede “Fresh Out the Slammer.”
Swift opens the song by name-checking The Blue Nile’s 1989 single “The Downtown Lights.” Not only was the song released during her birth year, but according to Healy, it served as an inspiration for The 1975’s political anthem “Love It If We Made It.”
“Drowning in the Blue Nile / He sent me ‘Downtown Lights’ / I hadn’t heard it in a while,” she sings.
In this verse, it’s clear that Swift is still in a committed relationship, though she admits, “My boredom’s bone deep / This cage was once just fine.” So instead, she dreams of “cracking locks,” underscoring the song’s connection to “Fresh Out the Slammer” (“Years of labor, locks and ceilings”).
Swift ponders: “I’m seeing visions, am I bad? / Or mad? Or wise?”
The word “mad” is particularly loaded, appearing previously in two “Folklore” tracks: “The Last Great American Dynasty” (“There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen”) and, of course, “Mad Woman.”
In the chorus, Swift sketches out her private fantasies of another man: “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?” Again, the word “Mine” carries weight as the title of a beloved “Speak Now” single.
In the second verse, Swift confesses, “I keep these longings locked / In lowercase inside a vault.” This is a clear nod to her “Taylor’s Version” series. These albums are rerecorded and rereleased with extra songs attached, labeled “from the vault,” meaning they were cut from the original albums. The implication is that Swift has written songs about this person before, but chose not to release them at the time.
In the final verse, Swift portrays her desire as sacrilege (“What if the way you hold me / Is actually what’s holy?”), much like she does in the “Lover” track “False God.”
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” is almost certainly a reference to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — a 1962 play written by Edward Albee — which is itself a reference to the 1933 Disney song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
According to Albee, the play’s title is another way of saying, “Who’s afraid of living life without false illusions?” Because Woolf made her name writing stream-of-consciousness poetry, the threat she poses is not one of violence, but vulnerability.
Ablee’s dark comedy follows a dysfunctional couple who delude themselves, each other, and the audience in order to cope with their feelings of frustration and inadequacy. While everything unfolds onstage, it’s never quite clear who’s lying about what.
Swift toys with the same concept throughout “The Tortured Poets Department,” blurring the line between truth and illusion. Her emotional reactions seem to eclipse the literal events, especially in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
Swift uses dark, potentially violent images — gallows, asylums, bullets — to communicate the pain of stardom and scandal. Swift has been famous since she was a teenager and the constant public scrutiny has taken its toll. By the end of the song, public perception and personal reality seem to overlap.
“You caged me and then you called me crazy,” she sings in the outro. “I am what I am ’cause you trained me.”
For those keeping track, that’s the third cage reference in this album (following “But Daddy I Love Him” and ‘”Guilty as Sin?”) and the seventh in her overall discography (following “I Know Places,” “So It Goes…“, “This Is Me Trying,” and “Midnight Rain“). In the album’s “Summary Poem,” Swift also refers to herself as a “caged beast” who was driven to do “the most curious things.”
But the song’s many parallels don’t end there. In the 1966 “Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?” film adaptation, Elizabeth Burton stars as the boozy, bitter wife (“I’m always drunk on my tears,” Swift sings, “Isn’t that what they all say?”) opposite Richard Burton’s sad-sack husband.
Swift previously referenced these actors and their torrid real-life love affair in her “Reputation” single “…Ready For It?” (“You can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor”).
“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” concludes the album’s outlaw trilogy. Swift begins to acknowledge issues with her lover’s behavior, like him chain-smoking cigarettes and making “revolting” jokes.
“I can fix him, no, really, I can / And only I can,” Swift pledges in the chorus, echoing the conspiratorial tone of the title track (“Who else decodes you?” “Who’s gonna know you, if not me?”)
In the bridge, Swift coaxes her partner in crime to behave: “I’ll show you heaven / If you’ll be an angel all night / Trust me, I can handle me a dangerous man.”
Indeed, Swift has demonstrated an attraction to danger, as in “Treacherous” (“This hope is treacherous / I like it”) and “New Romantics” (“We need love, but all we want is danger”).
The final lines in the song are written thusly in the lyric booklet: “I can fix him / No, really, I can / WOAH – maybe I can’t.”
Just as “But Daddy I Love Him” is the spiritual successor to “Love Story,” “Loml” is the spiritual successor to “The 1.”
In both songs, Swift characterizes herself as a compulsive grave-digger, unable to stop reviving the past and rehashing hypotheticals. “Still alive killing time at the cemetery / Never quite buried,” she sings in the chorus of “Loml,” a clear callback to the “Folklore” opener (“In my defense I have none / For digging up the grave another time”).
Another couplet, “You said I’m the love of your life / About a million times,” may allude to the adulterous tale of “Illicit Affairs” (“They show their truth one single time / But they lie and they lie and they lie / A million little times”).
Notably, “Loml” belongs to this album’s anthology of imagined marriages: “You and I go from one kiss to getting married.”
Swift seems to conflate the relationship’s intensity with longevity, though she later undermines that very correlation: “It was legendary / It was momentary.” It’s possible that Swift has intentionally muddied the timeline of these events, in order to confuse real-life interpretations — or else it’s a poetic device used to convey a non-linear healing process.
In the bridge, Swift sings, “You shit-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could unrecall how we almost had it all.”
The “Folklore” gem “Peace,” which Swift has said is “rooted in my personal life,” uses strikingly similar language: “I talk shit with my friends, it’s like I’m wasting your honor / And you know that I’d … Give you my wild, give you a child.”
The bridge and final chorus include varied salutes. “I can’t get out of bed ’cause something counterfeit’s dead” could be connected to the “Midnights” deluxe track “Glitch” (“It must be counterfeit”), while “The coward claimed he was a lion” is probably a nod to “The Wizard of Oz.” (Swift previously referenced the film in the “Karma” music video.)
The official lyric video for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” features clips of Swift on The Eras Tour, the blockbuster run of shows that boosted the US economy, inspired fervent devotion, and spawned a groundbreaking concert film, all before it was halfway done.
Behind the scenes, however, Swift didn’t feel so triumphant. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” digs into the chasm between her “glittering” onstage persona and her genuine emotional state, which takes a backseat to appease the demands of her fans.
“All the pieces of me shattered / As the crowd was chanting, ‘MORE!'” Swift sings. “I was grinning like I’m winning / I was hitting my marks.”
This brings to mind “Mirrorball,” which paints a similar portrait of Swift as a fragile yet devoted performer: “I’ll get you out on the floor / Shimmering beautiful / And when I break, it’s in a million pieces.”
In the chorus, Swift sarcastically intones, “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday / Every day.”
Indeed, Swift has an iffy track record with birthdays, as evidenced by “The Moment I Knew” (“What do you say / When tears are streaming down your face / In front of everyone you know?”) and the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” (“It’s supposed to be fun turning 21”).
The second verse deepens the connection with “All Too Well” — in particular, the fabled scarf that Swift left at her ex’s sister’s house.
“I keep finding his things in drawers / Crucial evidence I didn’t imagine the whole thing,” Swift pouts. A similar scene also occurs in “Hits Different” (“I find the artifacts, cry over a hat … I trace the evidence / Make it make some sense / Why the wound is still bleeding”).
The subject of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is vividly painted using physical details (“In your Jehovah’s Witness suit“) and allusions to drug abuse (“You tried to buy some pills,” “Sank in stoned oblivion”) that seem to suggest the subject is Healy.
Swift revisits the theme of addiction in one of the album’s deluxe tracks, “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” (“You needed me, but you needed drugs more”).
Addiction is also a dominant theme in The 1975’s discography. Healy has written about using cocaine (“Ugh!“), mixing pills with wine (“Playing On My Mind“), fighting an addiction to heroin (“It’s Not Living,” “Medicine“), and eventually going to rehab (“Surrounded by Heads and Bodies“).
In the bridge, Swift poses a series of hypothetical questions, trying to understand her lover’s rationale for leaving. She calls back to the pistol imagery from “I Can Fix Him” (“Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed?”) and draws a connection to “Fresh Out the Slammer” (“You deserve prison, but you won’t get time”).
“In plain sight you hid / But you are what you did,” she concludes, flipping a line from “Innocent” (“Who you are is not what you did”).
In the first verse of “The Alchemy,” Swift revisits the asylum imagery found elsewhere on the album: “What if I told you I’m back? / The hospital was a drag / Worst sleep that I ever had.”
The chorus marks her triumphant return to reality: “Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I’m the one to beat / ‘Cause the sign on your heart / Said it’s still reserved for me.”
These lyrics are intentionally vague, using generalized metaphors to illustrate her own dominance. “The Alchemy” could be read as a kind of “Mastermind” part two — a song that celebrates her own prowess while saluting fans for sticking by her side.
In the second verse, Swift declares, “That child’s play back in school / Is forgiven under my rule.”
This could be another reference to The Eras Tour, whose setlist includes songs like “Fearless” and “You Belong With Me” that Swift wrote as a high schooler.
Swift has been widely praised for allowing fans to reclaim their “girlhood” and creating a safe space for “cringe” at her concerts.
“Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime,” Swift said in 2022 during her NYU commencement address. “I had a phase where, for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950s housewife. But you know what? I was having fun. Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun.”
Some fans have attempted to connect “The Alchemy” to Swift’s current boyfriend, Travis Kelce, suggesting the bridge was written after he won the Super Bowl in February: “Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me.”
However, according to the liner notes, “The Alchemy” was copyrighted in 2023, so this theory is implausible.
Swift explained in the Amazon Music series that “Clara Bow” was inspired by real conversations she had with label executives as a child.
“They’d say, ‘You know, you remind us of,’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her,” Swift said. “That’s how we teach women to see themselves, as like, ‘You could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you.'”
To illustrate her point, Swift creates characters who name-drop “It Girl” flapper Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks. (Nicks even wrote an introductory poem for this album, included in physical copies.)
At the end of the song, Swift adds her own name to this succession: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light / We’re loving it / You’ve got edge / She never did.” Remember, in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” we learn that Swift’s handlers “took out all her teeth.” Now, industry executives mock her for not having enough “edge.”
Throughout the album, Swift seems to argue that public critique, at least at her level of superstardom, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She’s steeling herself for the day of reckoning, when she’s outstripped by a younger, edgier starlet.
Swift previously expressed her fear of being discarded and replaced in the “Red” vault track “Nothing New” (“She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me / I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep”).
Given the array of young stars who’ve already cited Swift as an influence, it’s very possible the conversation she outlines in “Clara Bow” has already happened.
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