The album sustains a vibe that’s melancholic without sacrificing hooks, but its minimalism undercuts the singer’s strengths.
I completed my undergrad at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest best known for its literary reputation, where tortured writers weren’t relegated to a mere department, but were, instead, about one-fifth of the entire student body. Having edited one of the student lit mags there, I share Taylor Swift’s love-hate relationship with would-be poets who define themselves via affected personality quirks and a refusal to complete a second draft.
What’s most odd about The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, then, is that Swift spends less time delving into what makes people like this tick than she does in imitating and then succumbing to their affectations. It’s the first of the singer-songwriter’s albums since her pivot toward full-on pop that would have been improved by an editor—or, more pointedly, by collaborators with the wherewithal to challenge some ideas that just don’t work.
Upon first impression, The Tortured Poets Department sustains a consistent vibe that’s melancholic without sacrificing pop hooks: “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” and “So High School” all sound like viable radio hits. With Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner sharing production duties, the double album’s aesthetic splits the difference between the cottagecore of 2020’s Folklore and Evermore and 2022’s less cohesive Midnights, relying primarily on minimalist arrangements that foreground rhythm sections and barely there instrumental backing. Again, it’s a vibe more than anything.
The album’s relative minimalism, though, undercuts some of Swift’s greatest strengths. The robust melodies of the standout cuts from Speak Now and 1989 are absent here, and there’s not a single bridge on these 31 songs that could bear any proverbial weight. Without those structural elements—and, to interject a key point into the discourse around this album that’s already taken some bizarre turns, it’s Swift’s mastery of song structure above all else that stakes her claim as a generational songwriting talent—there’s little to nothing to distinguish one song from another.
That homogeneity of sound puts the heavy lifting squarely on Swift’s lyrics. A similar approach worked brilliantly on Folklore and Evermore, on which Swift expanded her narrative voice beyond an insular Main Character Syndrome. But The Tortured Poets Department is something of a regression in that regard. There are some fantastic individual lines and stanzas throughout—and some showcases for Swift’s utterly savage sense of humor—but they’re too often stranded in songs that are otherwise not up to her recent standards.
For one, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” finds Swift at her most lacerating—“Is it a wonder I broke?/Let’s hear one more joke/Then we could all just laugh until I cry”—but the song’s impact is neutered by its over-writing. Truly, there’s no one, not even Swift, who can get away with a line like “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.” The album’s lyric sheet reads with far too many lines that, taken on their own, scan as purple, tortured prose.
To her credit, Swift elevates some of that writing with her performances: The way she modulates her phrasing or volume to emphasize how she’s changed words in common idioms—“Old habits die screaming,” she sings on “The Black Dog”—is one of her most effective tropes. And isolating individual lines isn’t always the fairest way to engage with lyrics that do read more like prose-poetry: “I Hate It Here” has already drawn significant social media ire for lines that read as problematic when plucked from the middle of an entire stanza that clearly recognizes them as such: “My friends used to play a game where/We would pick a decade/We wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.”
Still, on repeated listens, it’s both the great and the god-awful lyrics that draw attention to themselves. Antonoff and Dessner provide so little in the way of other points of interest that the songs bleed together until an especially pointed or overwrought line pulls focus.
In the interim, The Tortured Poets Department plays out as a pop album that sounds fine enough but sure is long-winded. At her best, Swift’s albums demand and reward analysis—and not the type of thought-terminating exegesis that gets bogged down in which songs are “about” which of her ex-boyfriends—because there’s genuine dramatic tension in the way that she employs details from her anything-but-common life in narratives that resonate broadly.
The narrators on The Tortured Poets Department are content to serve as both the speaker and listener in their own conversations, while Antonoff and Dessner decline to interrupt or respond with instrumental flourishes. Whether any particular listener will find a point of entry, then, depends wholly on how interesting they find Swift’s unfiltered and unedited versions of these same few stories, told and re-told many times over. While there’s a sizable audience who are fully invested in exactly that, what The Tortured Poets Department leaves for anyone else is an album that’s more of a tone poem than a collection that holds up to close scrutiny.
Jonathan Keefe’s writing has also appeared in Country Universe and In Review Online.
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