Taylor Swift Is Having Quality-Control Issues
This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you’re supposed to feel okay about—she is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling medium—but who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.
The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy. (And this opinion is based on the 16 songs of the main album; earlier today, she surprise-released 15 more tracks on top of those.) She’s just processing a weird chapter of her life.
Depending on how you frame it, that chapter began either before she started dating the actor Joe Alwyn in 2016 or early last year, when they broke up. Though separating fact from fantasy in Swift’s songs is never simple, Tortured Poets’ gloomy visual style and inside-joke title—Alwyn was in a group chat called “Tortured Man Club”—led many observers to assume the music would be about the dark side of her longest relationship. Instead, much of the album seems to fixate on a character whose tattoos, suit-and-tie uniform, and dicey reputation call to mind someone else: Matty Healy, the leader of the rock band The 1975.
Till now, Healy seemed to be a footnote in her life. She and he had reportedly hung out for a bit in 2014 and then, after the Alwyn breakup, appeared to rekindle passions. A short bout of feverish and awkward publicity ensued—Healy, among other things, apologized for making racist jokes about the rapper Ice Spice—and she soon moved on to the NFL player Travis Kelce. (Tortured Poets features one song that’s unambiguously about him, “The Alchemy,” laden with terrible football puns.) But the album makes it sound like Swift was seriously hung up on Healy, and he broke her heart. The story she spins is about busting out of prolonged romantic confinement and into the arms of a wild child whom she’s long held a torch for—who then uses her and bruises her.
It’s a spicy and salacious narrative, but much of the music is cold and inert. The producer and writer Jack Antonoff has proved himself capable of making all kinds of songs over the years, but this album will only feed his notoriety as a purveyor of formulaic, retro synth pop. The mannered orchestration of the album’s other main contributor, Aaron Dessner, isn’t any fresher either. The songs tend to develop through the slow accumulation of stuff—gloomy bass lines, spindly guitars, echoing harmonies—rather than through sophisticated interplay of instrumentation and vocalist. Swift sings in a breathy, theatrical tone that calls to mind better work by her buddies Lana Del Rey and Stevie Nicks, the latter of whom wrote a poem for the liner notes.
Both on its own terms and in terms of what she’s already done in her career, this musical approach is boring. But it does serve two purposes. One is to convey the tedium she apparently felt in her previous relationship, with a man who never gave her as much affection as she needed. (“Every breath feels like rarest air when you’re not sure if he wants to be there,” she explains, movingly, on “So Long, London.”) The other effect of the production is to provide a neutral backing for Swift’s words, like ruled paper for legible penmanship. She wants us to clearly understand what she’s saying.
The problem is that what she’s saying tends to sound more like rambling than songwriting. Already, internet commentators have started mocking the title track, in which Swift says, “You smoked and ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” This is actually a highlight because, on an album full of garbled metaphors, it’s direct and distinct: She’s summoning a very imaginable scene of at-home, intimate bullshitting with a partner. Even funnier, she tells her pretentious boyfriend, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.”
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It’s a good line—but it’s also jarring, given that Swift has never discouraged fans from treating her like the Millennial Patti Smith. Perhaps the title and library-themed marketing of The Tortured Poets Department is at last a self-aware prank, meant to acknowledge that her lyrics can indeed be a bit … tortured. But that doesn’t make her careless use of figurative language any less painful to sit through. “The smoke cloud billows out his mouth like a freight train through a small town,” goes one line that I wish I could unhear. In an extended metaphor comparing her relationship to jail, she suddenly brings up wizardry: “Handcuffed to the spell I was under.”
The bright moments here work because of feeling, not language. “But Daddy I Love Him” and “Guilty as Sin?” flirt with country and rock, and the combination of live-sounding drums with her keening voice is so perfect that it’s tragic we don’t get more. The album’s other highlights are extreme expressions of rage and petulance. “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” revives the high drama of her 2017 album, Reputation, by pairing warm pop passages with screamed refrains. “Down Bad” also calls back to Reputation with its cavernous dynamic shifts and catchy R&B inflections. On the scathing diss track “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Swift sounds genuinely bewildered by how she’s been betrayed. “Were you writing a book?” she asks. “Were you a sleeper cell spy?”
Powerful as such moments are, hearing Swift lay into yet another caddish ex, after a career of songs doing exactly the same thing, is sad, and not in a fun way. She’s casting herself, yet again, in the role of the naive victim who’s been taken advantage of by an irredeemable villain. She leans on stock types—saints and sinners—to present a schematic take on adult relationships. The results aren’t just predictable to listen to; they can seem callous and blinkered. For example, she mentions her partners’ drug use and mental-health problems multiple times—not as traits of a complex human being, but as failings she frustratingly can’t, to use her term, “fix.”
I don’t mean to moralize. Pop is an art form of simplification, and Swift deliciously spends “But Daddy I Love Him” torching “judgmental creeps who say they want what’s best for me.” Artists aren’t saviors; they’re flawed people figuring life out as they go along. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets,” Swift said earlier this year, and the results—Swift unleashing unpolished thoughts over lots of rote music—testify to what she meant. Each honeymoon-to-heartbreak story she’s sung about over the years has conveyed the lesson that worshiping another person is a recipe for disappointment. When will it sink in?