I recently dropped my phone in the tub during my toddler’s bathtime, so I was functionally adrift in space for 72+ hours while it dried out. Prior to this plunge, I had been listening committedly to Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology on Spotify via the app on my phone. It’s a long album, so I’d really only gotten through it a couple times before giving my phone a bath.
Being without a phone meant re-learning how to use ancient technology, including pen and paper, and more importantly for this story, the CD player in my car. I own one Taylor Swift CD. I got it as a stocking stuffer this past Christmas after emphatically begging my partner to please step up and fill my stocking because no one else in his family treats stockings with the enthusiasm that I do so mine is always conspicuously limp. Bless him; he tried. One of the tchotchkes he stuffed in my stocking was a CD/journal combo of Taylor Swift’s Lover.
I will never understand the way his mind works. Aside from the fact that Lover was released five years ago and we literally have no technology in the house with which to listen to CDs, Lover isn’t even in my top 5 Taylor albums (Folklore, Reputation, Evermore, Midnights, Red: Taylor’s Version, if you’re wondering). What made him choose it? If I had to guess, I would guess that he chose it because the album is called “Lover” and he loves me. I would also guess that it was cheap and stocking stuffers should be cheap.
So here I am, listening to Lover, Taylor Swift’s album-length love letter to Joe Alwyn, in full, after having dived into the breakup album. The experience was… weird. It reminded me of a tweet I saw in 2018 after Ariana Grande broke off her engagement to Pete Davidson; the tweet said that listening to Sweetener after the breakup was like being lied to for an hour. Listening to Lover felt like listening to someone lie to themselves for an hour.
So imagine my surprise when, cell phone dried out, I return to the land of the living and learn that The Tortured Poets Department is apparently not about Joe Alwyn at all, but rather, apparently, about Swift’s rebound with infamous dirtbag Matty Healy. Obviously I consulted my sister in law, Gillian, on this matter because she is my Taylor Swift consultant. She doesn’t identify as a Swiftie, but she knows what’s up.
G: I was hoping for lots of breakup songs about her long term relationship
M: Aren’t they all breakup songs???
G: I’ve read they’re all break up songs about Matty Healy and I find him so unbearable that the idea of of being sad about breaking up with him is hard to wrap my head around
M: THEY’RE ABOUT MATTY FUCKING HEALY?
(paraphrased)
I asked Coach for permission to write this month’s substack about The Tortured Poets Department because on careful inspection I think the album is dusted with references to Matty Healy in deliberately misleading ways that I find fascinating. Plus, Hannah and I discussed our respective thoughts on the album in our recent Patreon-exclusive Material Concerns recording (episode comes out next week!), and we agree that the album is doing A LOT MORE than eulogizing a fling. (And when Hannah and I agree on something? Well that just proves we’re right—sorry I don’t make the rules!)
I teach literary analysis to hundreds of university students every year, so I can tell you that analyzing literature, let alone poetry, is not a skill that comes naturally to most people, and turning to biography for explanations is a convenient way to make sense of the text. It isn’t necessarily wrong, either! But relying on biography is quite limiting and makes for inconsistent interpretation. (Once during my undergrad I wrote a paper about some Sylvia Plath poems, arguing that you can’t understand Plath’s poetry without taking her biography into account. My instructor commented something like “But wouldn’t it be so much more interesting not to?” Well fuck you Jesse, I’m using your advice to talk about Taylor Swift.)
Yes, Taylor Swift is famous for writing about her personal life, but that doesn’t mean her songs are equivalent to diary entries. Moreover, any references to her personal life that we “catch” in her music are included there on purpose, so we must resist the urge to assume that our observations of those references prove that we have some personal knowledge of her. We don’t! So even though The Tortured Poets Department (hereafter TTPD) is truly bedazzled with strategic allusions to Swift’s lovers (former and current) and her experiences as a woman dating under the microscopic public eye, I implore you to refuse the surface reading of the album as being about either Matty Healy or Joe Alwyn. Frankly, every one of those Healy signifiers reads (sounds?) to me like a red herring, a literary device deployed strategically to throw readers off course. After all, what better way to “diss” your ex-partner of six years (Alwyn) than to release a break-up album that’s seemingly about your dirtbag rebound fling (Healy)?
Let me dust off my degree for a moment and tell you what I, Marcelle Kosman, PhD in English, think this album is about. I read (hear?) this album as a furious reckoning with the trappings of the heterosexual love plot. (You may wish to re-listen to our Material Girls episode about Taylor Swift guest-starring the wonderful Margaret H. Willison, in which we talked about Lauren Berlant’s theorizing of the love plot, aka the female complaint.) Marriage, the logical conclusion of the love plot, is a recurring motif throughout TTPD; the album opens with “Fortnight,” a song from the perspective of a truly miserable suburban housewife trying to cope with the end of an extra-marital affair. Throughout the song, the speaker juxtaposes seemingly banal scenes of suburban living (“run into you sometimes / ask about the weather,” “now you’re at the mailbox / turned into good neighbors,” “your wife waters flowers”) with a barely concealed simmering rage (“I want to kill her.”). In fact, the way the speaker describes the addressee’s movement through the neighbourhood suggests that she’s watching him obsessively from a window. Hannah described Swift’s persona in this album as “very madwoman in the attic,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Likewise, TTPD gives us multiple songs about trying to make your partner better, an essential step in securing the happy ending (marriage) that the love plot promises. I’m thinking here in particular of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” The speakers in both of these songs seem to have come to terms with the fact that their lovers are social pariahs—one, a manchild whose self-destructive behaviour makes him incapable of commitment; the other a feral loudmouthed barfly we’ve all tried to ignore at some point or another. While both speakers seem optimistic, willing to make the best of their bleak relationships (“I’m queen of sand castles he destroys”; “A perfect case for my certain skillset”), we can’t ignore the way the two songs end with a total reversal of their stubborn optimism. The speaker of “My Boy,” for example, finds herself abandoned with “all these broken parts.” Crucially, the manchild has told this speaker that she is “better off” without him only after he has “broken” her. Personally, I find the end of “I Can Fix Him” to be even more haunting; our speaker, who has repeated “I can fix him / (No, really, I can)” throughout the song, suddenly pulls up short at the end of the final chorus, admitting “Woah — maybe I can't.” What happened to spark this sudden reversal? What does our speaker witness to make her doubt her civilizing superpowers? The lack of specifics here suggests that the song is a cautionary tale: listeners, if you think you can fix him, run.
Finally, we’ve got to look at the way TTPD represents “failing” to achieve the marital end of the love plot. Remember the song “Paper Rings” from Lover? The chorus goes something like “I like shiny things but I’d marry you with paper rings?” The speaker of that song is young, in love, excited about the future, and looking forward to a big ol’ celebration where she can declare her love in front of everyone because love is real and joyful and future-oriented. That speaker? Oh, she’s gone. Dead and buried in Florida, by the sounds of it. The transformation from Swift’s romantic optimist (rom-optimist?) persona in Lover to the mad woman (madwoman) of TTPD is all too familiar to those of us who have, ourselves, come to recognize the love plot as a lie.
To unpack this transformation, I want to do a final deep dive into the song “loml,” an acronym for either “love of my life” or “loss of my life”... or neither, or both. This pared down ballad mourns a relationship, yes, but it also mourns the person our speaker used to be before the relationship in question changed her. The chorus begins with a callback to that youthful romantic, “If you know it in one glimpse, it’s legendary / You and I go from one kiss to getting married” but the song pairs this hopelessly romantic utterance with punny references to death: “Still alive killing time at the cemetery / Never quite buried.” I can’t help but notice, listening to the song (on repeat for hours), how phonetically similar the words “married” and “buried” are. This wordplay tells me that although this romance is “legendary,” our speaker is still waiting for the next step: the marriage promised to her with that one kiss. What to make, then, of her choice to use the metaphor “buried” in describing the elusive “forever” of marriage?
The second chorus repeats the rhyming of “legendary,” “cemetery” and “Never quite buried,” reiterating the comparison between marriage and death, just as the song moves into the bridge. The lines “You shit-talked me under the table / talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could un-recall / how we almost had it all” not only conjure up the love plot (“rings” and “cradles” referring here to marriage and children), but the very premise of liberal feminism itself. To “have it all,” we modern career women are told, means we must have both a family and a career—but it isn’t actually clear from the song if that’s what our speaker ever wanted. In fact, I want to argue that metaphorizing marriage with burial suggests that she’s grieving a future that would have been a kind of death for her. She tells us in the very first stanza that the relationship was “safe” (“I thought I was better safe than starry-eyed”). She refers to her younger self as “a fool” and to her former partner as a “con man” trafficking in “fakes” and “schemes.” So while there is no evidence in the song that she wanted marriage and children, there is a lot of emphasis on being misled and regretting it.
Our speaker (who will still have a career because “[She] Can Do it With A Broken Heart”) ends the song with the words “You’re the loss of my life,” a devastating twist on the cliche “you’re the love of my life,” a sentiment repeated to her by her lover “a million times.” Remembering that throughout the song she has used burial as a metaphor for marriage, it is impossible to suggest that our speaker is here simply mirroring the sentiment of “the love of my life”; she cannot be saying that losing this relationship is the greatest loss she will experience in her lifetime. Rather, I think this line gestures back to the song’s constant references to death. She is, through the magic of language, turning her former lover into a metonym; he is the years of her life that she has lost and can never get back.
If you gave TTPD a listen and found that it wasn’t for you, that’s ok! We’re allowed to like the music that speaks to us, and to not listen to the music that doesn’t! If, though, like my brilliant and amazing sister-in-law, you found yourself feeling disappointed or betrayed by the album’s apparent obsession with Matty Healy, I hope that my interrogation of the lyrics opens up new avenues for you to enjoy what I think is one of Taylor Swift’s strongest albums to date.
A Couple Quick Notes
All of the lyrics I quote are from the Official Lyrics Videos available on Taylor Swift’s YouTube channel!
The wonderful
of (and our recent episode on Athleisure) just released a conversation with about why we get mad at celebrities looking at Taylor Swift as a case study — and you can listen to it right here!Our friends at Not Sorry are teasing a new Taylor Swift podcast launching in August and
is the show’s co-host with Vanessa Zoltan. They’re dropping homages to Taylor Swift’s albums every two weeks and our very own Zoe Mix illustrated the most recent one!
I'm a 33 yr-old AFAB, and I'm realizing that Swifties put me off to Swift! Who is this album about? I don't recognize either of the men discussed so I don't care. I'm an amateur poet/songwriter so I know first-hand that the process is a blurry blend of emotional reality and fiction. If Swift does, too, maybe I'll finally give her a listen.