Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Was A Long Time Coming

Taylor Swift is one of the most influential artists in the music industry.

On top of that, she is also one of the most prevalent poets and lyricists I can think of. She has a way with words that has curated a loyal fanbase that describe her music as relatable, since she has a song for almost every experience, from grief (‘Marjorie’, ‘Evermore’, 2020), to self-love and empowerment (‘ME!’, ‘Lover’, 2019) to the profound heartbreaks you can experience growing up (‘All Too Well’ Red: Taylor’s Version, 2021). She is one of many artists who has grown up in the spotlight, and has written music based on their lives. Others include global superstars like Adele and Ed Sheeran.

I may sound like a delusional fan in declaring that Swift is an exceptional poet, and while Swift clearly loved a good metaphor in her early discography, it was the release of her 2020 album ‘Folklore’, which made me realise she was more than just a popstar.

While Taylor Swift had built her brand up with her chart-topping hits like ‘Shake It Off’ (2014, 2023), and ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ (2012, 2022) and ‘Getaway Car’ (2017), her choice to evolve and move from, as she described it on her Eras Tour, “from being the person the events were happening to, to a narrator”, Swift was able to get deeper and more profound with the imagery she used.

Swift’s wit and use of wordplay on this album was fantastic, because while she used clear, tangible images like “August slipped away like a bottle of wine”, drawing the image of said bottle being drained to the dregs, on her bonus track, ‘The Lakes’(2020), Swift expressed that she had “come too far to watch some name dropping sleaze, tell [her] what are [her] words worth”, a pun referring to the poet romantic era poet, William Wordsworth, who is known for his poem ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud’.

‘The Lakes’ (2020) quickly became my favourite song of Swift’s entire discography, and is yet to be defeated by recent releases, though, many of her newer songs further demonstrate her prowess as a lyricist and a poet of her own right. You can strip her verses bare without any instruments or backing track, and yet, the words still have power and gravitas on their own.

There are fantastic examples within her subsequent albums ‘Evermore’ (2020) and ‘Midnights’ (2022), too. In ‘Evermore’, Swift uses narrative in her song ‘No Body, No Crime’, when telling the story of a woman called Estie, that was killed by her husband so he could pursue another relationship, and Swift, narrating as an unnamed character, kills Estie’s husband, and frames the mistress. It is a great, catchy song, and is sparing with details, focusing on the arc that the characters go through throughout the succinct verses of the song.

In contrast, her song ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’ from ‘Midnights’ (2022) has a clear meaning, but her open choice of words is incredibly clever, alluding to what happened, while not being explicitly. It protects her from the law, since she isn’t directly slandering the person that the song was written about, but the open use of language allows listeners to project their own experiences onto it. The best example in that particular song, seems to be the word “girlhood”, which Swift uses within the context of “give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” The childish declaration that she wants something that was taken from her adds to the innocent and youthful persona that was scorned by the aforementioned taking of her girlhood, and while it could simply refer to the industry making her need to grow up faster, which is exacerbated by the relationship she had found herself in at the time. Though, others associate the use of “girlhood” as her innocence with reference to chastity.

The release of an album with the intent to be visceral, punchy and lyrical, was something I’d been crossing my fingers for. It was a long time coming, and celebrates a skill that Swift has honed throughout her career, and while some of the songs on ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, have clearer references to poetry, such as ‘The Albatross’, which could be an ode to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’, and how the albatross is a symbol of the mariner’s sin and transgressions, and is thus “there to destroy [him]” as Swift expressed. Alternatively, the reference could be a nod to a poem of the same name, by Charles Baudelaire, which makes a mockery of the majestic and graceful, once taken from where they feel safe and confident, which modern audiences.

The lyrics in her newest album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, could be spoken aloud, without being sung, and still have an impact on an audience, whether performed by someone on a guitar or piano. One of my favourite examples comes from her song ‘So Long, London’ (2024).

‘You swore that you loved me but where were the clues?

I died on the altar waiting for the proof,

You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.’

I love Swift’s use of the word ‘altar’. This is because the initial image of Taylor Swift at an altar, evokes an almost Miss Havisham (the jilted bride from Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’) element to her in that moment, validated by the content in the previous line. She believed he loved her, and was waiting for her lover to come to her; she would have married him, and yet, she “died on the altar”.

As a writer and a poet, myself, I immediately took that as meaning that something in her broke irreparably and died when that part of her life ended.

Then the use of the homonym ‘altar’, is exceptionally clever, transitioning the meaning from this tragic bridal image to something that was slain and gifted to something divine, only for it to simply be “the gods of [her ex-partner]’s bluest days”. Swift makes it clear in this moment that while her ex was depressed and “blue”, he allowed his mood, and his whims to break down the relationship and the version of Taylor he knew, leaving her a sacrifice on the altar, something he was willing to give up.

While one can argue that an album was meticulously curated over an expansive amount of time in a bid to discredit Swift’s prowess as a writer, a poet and a storyteller, as if stories aren’t honed through time and editing, ought to consider her use of mashups when she went on tour.

Taylor Swift’s prowess as a poet was further demonstrated when she actively chose to blend multiple songs on ‘The Eras Tour’ (March 2023 – December 2024) into mashups. This was a further way to demonstrate her skill in storytelling. She was able to weave separate songs, which could be completely unrelated to one another, into a cohesive and evocative narrative, all while performing live.

While she began the tour by singing one song on the guitar and one on the piano, by the start of the European leg, mashups were cropping up among the surprise song setlist, and fans got to see Swift blend songs that could have been written years apart, and put them together for more weight and gravitas. For example, in London 2024, Swift played a mashup of ‘Come Back, Be Here’ (Red, 2012, 2022) and ‘The Black Dog’ (The Tortured Poets Department, 2024), songs about two distinctly different ex-boyfriends, Jake Gyllenhaal and Joe Alwyn, and then mashed that up with ‘Maroon’ (Midnights,2022), a song about hindsight and how it can impact your perception about a relationship. While there is a chance ‘Maroon’ (2022) was written about Gyllenhaal, there is no guarantee, despite the reference to colour, potentially being a nod back to the ‘Red’ (2012, 2022) era, where many songs about Gyllenhaal reside.

Some mashups seemed almost predictable due to similar motifs, such as ‘The Bolter’ (The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, 2024), being mashed up with ‘Getaway Car’ (Reputation, 2017), since both have the same image of running away from a relationship, or something that has gone awry and sour, and ‘Cassandra’ (The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, 2024), ‘Mad Woman’ (Folklore, 2020) and ‘I Did Something Bad’ (Reputation, 2017), where Swift reflects upon a woman who has supposedly lost her mind and acted without logic, grace or decorum, whether it be herself, or the mythological figure of Cassandra of Troy, a cursed prophet, whose prophecies were never believed. But, even when a mashup seemed inevitable, like the combination of ‘Cassandra’ and ‘Mad Woman’, Swift was able to weave the narrative together with soul-destroying lyrics that changed the meaning of her original words:

‘So they filled my cell with snakes,

I regret to say

“Do you believe me now? Do you believe me now?”

What did you think I’d say to that?

Does a scorpion sting when fighting back?’

The way that Swift changes the original meaning, from a woman likening herself to Cassandra, the supposedly crazy priestess, to turning the lyrics into a conversation, demonstrating that she wasn’t crazy, she was livid. Which makes the transition from ‘Mad Woman’ into ‘I Did Something Bad’ even better:

‘What a shame she went mad,

You made her like that.

What a shame she went mad,

They said I did something bad.

They said I did something bad, but why does it feel so good?’

Likening the rage this woman is feeling to catharsis, there is a release in doing what is supposedly ‘bad’, especially, since the previous lyrics refer to an affair that the woman potentially learned about, and or exposed. She feels a weight off her chest, even if she is ridiculed for doing it, because it was the right thing to do.

When I first heard it on TikTok, I wept, and it went from a few tears to floods by the time Swift was interchanging “do you believe me now?”, “they said I did something bad” and “what a shame she went mad” as the key changed. It was like a punch to the gut. Sheer perfection.

Even though the lyrics aren’t particularly showy in their poetics, the nuance and layers to the story she conjured with each word was immensely profound, and this became one of my all-time favourite mashups of the entire tour. And, I just had to begin a, most-likely futile, campaign for Swift to release popular mashups on an Eras Tour Album.