Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Swift owns her chaos, messiness
Taylor Swift has spent years warning us not to believe everything we hear about her. As the biggest star of pop music’s parasocial age, she argues that the facts of her existence are warped by gossip and misinformation, which is one reason the Easter eggs and coded messages she has long built into her work have helped create such a tight bond between her and her fans. Pay enough attention, the thinking goes, and her art will always tell you the truth. Except when it doesn’t. Toward the end of her juicy new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift unloads a sparky electro-pop song called “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” In the song, she essentially admits that last summer, as she was crisscrossing the country on her record-breaking (and far from finished) Eras Tour — a show centered on her constantly living her best life — the singer was actually falling apart inside.
“They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it,’ and I did,” she sings over a whooshing groove that feels like it’s slowly picking up speed, “Lights, camera, (expletive) smile/ Even when you wanna die.”
These are the makings of a very sad song, but “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic. The point isn’t that she suffered through this experience — it’s that she soldiered through it. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” she crows in her perkiest voice, explaining why in the next line: “I’m so obsessed with him, but he avoids me like a plague.”
Swift’s 11th studio LP follows a busy period in the 34-year-old’s personal and professional spheres: Beyond launching the Eras Tour, which itself followed 2022’s hugely successful “Midnights” album, Swift — deep breath here — broke up with Joe Alwyn, the English actor with whom she was in a relationship for more than half a decade; had a reported dalliance with Matty Healy of the 1975 that ended amid uproar over offensive comments he made about Ice Spice; notched huge commercial numbers with rerecordings of two of her older albums; took the Eras production into movie theaters; and, oh, yeah, started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs before his team won Super Bowl LVIII in February.
Its sound pitched somewhere between the synth-soaked “Midnights” and 2020’s rootsy “Folklore,” “Tortured Poets” touches on all this, not least the split with Alwyn, whom she portrays in “So Long, London” as a cold partner. “I stopped trying to make him laugh/ Stopped trying to drill the safe,” she sings.
Swift also details the linkup with Kelce, whose NFL victory she evokes in “The Alchemy” — “Trying to be the greatest in the league/ Where’s the trophy?/ He just comes running over to me.”
Yet this isn’t the breakup album — or the new-love album — you might’ve expected. Swift doesn’t portray herself precisely as a victim as she did in old tunes such as “Dear John” or “All Too Well,” to name two of her masterpieces about unscrupulous men; nor is there anything dewy-eyed about “The Alchemy,” which likens falling for a new guy to a chemical imbalance.
The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her most chaotic tendencies. This mindset comes to light particularly in a handful of songs that appear to be about Healy, the rock star whom she alternately roasts in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and describes as the only guy crazy enough to match her in the title track.
“But Daddy I Love Him” is the album’s finest cut: a garment-rending folk-rock melodrama in which Swift seems to excoriate her audience for its disapproval of her and Healy’s affair. The track finds her comparing her pearl-clutching fans to “judgmental creeps” and “vipers dressed in empaths’ clothing.”
In its cheerful bad vibes, “Tortured Poets” registers as a clean break from the therapized self-care pop heard lately from the likes of Ariana Grande and Kacey Musgraves. Swift isn’t seeking betterment in these songs about emotional trauma; if anything, she’s taking a perverse satisfaction in her unwillingness to learn someone else’s lessons.
We’ve encountered this Taylor before: “Tortured Poets” feels like the spiritual successor to 2017’s “Reputation,” which took a devious glee in dealing with the fallout of feuds with various celebs. As on “Reputation,” Swift delights in depicting herself as the bad guy, as in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” — where she insists, “I was gentle till the circus life made me mean.”