album review: ‘the tortured poets department’ by taylor swift

Perhaps Midnights shouldn’t have been as big as it was.

Hell, going back to Taylor Swift’s 2022 return to pop and my review, I said that at the time. It was opting for a more refined, muted, mature sound but also embracing a level of messy moral ambiguity that I suspected was going to alienate some audiences; she was admitting just how much she was the problem, not so much the heel turn of reputation but attempting to contextualize and even own her mess, increasingly aware of the isolation that might come as a result. She had long ago stopped being the everygirl no matter how much the branding had stuck, but Midnights felt like the first time the consequences of that were sinking in, having ascended to the very peak of American pop culture royalty and feeling the rampant empty phoniness and knowing both the extent and systemically defined limits of her power… and her willingness to use it. Because for as much as Swift has been set up to succeed on so many levels, with a vast machine behind her that literally felt too big to fail, there is a human cost to it, which the blur of overwork and alcohol abuse can only deflect for so long, to the point where I thought it would be a breaking point for a lot of fans when you sacrifice that much relatability.

And boy was I wrong about that: Midnights saw mountains of critical acclaim and Grammys and chart success and while I’ll quibble about certain single choices - ‘Maroon’ should have been pushed instead of ‘Karma’ getting a remix with Ice Spice, goddamn it - clearly the album had resonance, including to me personally, where it made my year-end list of the best projects of 2022! And I won’t lie, that felt a bit perverse - one of Swift’s greatest assets is her accessibility and riding through a tide of flaws and cringe to reach an audience that finds it aspirational, but the subtext of at least the last three albums is just how damaging that could be; maybe you shouldn’t aspire to be the mastermind, the anti-hero, where if there’s glamour it’s a Faustian bargain to attain it. Yeah, I might find some personal relatability to her struggles with her platform and privilege and being really damn good at playing the game even as you feel you’re losing something of yourself along the way, and that your authentic awkward cringe has them snickering behind painted smiles but why not just fucking own it… but I shouldn’t have to say that’s not always a great thing to find that pathos! And yet 2023 saw her more famous than ever, with The Eras tour breaking records and elevating Swift to billionaire status, where even more eyes were upon her, where after an album where she openly makes it clear ‘I’m not the best person to be given so much power’, the response was ‘here, enjoy all of the power!’ I said way back in my reviews of 1989 and reputation that I was sick of the discussion of ‘aspirational icon’ that surrounded Swift, where inevitably she’d lose control of her narrative, but in 2024 she now has something close to an iron grip; the fanbase is larger and louder than ever, she’s permeated a cultural zeitgeist that spills outside of media into sports and politics, a hurricane with herself in the eye of the storm, where for the diehards her presence almost feels like religion with its own set of doctrine… which feels fucking insane following an album where the raw, deeply flawed humanity carried the most resonance for me! And let me make this clear, Swift did this to herself: she and the machine around her cultivated all of this, nobody attains billionaire status without some level of exploitation, and that also comes with heightened scrutiny on what you choose to do with your power; you lose your excuses when you have resources beyond measure.

That said, the other risk that comes with being branded as such an aspirational force is that even if you’re screaming your flaws in their face, there’s no guarantee the audience will listen or care, especially when you’ve built so much of your career on a cult of relatability for so long, which gets even worse if you’re trying to sustain any human relationship in the public eye to the point where fans would designate it as ‘lore’, and that would set up a crisis if she stepped out of her entrenched ‘brand’. I had the lingering feeling that her relationship with Joe Alwyn was on the rocks coming out of Midnights - hell, on the Song vs Song podcast I mentioned it in passing when I drew the parallel between Taylor Swift and Shiv from Succession - and thus I was not surprised by the breakup… and I really shouldn’t have been surprised that her rebound was Matty Healy, the long-contentious dirtbag frontman of The 1975. I also knew that wasn’t built to last - Swift and I are around the same age, I get how these sorts of reckless rebounds work - but it threw the fanbase into paroxysms of rage because… well, see dirtbag status, after years of a stable relationship, this screamed of bad ideas, she should know he was trouble when he walked in, Taylor Swift should know and do better than this! And while I could tilt my head and point at Swift’s relationship history, long-documented in music - she’s dated worse men - when you become such an aspirational figure, the parasocial relationships sting all the harder when it appears you’ve ‘betrayed’ the moral code assigned you… or worse, potentially compromise the machine. All of which seems to lead to The Tortured Poets Department, which is a godawful album title… but Swift would know that given her own melodramatic proclivities. It seemed built to draw attention to her poetry and songwriting which… again, feels like a choice; not that it’s bad, but trying to insert herself into the canon of great poet-songwriters would prompt unflattering comparisons. And hey, she’s still working with Jack Antonoff and who knows what level of backlash he’s facing any given week for songs he might not have even touched - glaring right at what happened for 1989 (Taylor’s Version) here - especially as so many folks were far from kind to his self-titled album this past year, in my opinion a little unfairly. I’ll be very honest, all of this screamed ‘high risk, dubious reward’, and while Taylor Swift has weathered waves of backlash before, there was a part of me convinced this was a catastrophe in the making, especially as Swift dumped out an additional fifteen songs that same night, the ‘anthology’ version with more Aaron Dessner credits. I’ve long been on the record that Taylor Swift albums can be way too damn long as it is, this was looking like a monster… so what did we get?

…well, I’ll start with this: it may not be Taylor Swift’s best or worst album, but it certainly her ‘most’ album, where everything that makes a modern Taylor Swift album is escalated to a point where this will be an absolute make or break moment, even for those who have bought in over the past few years - and I thought all of this even before I got to the ‘anthology’ tacked on of which I will discuss… somewhat, we’ll get to it. On some level it feels like a dare and an endurance test, how much of Taylor Swift you can stomach before you get sick of her pushing every button of which she knows she’s been hated, fairly or otherwise… and yeah, in certain areas it has absolutely worked, where outside of a mainstream press, this has been review-bombed into the toilet with some of the most shockingly disingenuous arguments I’ve seen in a while, and we’ll get to some of those as well. But then I realized that so many of those reviews don’t even try to engage with theme or concept or any veneer of good faith, and instead pull out the hatchet for Swift as the overexposed billionaire millennial celebrity overflowing with whining cringe and an insufferable diehard stan army… which is absolutely a reading of this album, but one I increasingly feel Swift understands. Indeed, the more listens I gave this album, the comparison that leapt to mind the most was Return To The Moon by EL VY, the side project of Matt Berninger of The National that serves to viciously deconstruct… well, The National, that brand of indie rock, and the frequently insufferable fanbase that props it up. What I’m saying is that if you’re disgusted and sick of the pop culture phenomenon of Taylor Swift and all her melodrama, I get the impression she is too; you don’t get to this point of her career without knowing what she’s doing, and I think that’s why, at least for me trying to meet it there, it actually works.

Now before I get deeper into all of that, I wanted to run through a few of the bad faith arguments I’ve seen around this album, either to dismiss them or find where I might agree… and then I realized I’ve already done this in other reviews, it would feel like copypaste! You want a conversation about Swift making basic music, I’ve gone through that case talking about Ed Sheeran, especially with =. You want a conversation around to which artists we extend empathy, especially those entangled in the nightmare of the music industry, my extended review of mainstream sellout by Machine Gun Kelly is easy to find. You want a conversation about ‘maturity’ in art and I’ll roll my eyes and point at my review of Love Sux by Avril Lavigne… my point is that when you have literally thousands of reviews over the course of nearly twelve years, I’ve heard the lazy but pithy takedowns egged on by social media backlash plenty of times, and given how long this review is going to run, I’m not particularly interested in repeating myself! One argument I will entertain is how so many just don’t want to hear the histrionics of a billionaire in this late capitalist climate, especially over the course of a bloated album with a familiar sound and with nobody around her that will say these are bad ideas - a person with her power and resources should be able to afford enough therapy to get the hell over herself, make smarter decisions, potentially better art, or at the very least move past another relationship misadventure with some maturity.

But that’s the trick: this is not an album about making smart, mature decisions, and following in the wake of Midnights, it continues the questions of what decisions Swift is even allowed to make to indulge personal melodrama. Now if you think that’s insane - again, billionaire, so much power and influence, she should know better - on the surface I’d agree, but Swift has always been personally obsessed with being perceived as moral and loved, while being groomed from a very young age and privilege to be a megastar with a whole subsection of the music industry now dependent on her success… and thus falling for a rakish dirtbag even your fans don’t like isn’t just going to cause havoc in your personal life after a longtime stable relationship falls apart, but it impacts the money as well, even if you know it’s not built to last and might just be a fling to get out of your system! Hell, let me contextualize this as someone who has a carefully constructed platform and where I found some personal resonance: there’s a very good reason why none of my family, offline friends, or partners have ever shown up on camera, and why I maintain structure so ruthlessly for over a decade, there’s a mortgage that needs to be paid… but I absolutely get the passionate desire to cut loose, show more than just the fleeting mentions on year-end lists when the songs get too personal and I cannot elaborate, when you have a path to make the low-stakes easy ‘good’ decision but can access the high-stakes ‘bad’ decision that might bring more of a personal thrill… look, I get it, and I’m so fortunate that as of right now I have folks who care about me but nobody reliant on me for anything! Now there’s an open question how much anyone will buy into those stakes or even understand them - besides conversations of responsibility to non-anonymous platforms which the internet seems categorically built to misunderstand, I’ve seen plenty of people call this performative white woman victimhood - but I think Swift also knows that; this isn’t like reputation where her career could have very easily collapsed in the late 2010s like so many other pop stars of her ilk, in 2024 the only way the Taylor Swift cultural institution is being taken down is from within… which seems to be exactly what a part of her wants to do, to find a vestige of freedom. So another comparison might be Eminem’s 2004 album Encore, the sort of artistic self-sabotage and suicidal ideation by a man who came to loathe the industry, his fanbase, and everything that surrounded him, suffocating under its own self-conscious weight… but where Eminem was battling depression and drug addiction, even if I think the alcoholism is a much larger factor than many have given credit and Swift herself references it in the first few lines of this album on ‘Fortnight’, where it suddenly makes sense why Post Malone is here… this is all being driven by dating and even falling down bad for Matty Healy, that she later commemorates on ‘The Smallest Man That Ever Lived’? That’s how the empire falls?

And hence, you have the tension underscoring this album and what helped it snap into focus for me immediately: on some level, this is a farce, where Swift is self-aware enough to recognize just how ridiculous all of this is - the album is called The Tortured Poets Department, for god’s sake, I think she knows what she’s doing here! On the title track she literally refers to her and Healy as ‘modern idiots’ compared to the more respectable singer-songwriters of old - which if you dig into the history were often just as undignified - so why not play up the absurdity, lean into the steamy pretentious melodrama and Swift ramping it to eleven, even implying that Charlie Puth should be a much bigger artist which can only make sense if they heard the 2018 album and nothing else, the same way Matt Berninger allowed EL VY to embrace the truly ridiculous before the anvil dropped… but with the reality that this relationship did happen, she made those mistakes and felt something for him, so there is a tragi-comic side to the story - hell, on a song like ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ hammers that text with the accompanying reality that you still have to perform a world-conquering tour while doing it! Now again, there is tension here: Swift is inviting laughter both with and at her, and for us to see how much the breakup and the following stupid whirlwind high-stakes romance impacted her life, and that’s a high-wire act that can really come down to execution in accepting both the sincere pain and rage along with the joke. And what makes this messier is that Swift can’t really sell being the ‘bad girl’ here - her music and poetry can make her seem like a force of nature, but the line that I think contextualizes her well actually jumped to mind on the bonus track ‘Robin’: ‘way to go tiger’; it sounds like something Mary Jane would say in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, that got me thinking about Spider-Man 3, and the notorious emo Peter Parker dancing scene where the joke is the same: there’s an emotional resonance in what the protagonist thinks is cool or necessary to sell it, but they’re too dorky to effectively nail the atmosphere, and that’s what makes a song like ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ high camp and actually work on a few different levels! It’s the reason I find the quoting of lyrics out of context to be a very lazy bad faith dunk - aside from performance mattering, I can do this with every single one of your critically acclaimed favourites and it’ll look just as bad! To Swift’s credit, I think at this stage she’s an expressive enough performer to largely sell the range of emotionality here, where working alongside the high camp melodrama from Florence Welch on ‘Florida!!!’ makes all the sense in the world - as well as a singer who can match her in volume and presence - but the production might be a tougher sell. Part of me wonders if this album would have been better suited with a more elaborate, over the top palette from a baroque pop act like The Last Dinner Party, but if anything the sharper juxtaposition provided between Jack Antonoff’s willowy synths and grooves to Swift’s tortured poetry might work to her favour; it puts me in the mind of every moment where she bucks against good taste, slamming her raw melodrama into the scenes where she knows she should be better, which reminds a lot of the human reality that shows up on shows like Succession or even Frasier. Hell, both those shows focus on the language of privilege and the upper class, where you may find pathos in the performance or characters or story but can recognize in the language how astoundingly full of shit everyone is… and yet still care despite every inclination that you shouldn’t - Taylor might not scream ‘I’m the eldest boy’, but look at her writing within that sad context on a song like ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ and it suddenly makes more sense! And once you slip into that mindset that’s closer to Father John Misty than Lana Del Rey, this album becomes easier to enjoy and I still find a degree of pathos… because guess what, despite being largely self-serious, occasionally I can be full of shit too!

But again, this is about execution - Succession knew how to end and walk away, Fraiser ran way too long but could also feel self-contained and episodic, and it’s worthwhile highlighting in both cases I know folks who ditched the shows when the flaunted privilege hit too close to home or just felt too insufferable, which is valid too - which leads to the stream-trolling approach and biggest pitfall of this album: Taylor Swift is in dire need of an editor and someone to tell her no, and when you’re a billionaire and your primary producers have a reputation for not rocking the boat when they have a consistent thing going, you get an album that feels lengthy at over an hour and they she drops the deluxe that’s nearly just as long, especially when there’s little chance of consistent momentum! I have to think her label also would not say no to her… but given Republic rolls up under Universal and they’re having a bad year as it is, thanks to how streams get counted towards album sales, the advantage everyone needs only compounds - but one of the reasons I liked Midnights was how tight and self-contained it was, where the bonus cuts were simply that, where I’d keep ‘The Great War’, ‘Dear Reader’, and ‘You’re Losing Me’ and just move on. But The Tortured Poets Department is so deep in its own lore and melodramatic meta, there’s the sinking feeling you’re missing pieces of the puzzle by not going into the predominantly Aaron Dessner-produced ‘anthology’. I’m going to spend less time on the fine details here - it’s a familiar sound palette, I don’t usually cover deluxe tracks - but it’s hard not to feel like it’s wrapping up less-connected loose ends and feels a bit perfunctory, very clearly written when she was settling into her relationship with Travis Kelce and the tempestuous weight of the last romances have faded. And this is where I buck popular opinion and say I think I might prefer Antonoff to Dessner here as a whole - soft-focus elegant polish paired with writing that has a little more grace but is still full of Swift’s awkward idiosyncrasies not only runs together more, it leaves the scenes feeling somewhat tepid… with the exception being ‘So High School’ which is probably the closest to rock Swift has gotten in years and is obviously about Travis Kelce and her living out the fantasy of being with the high school jock; kind of ridiculous when you’re in your thirties, again, but if you think Swift isn’t in on the joke of that Grand Theft Auto line, it might be on you. But again, when you notice songs like ‘Peter’, ‘I Hate It Here’ and ‘Robin’, there’s an aching for a certain childhood freedom that Swift is realizing she never really had, and what the cost of that has been, which plays out in the heartbreaking open question left on ‘The Manuscript’, which alongside ‘Dear Reader’ I’d add to the list of bonus closers that should have made the main album. But songs that can lean into the wistful abstraction function pretty well - ‘Albatross’ is great in how much she knows her reputation precedes her, the haunted ‘Cassandra’ fleshes out the old Greek myth to feel like a spiritual successor to ‘mad woman’, and ‘The Bolter’ is a playful warning to Kelce that all of this might play out again.

But circling back to the main album and the production, once again the Jack Antonoff backlash is in full swing… and while I might have understood it more for Midnights given how subdued that album is, when I hear the critique that all of his production is so boring and sounds the same, I’m tilting my head sideways because this is easily some of the most wild bombast he’s given to Taylor Swift since 1989! But I don’t think that’s going to quell anyone who wants Antonoff gone at all costs - his atmospheric minimalism is not for everyone, it’s a little overexposed in mainstream pop, and it certainly feels like an instrumental formula that doesn’t challenge Swift out of her comfort zone, even if I’d argue on this album the sonic juxtaposition with the content actually works once you’re in on it. It starts off slower than I’d prefer - ‘Fortnight’ feels like an overture more than a proper intro, the gauzy title track is a bit more effective and it’s a shame that the toy metaphor on ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys’ feels way too overworked to pay off that sharper synth menace. The album really hits its stride by ‘So Long, London’ with Swift’s husky delivery backing the quavering synth gallop from Dessner - love the blend of grief and rage at the feel of so much time wasted and a place that will never quite feel the same - and then we get the glorious centerpiece ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ as the drums and strings hit the dramatic crescendos, and while the synth blending on ‘Fresh Out The Slammer’ is kind of goopy to flatter that western guitar tone - also an issue with the synths on the jittery ‘I Can Do This With A Broken Heart’ that sounds like a 2021 Bleachers cut, it works better on the ramshackle ‘I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)’ - ‘Florida!!!’ ramps with so much percussive force that it reminded me of a lost cut from Dance Fever, with some of that warping bombast bleeding into ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ as well. And then there’s the album closer ‘Clara Bow’ which is rooted in a deeper guitar line from Dessner as the strings ache behind her - it feels cyclical in its progression, and we’ll come back to what that means. Hell, ‘Guilty Of Sin’ feels like the sort of synth-touched guitar pop song that could have fit as a deep cut on Red, especially with that hook, which leaves me wondering what the hell folks even want! Because I also know that if I asked who should replace Antonoff and Dessner, you’re not going to get a consistent answer from any fan, because I don’t think Max Martin is an easy answer after eternal sunshine, and if you get Dan Nigro the Olivia comparisons will only get louder. My suspicion is that when the Travis Kelce relationship ends - sorry Travis, the odds are against you, and you already got three Super Bowls so your Canton legacy is fine - there probably will be a sonic shift to something that better matches the temperament of that sort of relationship failing; maybe more rock-leaning if ‘So High School’ means anything, it’s not the only reference to that era of the 2000s on this album!

But that’s the thing now, isn’t it - I don’t think the fanbase knows what they want, if you ask a hundred Swifties what the sound should be, you’ll get a hundred different answers, and quite frankly, I don’t think she should be listening to any fans at this point, including me! Because if there’s one element of subtext that rings loud and clear over The Tortured Poets Department, it’s that Taylor Swift might be finally sick of everyone who thinks they know what’s best for her, from her art to her relationships, from her label to her fans to even passing mentions to her family which is ground she’s never touched before. And then there’s the dawning realization that despite the granular, overworked detail in which she’s shared her life, a lot of it has flown over everyone’s head because they’re more enamoured with the unimpeachable perfect celebrity icon that started as the American sweetheart everygirl rather than the complicated person she is now, especially as that person has become a lot less relatable in the fine details than she previously was constructed to be - again, ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ drives so many more cracks into that performance; she’s good enough to fake the smile for now, but how long will that last? And the fanbase has picked up on the venom Swift is now showing for those who claimed so much ownership over her art and life, which is why you’re seeing calls of betrayal and more animosity towards her than you have in years across ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ and ‘Guilty As Sin’ and especially the stalking rage of ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ - and yes, some of this is absolutely Swift reaping what she sowed, but there’s a level of degree that feels like it’s reached a cartoonish extreme, and why on some level I get why Swift’s writing in this territory is so melodramatic; just having the platform I have and facing harassment, backlash campaigns that reach major news outlets, hacking attempts, stalkers both on and offline, at a fraction of a percentage of what Swift faces daily, I have empathy for what that might do to somebody and I share way fewer personal stories than she does! And again, she’s monetized that to untold fame and fortune, but this is the extreme of what happens when you share so much with the world in your art, as she says on the final lines of ‘The Manuscript’ - they’re no longer hers, and it can feel dehumanizing and empty on the other side, especially when said fans feel entitled to then regulate her personal life or demand she use her power and influence to shape geopolitics, which the built-in assumption that her interests must align with yours, made all the worse when politicians play into it with more or less calculation because they’re not serious people either! I’ve seen comparisons to Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers - one I already made back when I reviewed Midnights in discussions of how one uses power - but I think Kendrick Lamar had time to go to more therapy and take time away from the spotlight to settle himself, recognize he’s is far from being anyone’s savior; and comparing to Beyonce and my hope she could have shown more vulnerability on COWBOY CARTER, I had conversations with Black peers who highlighted the great risk that comes with letting that many people in and the very human ambiguity it adds to her iconography, where losing control of your narrative is a tremendous risk compounded by not having the same privilege; you’re watching Swift struggle to pay the price of that complicated ambiguity, and an audience that’s a lot less receptive to it.

But that takes us to a more interesting question: for all of this labour, what is Taylor Swift trying to say through all the tortured poetry? Well, a lot - part of this just feels like a project that Swift desperately had to get out of her system in order to process everything, when you’re a workaholic you tend to think you can just work through it and by the time we get to ‘The Alchemy’ which is the main project’s love story for Kelce - but I think there’s a deeper throughline that is heavily implied on the album but most revealed in the ‘anthology’: the increasingly stark limit of autobiography. Let’s face it, Swift has spent her career trying to spin gold out of relationship stories, and by the time you’ve reached outright farce with an audience that no longer seems to get any of the jokes, it’s probably time to move away from it. Or hell, to make the EL VY parallel again, when you play the loudest voice in the room and are convinced of your own self-righteousness, it bites you in the ass and you only figure it out when it’s too late. The anthology songs seem to get this - by necessity they’re more abstract, they feel a bit more centered in who she is, who she’s with, and the deeper questions she’s now pondering; it’s why I think the deeper message of ‘thanK you aIMee’ is being missed for the media frenzy of mentioning Kim Kardashian between the lines, because it’s a song about moving past their beef and learning from it. And hell, it leaves me with the thought that if the relationship with Kelce has any longevity, we might get a folklore-esque return to more fiction, and I think that would be good for Swift to keep growing as a writer… either that or actually take a proper break like I hoped she would after evermore instead of rerecording four albums and releasing two more! But ‘Clara Bow’ as the main album closer is very revealing of Swift again looking bigger, not just placing herself in the context of women in art who struggle with mental health and tumultuous love lives, but also the reality of how the industry constantly lies to prop them up in the moment so long as they can be controlled and conform… or until they have the next one in the wings, where Swift sees her own name get dropped for a new artist that actually has an “edge”. And I find that observation interesting and more than a little tragic because while on some level it’s true, there are so many songs over the course of years where she’s tried to show that darker, messier side and it just gets ignored because it’s not what the world has decided you are, and it gets uglier the further you stray, and because you are too big to fail, there’s no easy way to crash out. It is the stark flipside to ‘Mastermind’, where on the one hand Swift’s feminine wiles and intellect helped her ascend and maybe find someone on her level, where here she sees the stark messy limitations of her power where men are often given a much greater runway in both the public eye and the industry - and if that’s true for her at the very top, what does that imply for everyone else?

…you know, one thing I’m very grateful for in 2017 was that I didn’t so much pull my punches with reputation but acknowledged that we were all too close to the mess to get a clear picture, Swift herself included. It was the first time tangible metatext about Swift herself became embedded in the text, where for a lot of people it was a jump-off point, where they were convinced Swift was over; when your art starts becoming circular about your presence in art, it’s an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, and for those just looking to be entertained David Mamet style, it becomes the most tedious and insufferable thing imaginable - I absolutely get why people hate albums like this. I later called Midnights as ‘reputation done right’, but The Tortured Poets Department is the real sequel; coming as what I hope is a more stable relationship blooms, it’s way bigger and way messier and seems to be the next major breakpoint of popularity, less a ‘I’ve changed and this is a heel turn’ as a ‘this is me and you have never listened, and now you have to’. I would not be remotely surprised if Swift sees a popular downturn after this - she might even welcome that - but reputation wasn’t really that for her or the diehard Swifties, although given how blatantly she called them out here, we’ll have to see what really sinks in. And for me… I don’t think I like it more than Midnights or Speak Now, but I do like this, a lot - I prefer the main album to the anthology, both discs have great songs for different reasons, cut thirty-one songs to thirteen and you could easily have one of her best… provided of course you’re willing to accept its tragic humour and meet it in good faith. As a creator myself I know I gravitate to art that circles the process, often for the worse as any insight or humour is lost amidst the artists’ cringe and people who think they know better: twenty one pilots pop albums, Machine Gun Kelly’s tickets to my downfall, EL VY’s Return To The Moon. But I’m also not going to recommend this - half because it’s pointless, Taylor Swift is the biggest artist in the world, you’ve already made up your mind if you’re going to listen to this or not, but half because I also know my taste here is idiosyncratic and I’ve got a different slant on this project than the majority, both positive and negative. That said, I think if you approach this album with framing that allows for greater layers and not just assume it all at face value, or at the very least understand melodrama, you may find yourself surprised. Either way, by the end the torture will be over, and for Taylor Swift… it might be worth taking a sabbatical, for your own sake.