Pulling close to the same rate of album releases—one a year—that Rihanna once did starting in 2005 (with some rare breaks in 2008 and between the years 2012 and 2016) before she effectively retired to become a beauty mogul, Taylor Swift has always had a seemingly strategic release rate of every two years for studio albums (and no, the re-recordings aren’t being factored in). The Tortured Poets Department, her eleventh record, proves no exception to the every two year pattern (though Reputation did, with Swift waiting three years after 1989 to release it—but then, she had been “bullied” into sequestering herself by Kimye). And in the two years that have gone by since Midnights came out, Swift has only become more of a mythical figure to her worshippers. The ones who now despise Joe Alwyn for breaking her heart, throwing her away, etc. They’re likely to feel even less kindly about him (and several others) after hearing what Swift has to say on this record.
Starting with “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone (though he’s featured in a similarly faded manner as Lana Del Rey on the original recording of “Snow on the Beach”), Swift brings her listeners into the pseudo-intellectual world of The Tortured Poets Department. Whether or not that’s meant to be a mirror of Alwyn’s own pseudo-intellectual, faux pretentious nature is at one’s own discretion. Though one imagines Swift is trolling him more than she’s actually taking herself too seriously when she says things like, “Your wife waters flowers/I wanna kill her,” there’s plenty of gravity in her admissions, “And I love you, it’s ruining my life” and “For a fortnight there, we for forever.” The idea of “I touched you for only a fortnight” also speaks to where she stands now with this person, who has been lost to a parallel existence that no longer aligns with hers. In this way, Swift channels Ariana Grande on Eternal Sunshine’s “i wish i hated you.” Specifically, when she resignedly laments, “Our shadows dance in a parallel plane/Just two different endings, you learn to repair/And I learn to keep me in one place.” Swift hasn’t really learned that, it would appear (not just literally, with her constant jet-setting, but figuratively as well). And, in contrast to Grande’s latest breakup album (nay, divorce album), Swift doesn’t come across in a manner that exudes “let bygones be bygones” vibes (and actually, at one point on “imgonnagetyouback,” she quips, “Bygones will be bygone”). No, instead, she fulfills many women’s fantasies of being able to publicly dig the knife into an ex who did her wrong by emotionally abusing her. So she abuses right back, as usual, with all the receipts.
This includes highly specific references like the title track itself, said to be a riff on the name of a WhatsApp group (created by Andrew Scott) that Alwyn was a part of called “The Tortured Man Club.” And yet, ironically, “The Tortured Poets Department” is more directly aimed at Matty Healy than Alwyn. Particularly with lyrics like, “I think some things I never say, like, ‘Who uses typewriters anyway?,’” “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” (he probably will be now after the streaming bump that comes with a “Taylor plug”), “I scratch your head, you fall asleep/Like a tattooed golden retriever” and “Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me/But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave.” Elsewhere, Swift notes, “But I’ve read this one/Where you come undone,” which sounds a lot like “I think I’ve seen this film before/And I didn’t like the ending” on folklore’s “exile.”
Nor does she seem to like the ending on “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” Yes, that means her. What’s more, she also uses the trick of dual applicability to either Alwyn or Healy. For verses such as, “My boy only breaks his favorite toys, toys, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh/I’m queen of sandcastles he destroys, oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh/‘Cause I knew too much, there was danger in the heat of my touch/He saw forever so he smashed it up” could work for both of them. Clearly, Swift has a thing for cads. Though that’s not hard to do when taking into account the selection of “straight” men available. And even though it’s the men of this world who are too damaged for long-term relationships, Swift insists that, “Once I fix me/You’re gonna miss me.” A line that channels the old internet chestnut that goes, “Once I do such-and-such, it’s over for you bitches.” As for the outro, it feels more, er, tailored to Alwyn when she says, “Just say when, I’d play again/He was my best friend/Down at the sandlot/I felt more when we played pretend/Than with all the Kens [guess that means Swift admits she’s Barbie]/‘Cause he took me out of my box/Stole my tortured heart/Left all these broken parts/Told me I’m better off/But I’m not.” Because surely, she can’t really think she’s not better off sans Healy.
After being discarded like a broken toy by Alwyn, it’s only natural that Swift should be “Down Bad,” an uptempo song that betrays Swift’s heartbroken state as she sings, “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym/Everything comes out teenage petulance/‘Fuck it if I can’t have him’/‘I might just die, it would make no difference.’” In point of fact, the majority of Swift’s work remains resonant to so many “aging” women precisely because the teen girl inside never really dies. And that’s where many women get frozen in their minds due to the traumas and insecurities suffered during said “era.” Swift also compares the high of her relationship to being abducted by an alien, only to endure the low of being cast out of his spaceship and back into dull, ordinary life. Which can never feel ordinary again to her. This, too, has applicability potential to Healy, much to fans’ chagrin.
For those who were craving more specificity about Alwyn instead, “So Long London” is able to deliver. A contrasting companion piece to Lover’s “London Boy,” Swift details her loathing of Alwyn not only for breaking her heart, but also making her hate London as a result (“I’m just mad as hell ‘cause I loved this place”). The sentiment echoes Billie Eilish’s on “Happier Than Ever” when she says, “I don’t relate to you, no/‘Cause I’d never treat me this shitty/You made me hate this city.” Except that, while Eilish insists, “I don’t talk shit about you on the internet/Never told anyone anything bad/‘Cause that shit’s embarrassing…” Swift is perfectly willing to embarrass her own self with the details of this botched, and yes, tortured relationship—in addition to the rebound one with Healy.
The closest Swift might ever hope to get to as far as her version of “Papa Don’t Preach,” “But Daddy I Love Him” offers country song vibes (sorry Beyoncé, Swift isn’t ready to hand over the genre entirely) not just in musical tone, but narrative one as well. As a song that seems to be less about Alwyn and more about her pair of romantic choices after Alwyn (A.A., if you will—which works on another level in that he seemed akin to a drug), Swift derides the critical, judgmental eyes of a small town watching her every move. A clear allegory for the media at large. When she sings, “Now I’m running with my dress unbuttoned/Scrеamin’, ‘But, daddy, I love him’/I’m having his baby/No, I’m not, but you should see your faces/I’m telling him to floor it through thе fences/No, I’m not coming to my senses I know it’s crazy/But he’s the one I want,” it could be as much about Matty Healy as it is Travis Kelce. Both men being more than somewhat “unrefined” choices for a “poetess” like Taylor.
No stranger to getting off on dating “bad boys” (by Swift’s white bread standards), the theme of running away with a man/“forbidden love” is nothing new in Swift’s oeuvre, with songs like “Love Story” and “Getaway Car” urging the protagonist (Taylor, of course) to just say, “Fuck it” and make the “bad choice” by fleeing into the sunset with her bloke of choice. For a while, that was Alwyn, who might also be considered as being referenced here in that, “But Daddy I love him” is also a line Ariel from The Little Mermaid shouts in defiance. And what did Ariel have to do in order to be with basic-ass Eric? Lose her voice, ergo herself—obviously. Something Swift feels she did by catering to Alwyn’s privacy “needs.”
On the track that follows, it would seem all her recent time with Lana Del Rey is rubbing off on Swift (complete with a song title like “But Daddy I Love Him”) in terms of being sure to mention the same color palettes repeatedly in songs. While in “But Daddy I Love Him,” those colors were gray and white (as in: “If all you want is gray for me/Then it’s just white noise, and it’s my choice”), “Fresh Out The Slammer” offers “gray and blue and fights and tunnels.” As the song’s name suggests, it’s not nearly as glamorous as Rihanna’s “Phresh Out the Runway.” No, instead Swift is wielding a prison sentence as an allegory for the “relationship time served” with Alwyn. So it is that the first verse consists of her declaring, “Fresh out the slammer, I know who my first call will be to.” Here, it’s apparent she’s referring to calling Matty Healy the moment she was free from Alwyn’s ostensibly dark cloud. Like Florida, Healy seemed to be a sunny and fun (even if trashy and humiliating) escape. And yes, Florida also happened to be the first stop on The Eras Tour after the breakup between Swift and Alwyn was announced.
As for the mention of “work[ing] your life away just to pay/For a timeshare down in Destin,” it sounds weirdly coded as a message of support for Britney Spears, who did work her life away in a conservatorship to pay for her sister, Jamie Lynn, to have a million-dollar condo in Destin. Of course, it’s probably alluding more to sharing space inside a man’s heart (*cough cough* Alwyn’s), even though he was once the king of hers.
Unlike other artists that have collaborated with Swift, Florence + the Machine isn’t one to “fade into the background.” And she certainly doesn’t on “Florida!!!,” a song that feels stadium-ready as the duo extols the non-virtues of a “drug” like Florida (initially mentioned in “Fortnight” when Swift sings, “Move to Florida/Buy the car you want”). Indeed, the motif of addiction (as well as mental illness) runs rampant throughout The Tortured Poets Department—begging the question of whether or not Swift should attend some SLAA meetings. In any case, Camila Cabello knows all about being seduced by Florida—it seems it’s the place to be seduced by again (despite its horrifying political policies), its light no longer dimmed after reaching a peak in the 90s (enough to compel Madonna to buy a house there). One that crested in the aftermath of the assassination of Gianni Versace in 1997.
While there’s no question mark to Andrew Cunanan being guilty as sin of that crime, Swift puts that very punctuation after “Guilty As Sin?” Among the most generic-sounding tracks on the record, it could perhaps be because hearing little “Easter eggs” about Healy has already started to grow a bit stale (at only nine of thirty-one songs in). Yet that’s precisely how Swift opens the “poem,” making a pointed allusion to Healy with the lines, “Drowning in The Blue Nile/He sent me ‘Downtown Lights’/I hadn’t heard it in a while.” Cue the “Downtown Blues” streaming bump as well. In the same breath, Swift still makes time to refer to Alwyn by noting, “My boredom’s bone deep/This cage was once just fine/Am I allowed to cry?” At the same time, the “cage” she mentions could be just as much fame itself as it is her overly private relationship.
A seeming nod to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” is less about the men who have been in Taylor’s bed and more about her increasingly fraught relationship to and with “fans,” the media and, as some are speculating, Olivia Rodrigo. After all, if “vampire” and “the grudge” really were about Swift, it’s only fair for her to weigh in with, “The scandal was contained/The bullet had just grazed/At all costs, keep your good name” and “I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?/That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn/That I’m fearsome, and I’m wretched and I’m wrong.” Her contempt for losing her innocence as the years have gone by is also manifest in the analogy, “I was tame, I was gentle ‘til the circus life made me mean/Don’t you worry folks, we took out all her teeth.” As for the unique blend of narcissism and self-loathing that celebrities can have, Swift speaks to it (or Rodrigo claiming “vampire” isn’t about her) with the bridge, “So tell me everything is not about me, but what if it is?/Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me, but what if they did?/I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me.”
More subtle digs at Rodrigo seem to manifest with a title like “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” For, not only does Rodrigo sing, “But I am my father’s daughter, so maybe I could fix him” on “get him back!,” she also sells a sweatshirt with the phrase, “Maybe I can fix him!” as part of her collection of merch for Guts. But Swift seems keen to adopt the phrase for her own canon as she, needless to say, applies it to Matty Healy. Addressing how embarrassed everyone felt for her by describing a “character” whose “jokes” “were revolting and far too loud,” Swift eventually pronounces, “They shook their heads saying, ‘God, help her’ when I told ’em he’s my man/But your good lord didn’t need to lift a finger I can fix him, no, really, I can/Whoa, maybe I can’t.” Set against the backdrop of some country milieu and painting Healy as some kind of villainous cowboy, Swift again makes it overt that she’s not content to lose her erstwhile crown as Country Queen.
The slowed-down piano ballad that is “loml” plays with the phrase “love of my life” (for which the song is abbreviated) until Swift delivers the dramatic subversion of it by the end as she rues, “And I’ll still see, until the day I die/You’re the loss of my life.” This one being among the few that more implicitly points to Alwyn, Swift paints her poetic images with verses such as, “Talking rings and talking cradles I wish I could unrecall/How we almost had it all/Dancing phantoms on the terrace/Are they second-hand embarrassed/That I can’t get out of bed?/‘Cause something counterfeit’s dead.” At the same time, Healy could still figure into the lyrics, “It was legendary/It was momentary/It was unnecessary/Should’ve let it stay buried.” In fact, “loml,” in its twisted way, can apply to all the many “great loves” of Swift’s life who have already inspired albums past. And maybe some part of her doesn’t want any one man to think he could be the true “loml.” That it actually takes many for her to get to the point of even singing a song like this.
As for the emotional wreckage that occurred just in time for The Eras Tour to start, “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” acknowledges, “All the piеces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting ‘more’/I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’/I was hitting my marks/‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart.” Seeing Swift at her most braggadocious and unafraid to take a bow for her skills and accomplishments, she also mentions that it often comes at the cost of being “miserable.” Particularly during the emotional aftermath of the Alwyn “affair.” So it is that Swift says with chirpy sarcasm, “Lights, camera, bitch, smile/Even when you wanna die,” adding, “He said he’d love me all his life/But that life was too short.”
Her career’s life, however, is not, with Swift appearing to aim for the kind of longevity that some can only dream of. This is perhaps why she uses the tactic of “pretending it’s her birthday” every day when she’s depressed, so as to remind herself why it’s worthwhile to “power through the pain” and channel it into her music instead. So it is that she sings, “I’m so obsessed with him, but he avoids me, like the plague/I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art/You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.” For her “coup de grâce” line she concludes, “Try and come for my job.” This being a foreshadowing for another song on the album that speaks on a certain beef she can’t let go of with Kim K.
In the meantime, she’ll keep coming for Matty Healy, as “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” indicates. That much is immediately given away with the descriptor, “Gazing at me starry-eyed/In your Jehovah’s Witness suit.” Swift then goes on to talk about Healy’s penchant for drugs and being disappointing, complete with the shade-drenched dig, “You didn’t measure up/In any measure of a man.” By verse three, the music starts crescendoing as Swift belts out her barrage of questions about why and how he could do this to her. Ruin her “sparkling summer” by rusting it.
Swift then switches gears quite quickly on “The Alchemy,” marking her first unmistakable “homage” to Kelce with football metaphors that include, “So when I touch down/Call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team” and “These blokes warm the benches/We’ve been on a winning streak/He jokes that it’s heroin, but this time with an ‘e.’” Talk about hitting below the belt. But Swift, evidently, has been playing much too nice all this time in her lyrics, and is proving, once and for all, that the pen is mightier than the…British penis.
Although, track order-wise, Clara Bow doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near a song that glorifies Kelce, “Clara Bow” is the song that succeeds “The Alchemy.” Swift undoubtedly homed in on Bow as a prime example of someone who was chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine after being one of its prized cash cows before the transition from silent movies to “the talkies.” In an alternate universe, Swift can seem to see her own path taking that “spit-out” route as she starts to realize the pressure of a revelation like, “You’re the new god we’re worshiping/Promise to be dazzling.” Of course, Swift also seems to be anticipating what happens as women in the entertainment industry get older and they end up being cast aside by the public in favor of a younger, shinier “model.” Hence, the bridge, “Beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours demanding more/Only when your girlish glow flickers just so/Do they let you know/It’s hell on earth to be heavenly/Them’s the brakes, they don’t come gently.”
By the final verse, Swift gets ultra meta by remarking to the next proverbial “it girl,” “You look like Taylor Swift/In this light, we’re loving it/You’ve got the edge, she never did/The future’s bright, dazzling.” These lyrics come at a timely moment in the wake of certain (not inaccurate) comments Courtney Love made about the singer not being “interesting as an artist.”
She does little to prove Love wrong upon transitioning to “The Black Dog,” yet another song that could be about either one of her two recent British blokes. A fact that’s kind of offensive to Alwyn considering how much of a blip Healy was by comparison. But maybe that’s part of Swift’s stinging intent toward her ex of seven years. Title-wise, the generic nature of it is meant to mirror the typical name of some British pub as Swift condemns, “I just don’t understand/How you don’t miss me/In The Black Dog, when someone plays The Starting Line/And you jump up, but she’s too young to know this song/That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming.” Again, Swift broaches the unpleasant subject of getting older herself, while exes of her past (Jake Gyllenhaal included) continue to date younger women. As the first track to signal the “second album” in this surprise double album (either putting Beyoncé to shame for passing Cowboy Carter off as one album at twenty-seven tracks or making her look even better for being able to release a non-double album with so many songs on it), little changes in terms of lyrical themes or musical tones.
That much is also made clear on “imgonnagetyouback,” which, at times, sounds like the sonic sister of “Maroon” from Midnights. There is also some blatant knife-digging into Olivia Rodrigo again, in terms of ripping off the latter’s premise and double meaning conceit for “get him back!” This is done via the chorus, “Whether I’m gonna be your wife, or/Gonna smash up your bike, I haven’t decided yet/But I’m gonna get you back/Whether I’m gonna curse you out, or/Take you back to my house, I haven’t decidеd yet/But I’m gonna get you back.” Seems like she did just that to Rodrigo with this song. So whatever ex it’s “really” supposed to be about, the aim was ultimately taken at this Gen Zer. There’s also a continued element of surrendering to jadedness as Swift states that her “eras [are] fading into gray”—that go-to color of hers on this album.
Another telling sign of Swift losing all sight of any rose-colored glasses in matters of love is “The Albatross.” Painting herself as that “burden to bear” for any man who dares pursue her romantically, Swift asserts, “I’m the life you chose/And all this terrible danger/So cross your thoughtless heart/She’s the albatross/She is here to destroy you.” Yet another instance of Swift’s tongue-in-cheek sarcasm on this record, she doesn’t seem to care anymore about trying to “protect her reputation” or “seem innocent.” Knowing that, no matter what she does, she’s damned if she do and damned if she don’t.
That much is magnified on “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” another track about, you guessed it, Healy. Once again condemning him for his drug habits (and now, his occasional bisexuality), Swift accuses, “You needed me, but you needed drugs more (a similar line appearing in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”)/And I couldn’t watch it happen/I changed into goddesses, villains, and fools/Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules/All to outrun my desertion of you.” But, of course, that desertion was inevitable as Swift bowed to public pressure and backlash in the end. Opting for a more all-American boy like Kelce, who is also referenced in another shade-laden line that goes, “And you saw my bones out with somebody new/Who seemed like he would’ve bullied you in school.”
Swift alternates back to dissecting Alwyn on “How Did It End?,” another melancholic piano ballad akin to “loml.” Her most blatant hint at Alwyn is the line, “He was a hothouse flower to my outdoorsman.” Famously private and averse to being photographed with or interviewed about Swift, it seems telling that she might mention this immediately as a prime reason for why it ended. She then reconciles with the public lust for watching her continue to fail in love with her mimicry of the masses going, “Come one, come all/It’s happ’nin’ again.” Step right up to watch her try to pick up the pieces of her shattered personal life. Among the more gut-wrenching images in the song is Swift subverting the elementary school tease about sitting in a tree and K-I-S-S-I-N-G, changing it instead to, “My beloved ghost and me/Sitting in a tree/D-Y-I-N-G.”
And talking of elementary school, Swift’s subsequent track is the 90s-sounding “So High School,” one of the only songs that radiates the “old Taylor” in terms of being unapologetically cringe. We’re talking Lover-era uncomfortable. And maybe that, too, is another dig at Alwyn. The most out-of-place offering on TTPD (even “The Alchemy” fits in more seamlessly), Swift gets unabashedly bathetic when she gushes, “I’m watching American Pie with you on a Saturday night/Your friends are around, so be quiet I’m trying to stifle my sighs/‘Cause I feel so high school every time I look at you, but look at you.” Worse still, “Truth, dare, spin bottles/You know how to ball, I know Aristotle/Brand new, full throttle/Teach me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” This is Swift settling into her ultimate basic bitch, “I don’t care how uncultured my baby is” era.
Reverting back to her “depressing diva” era (even though that’s Lana’s thing), “I Hate It Here” is another slow-tempo number that’s all about Swift’s unique ability to travel to the “secret gardens in [her] mind” when she can’t stand a place (e.g., the present). Saving all of her “romanticism for [her] inner life.” Even though, sometimes, that romanticism of the past can be a trap because, as she says herself, “Seems like it was never even fun back then/Nostalgia is a mind’s trick/If I’d been there, I’d hate it.” And when she was there, she actually did hate it. Namely, back in 2009, when her beef with Kanye West first began, and then, in 2016, when Kim Kardashian-formerly-West escalated it. Something Swift keeps thinking about to this day, as recently made evident in Time magazine for her “Person of the Year” interview, wherein she insisted she was “canceled within an inch of [her] life and sanity” thanks to the unnamed Kimye.
She undoubtedly brought it up to help prepare listeners for the non-at-all-veiled “thanK you aIMee” (my, what a subtle stylization tactic). And yes, let us take pause to pay respect to the original pop princess who barely coded a song with the name Amy in it, the legendary Miss Britney Spears with “If U Seek Amy.” Swift definitely isn’t seeking her though, no matter how her name is spelled. Barely disguising the woman or story in question, Swift still does her “best” to frame the narrative in a more “high school-y” context (high school does, indeed, often seem to be on her brain), opening with the verse, “When I picture my hometown/There’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you/And a plaque underneath it/That threatens to push me down the stairs, at our school.” Painting (no spray-tan pun intended) Kim as a high school bully throughout, she comes to the point of referring to that time North West danced to “Shake It Off” for a TikTok post and goes for the jugular by saying, “And in your mind, you never beat my spirit black and blue/I don’t think you’ve changed much/And so I changed your name, and any real defining clues/And one day, your kid comes home singin’/A song that only us two is gonna know is about you.” With “Shake It Off” being expressly about shaking off all the haters’ hate, including Kim’s, who now tries to cozy up for clout. How this song might affect the Lana-Kim alliance via Skims is unclear, but surely there must be a conflict of interest for LDR to try being friends with both.
While the masses might be obsessed with “studying Taylor,” she has her own voyeuristic tendencies, as explored in “I Look in People’s Windows.” The shortest song on the album at just over two minutes, it would have been ideal, actually, to soundtrack The Woman in the Window. In this case, though, Swift is trying to find her ex among the windows across from her apartment as she admits, “I look in people’s windows/Transfixed by rose golden glows/They have their friends over to drink nice wine/I look in people’s windows/In case you’re at their table/What if your eyes looked up and met mine/One more time.” In another moment, she questions her ex (whichever one she might want to address) directly in the same way she does on “The Black Dog” by asking, “Does it feel alright to not know me?/I’m addicted to the ‘if only’/So I look in people’s windows/Like I’m some deranged weirdo.” At least she can cop to that in a way that few stalker-y men can.
Rhyming “throttle” with “bottle” again like she does on “So High School,” so begins “The Prophecy” with the verse, “Hand on the throttle/Thought I caught lightning in a bottle.” Alas, she didn’t, “it’s gone again.” Thus, Swift can’t help but victimize herself a little bit by insisting she’s “cursed” as much as she is blessed. Delivering the tragic (for a white billionaire) lines, Swift pleads in earnest, “Change the prophecy/Don’t want money/Just someone who wants my company.” She then gets all Karen-y with the gods by demanding, “Who do I have to speak to/About if they can redo the prophecy?” But, in truth, one imagines she wouldn’t really want it to be redone, even though she laments, “Oh, still I dream of him.” One supposes, in this case, that means Alwyn…mainly because the sonic tone has a similar feel to “invisible string.”
What else could follow “The Prophecy” but “Cassandra,” the name of the prophetess no one would believe when she delivered the vision that the Trojans didn’t want to hear. As is the case with “thanK you aIMee,” Swift weaves her own feud with West and Kardashian into this song, getting quite brutal by the time the bridge rolls around with the condemnation, “They knew, they knew, they knew the whole time/That I was onto something/The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line/They all said nothing/Blood’s thick but nothing like a payroll/Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul/You can mark my words that I said it first/In a morning warning, no one heard.” Swift then concludes with the scathing assessment, “When it’s ‘burn the bitch,’ they’re shriekin’/When the truth comes out, it’s quiet/It’s so quiet.”
Swift switches tack again on “Peter,” not a reference to the apostle, but rather, to Peter Pan. While many have speculated that this song is about Alwyn in lieu of another ex (i.e., Healy)—thanks to the telltale line, “Sometimes it gets me/When crossing your jetstream”—it could easily serve as the anthem for all male millennials, the breed most known for suffering from Peter Pan syndrome.
Acting in the slighted role of Wendy, Swift bemoans, “You said you were gonna grow up/Then you were gonna come find me/Said you were gonna grow up.” Unfortunately, “Peter” (or whoever she’s really talking about) never did. Even though it doesn’t seem like Travis Kelce is that much of a grown-up either.
And yet, Swift appears to make note of her own puerile tendencies on “The Bolter.” While some might have assumed such a title would be about Alwyn, it is a self-referential track, with Swift describing, ultimately, how stifling a relationship can be, and, therefore, how liberating it can feel to be free of it. Or, as the chorus goes, “Started with a kiss/‘Oh, we must stop meeting like this’ [very The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside”]/But it always ends up with a town car speeding/Out the drive one evenin’/Ended with the slam of a door/But she’s got the best stories/You can be sure/That as she was leaving/It felt like freedom/All her fuckin’ lives/Flashed before her eyes/And she realized/It feels like the time/She fell through the ice/Then came out alive.” So yes, in the end, there seems to be a sense of relief about her “tenure” with Alwyn reaching a denouement, her “runaway bride steez” paying off yet again. As does her absorption of the LDR canon, with the lyrics, “Off to the races” managing to enter the fray during the bridge.
Providing listeners with yet another piano ballad, “Robin” is a bittersweet track (yes, another one) that encapsulates the innocence of childhood (or what should be the innocence of childhood). Tying into “Peter” in this regard, Swift is ostensibly obsessing over this “era” of existence as TTPD comes to a close because it’s arguably the last time she can remember being as full of earnest hope unmarred by the crushing weight of fame-related reality (even if fame is a prime example of unreality).
For the grand finale (also a piano ballad), Swift’s literary-themed (in keeping with the album title) “The Manuscript” is another meta exploration like “Clara Bow.” One that delves into how she can’t help but turn all the pain of each failed relationship into a “story.” One that, eventually, “isn’t [hers] anymore.” Mainly because she serves it up to the world for endless scrutiny and dissection in the name of alchemizing pain into art. One of the lines that might be overly examined in this instance is: “He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was/Soon they’d be pushin’ strollers/But soon it was over.” Since it’s often been joked about that maybe the reason Swift can’t “hold onto a man” is a result of her less-than-stellar boudoir skills, this lyric isn’t exactly helpful to kiboshing that theory.
As for the many other lyrics about many other people well-beyond just Joe Alwyn, they answer the question of who TTPD is really torturing. And that is: anyone and everyone who has ever wronged her in the past decade. Hence, a bit of self-flagellating as well.
Genna Rivieccio
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