What does one say about the biggest entertainer in the history of the world? Billboard estimates that Taylor Swift earned approximately $1.82 billion in 2023. No other recording artist in history has come close to that. Maybe, one could say “The Beatles” or “Michael Jackson” or “Madonna,” at the height of their popularity? There are a lot of articles pondering this with charts and exclamation points, so I’ll leave it, only to say that Taylor Swift has sucked all the air out of the room. What then does a review of an album by Taylor Swift accomplish? It feels a bit like reviewing the weather. Oh, I don’t like this rain. It’s the same rain as yesterday, and there’s so much of it. It does nothing to and for the weather. I suggest an umbrella. 

And then here’s this new album, The Tortured Poets Department. First off, hearing there was a new album coming out, the first thought I had was money (The internet tells me that if Taylor Swift’s Eras tour impact to US GDP were a country, it would be bigger than 40 countries). The second thought was that the system is broken: no one should make that much money. And so, because I can be petty, I wanted the album to be terrible. Taylor Swift isn’t the one who broke the system, I know, but she’s benefited greatly from it, and any chance to have at the system, I’m down for it. 

The problem is, though, that the album isn’t bad at all. In fact, it’s pretty good even. Four out of five stars maybe. But maybe like my initial feelings of Taylor Swift exhaustion, a lot of thoughtful reviewers panned it, mostly criticizing its length (when thinking of the “anthology” version, with its 31 songs and two-hour runtime), its predictable and repetitive arrangements and production choices, and the places where the lyrics are, as one review says, “cringy.” 

That got me to thinking about the lyrics to pop songs, a genre which, like music in general, has a long history of cringy lyrics. Is there something especially cringy that makes this album stand out? To compare, I turned on Spotify’s Top 100 hit songs playlist, and “cringy” is pretty much the starting point for the songs that popped up. I would quote, but I’ll leave that for you to imagine. Should Taylor Swift, though, maybe because of her “Bigger That The Beatles” stature, have better lyrics than the average pop song? What do we mean by “better lyrics” anyway? 

Lyrically, Swift is prone to overstatement, drama and hyperbole. The Tortured Poets Department, even by her usual standard, is a melodramatic album. A lot of graves and death and shooting and breaking and spies, etcetera, as metaphors, mostly for how bad one feels in a relationship. Sometimes the lyrics come with a wink, sometimes with a bit of camp, and sometimes they’re given straight. Deciding which it is at any time is left for the listener to decide. One thing, though, that The Tortured Poets Department is throughout, is self-aware. Actually, self-aware is a hallmark of Taylor Swift’s career in general. Watching the Eras tour movie, I had the feeling that Taylor Swift was in the audience watching Taylor Swift along with us. “Poise,” one might say. Or “professional.” Or “calculated,” if one is feeling less generous. And mostly, I’m siding with the generous crowd here. Swift is an entertainer. And she’s found a multivalent approach to entertainment. 

I’m not a Swiftie, and I mostly know Swift’s work secondhand, when other members of the household play the songs or bring some pop culture tea to general conversation. I didn’t pay much attention to her albums, though, until Folklore, because Bon Iver was involved, and I like Bon Iver. Turns out, I liked the album, and the follow-up, Evermore. And then I went back to lurking, until this album was announced, because “poets” was in the title, and I write poetry. I found the title amusing, with its overwrought “tortured.” I wondered how the songs were going to approach such a title, or how such a title was going to hold the songs together. Color me intrigued. 

And, by and large, the lyrics to The Tortured Poets Department follow the Taylor Swift playbook. The lyrics feel autobiographical, but at times obviously not, and then at other times, it feels like she’s stepping to the side of the mask of the song, and speaking directly to the listener. That stepping to the side is one of the more interesting moves Swift makes, and they’re used sparingly. Take, for example, in the song “But Daddy I Love Him” where she coyly sings “I’m having his baby / No, I’m not, but you should see your faces.” It’s a move that allows the songs to breathe between fiction and fact, as she does in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” one of several songs where Swift has sole writing credit: 

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

Putting narcotics into all of my songs

And that’s why you’re still singing along

With the direct address of “all of my songs” it sure sounds like Taylor Swift is giving it to us straight, singing about herself. But then in the song “fortnight” which is the lead single, and duet with Post Malone, the lyrics allude to a brief affair that haunts the speaker: 

Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather

Now you’re in my backyard, turned into good neighbors

Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her

If there’s anything autobiographical in this song, it’s deeply buried. It’s also economical, and gets to a very specific emotional and situational construct. Taylor Swift’s songs over the past half decade, like this one, are usually about busted relationships, and often with autobiographical allusions. It’s an interactive game for fans  who follow the life of Taylor Swift. But it won’t always be. In twenty years, no one will much care who “So Long, London” is about, but they might well still be listening to it. It reminds me who George Harrison was singing about in “Something.” I knew at one time, but it’s not something I’ve thought about in decades. The song, though, is timeless. We’ll see if “So Long London” achieves that longevity, but since I don’t know or care much to know about the real life characters involved, I can appreciate the nicely arranged vocal intro that blends well into the first verse with a propelling beat matched with a lilting vocal line. And the story of the song, while seemingly autobiographical to Swift’s experience, is backed off just enough to let it ramify with anyone leaving a place after a relationship, and that feeling of loss mixed with nostalgia that follows them. 

And that’s where Swift’s songs, I feel, are at their best. Autobiographical enough to get those interested in Swift’s daily life to detective their way through them, but general enough, or fictive enough, so people like me to feel along with them for their underlying emotion. The relationship focus of the vast majority of Swift’s songs works well for Spotify playlists and random singles here and there, but it brings with it a narrow focus that makes one wish at times she’d think about something else a bit more often. And when she does, it’s usually quite interesting, as in the song “Clara Bow,” a song about the way in which the entertainment industry uses up its ingénues. One can imagine it comes from Swift’s own experience of the industry that she’s been a part of since she was a teenager, but which concludes with the rather remarkable lines “You look like Taylor Swift in this light. / We’re loving it. / You’ve got edge she never did. / The future’s bright, dazzling.” It caught me off guard, and I loved it. 

The understanding and cleverness of such observations are maybe why some people have focused on the places where the lyrics fall flat, as in a song like “Fresh Out the Slammer,” which just feels goofy, and undercuts the emotion of the song. There are several moments in Swift’s oeuvre where she plays with campy melodrama, usually doing it well, but when it doesn’t work, it deserves the “cringy” charge. Smaller moments happen here and there throughout the album, as in the song “I Can Do it with a Broken Heart,” which centers on the mask of fame, where the world can look at her and think “She’s having the time of her life” while inside she’s broken. It’s an excellent roller-coaster of lyric and arrangement that culminates in a carnivalesque keyboard through the chorus, but then includes the line “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague.” It’s not so much that it’s a cringy line, but more that it’s just lazy, the expected thing anyone would say. There are so many more interesting things one with Swift’s ability could say. A missed opportunity, then. Not a reason to pan the album. 

The Taylor Swift overdose haze, though, is a real thing. Articles online and posts on social media are filled with “enough already go away,” and got a little gleeful when it seemed like there was a way they could take a bite out of the inescapable gorilla in the room of her presence in 2023-4 by finding fault in The Tortured Poets Department. Is it pretentious? Maybe. But it’s also self-lacerating. The protagonists of the songs on this album aren’t always doing the right thing, and at the very least, they’re “modern idiots.” But this other criticism of the album, that it has too many song on it, in the age of streaming, where playlists and skipping and not listening to albums in order is the general way of things, seems to me to be missing the point. For instance, my playlist version of The Tortured Poets Department has 17 songs on it. I consider that a win. This is similar to The National last year, who put out two albums, where I made a playlist of the two of them together, and ended somewhere around that 17 song mark. A good solid hour. 

In the age of streaming, album reviews can feel antique. I like to read them, but a little voice pipes up, and says “Why read this when you can just go to Spotify or YouTube and listen to it?” Does someone read a review of an album in order to decide if they should listen to it or not? That seems doubtful. Pre-internet, in the beforetimes, not all the songs from an album ever got airplay, and people would buy them only maybe having heard one song. So, if for some reason you are trying to decide if you’ll like The Tortured Poets Department, go to YouTube and listen to, I’ll suggest “Guilty as Sin?” and if you like it OK, you’ll like the album at least OK. 

“Guilty as Sin?” with its title that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be interesting, is a good example of how Swift rides the edge of overused phrases and mixes them with more unique, clever turns of phrase. I’ve long been a fan of The Blue Nile, so when Swift alludes to the song “The Downtown Lights” in the opening lines, “Drowning in the Blue Nile / He sent me ‘Downtown Lights,’” I’m there for it. There’s a long list of other literary allusions on the album, some direct (including name-checking Patty Smith and Dylan Thomas in the title track), and many at various levels subtle to overt, including Cassandra to possibly Emily Dickinson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. 

As a singer, Taylor Swift has a more limited instrument than a lot of the other current major female artists who have dominated the pop charts along with her. She’s not going to coloratura through a song. Instead, she’s more a theatrical singer, relying on phrasing and intonation. The opening of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is a good example. An inhalation and exhalation of breath leads into a simple piano phrase as if to say “I can’t believe I’m going through this again” that becomes the lyric “Was any of it true?” with a melody and light approach similar to a lot of Sufjan Stevens’ more breathy songs. Other songs, like “The Black Dog” and “How Did it End?” wouldn’t be out of place on a Phoebe Bridgers album, with their more lilting directness and swells of sound. At other times, her vocal approach is similar to the more drowsy aspects of Lana Del Rey. 

Musically, Swift has been working with Jack Antonoff for the last decade, and he has co-production credit on roughly half the tracks. Aaron Dessner of The National, with whom she’s been working for the last five years, has co-production credit on the rest, and both Dessner and Antonoff have co-writing credit for a number of tracks as well. This two-producer approach balances the more organic, indie rock approach of Dessner with the more pop approach of Antonoff, though really, the contribution of Swift as co-producer on all the tracks keeps things firmly grounded in her sound. The differences between her two collaborators can be heard best on a song like “So High School” which, except for her vocals, wouldn’t sound out of place on an album by The National. Contrast that with “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” with its keyboards and glitz and the breadth of the album becomes clear. 

Still, the charge of sameness has been levelled at the album, and as it stretches just over two hours, it’s true, that’s a long time to sit with an album. It might’ve been a better move for Swift to wait a few months to drop the extended Anthology full-version of the album, which was released just a couple hours after the original album of sixteen songs. One shouldn’t be too concerned about that sort of criticism, though. If the album feels long, you can take a break. Come back to it later maybe. I mean, it’s not mandatory to listen all the way through. I like a lot of the second half, so if you feel it’s too long, I suggest you skip to those, especially “Peter” and “Robin.” 

The other night, on tour in Europe, she introduced The Tortured Poets Department segment of the show as “Female Rage: The Musical.” And then immediately filed to trademark the phrase. He ongoing Eras tour is halfway to being a Broadway revue. I can’t imagine it will be long before “Female Rage: The Musical” hits Broadway. It will have a great run. I’d go. 

John Gallaher teaches at Northwest Missouri State University and co-edits the Laurel Review. A previous winner of the Levis Award and The Boston Review Prize, his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and others. The author of five previous collections of poetry, Gallaher has also co-written books with G.C. Waldrep and Kristina Marie Darling, and co-edited collections with Mary Biddinger and Laura Boss. His most recent collection of poems is My Life in Brutalist Architecture.

Bio borrowed and adapted from the Four Way Books website.