On April 19th at midnight, Taylor Swift released her new album The Tortured Poets Department. I was in a hotel in Virginia when it happened, jet-lagged and exhausted from a day of tourism (ie walking more than the distance to and from my refrigerator). I opened up Spotify, took one look at the 16-song tracklist, and immediately felt exhausted.
Now, listen. I am a hardcore Swiftie. I really am. Here’s me with my Speak Now blanket, which I bought in 2020:
I love her! Her music just speaks to me on a guttural level, which ultimately is what music is supposed to do. I know her entire discography intimately. Hell, I even know all the words to the single she released for the end credits of the Where the Crawdads Sing movie. (To save you the disappointment: no, the song does not feature a chorus of tiny crawdads.)
FYI: It is important for me to prove my Swiftie identity here, because this newsletter is ultimately somewhat critical, and criticizing Taylor online is one of the fastest ways to get SWAT-teamed.
I differentiate between stans and fans in that I believe stans blindly adore an artist, whereas fans enjoy them deeply, but are capable of critiquing them. I only stan one thing, and that’s the preschool show Bluey.
Thus, I will say: Miss Swift was as annoying as she possibly could’ve been leading up to this drop. She pulled a clearly-uncomfortable Lana del Rey on stage with her after beating her out for best album at the Grammys, and then took the opportunity to announce her new album in her speech, with Lana still awkwardly on stage. She dropped a “library installation” of lyrics as a PR stunt…
… which was such a deeply 2010 tumblr thing to do (I mean this as an insult, which is confusing, because normally that would be a compliment). The album has a name which even *I* cringe saying. And I once told a room full of new colleagues that I was been listening to an audiobook called “The Happily Ever After Playlist.”
So I arrived at this album already fatigued, and barely made it through the first four tracks before falling asleep. They were wordy, heady, and upon first listen, not quite dreamy enough to be lullabies, and not quite poppy enough to be true bops (my least favorite kind of musical limbo).
Like the rest of the world, I woke up the next morning to find that in addition to the 16 songs she initially released, she dropped another set of songs two hours later, and pronounced the total (31 songs; 2 hours and 2 minutes) The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
“Wow,” I thought, staring at my screen like this. “A double album.”
That’s not to say that I wasn’t excited; after all, it was a full, unexpected second album drop by my favorite artist, and I’ve never not come around to an album of hers. But people online were besides themselves with shock, and I found that I felt basically none. I felt like this:
Taylor is many things, and one of them is a businesswoman with a penchant for large releases. Each re-release of her old albums contains a slew of bonus songs “From the Vault,” adding numerous tracks to already-long albums (for example, Red (Taylor’s Version) was 30 tracks long). She surprise-dropped her album Folklore in quarantine, and then released its “sister album,” Evermore less than five months later. The closeness of release made them feel more like twins. When she released her last album, Midnights, she released 10 bonus tracks two hours later.
I couldn’t help but think of something I read that said that Carly Rae Jepsen wrote 200 songs, and whittled them down to two albums. With Taylor’s tour and tour-film release happening while she was writing this album, and the 23-song edition of Midnights having just dropped in October of 2022, I just don’t get the sense that Taylor is being as meticulous in crafting her albums as she used to be. And while she is unquestionably a songwriting juggernaut, I think the quality is suffering.
I don’t think this is all her fault. I think the people surrounding her do not question her (I certainly wouldn’t), and it’s becoming evident. The most glaring example of this, in my opinion, is the song “imgonnagetyouback,” which is exactly the premise of Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Get Him Back,” only released much later and done less cleverly. Someone REALLY should have told her to not release it.
Additionally, I think it’s worth comparing her to Beyoncé, here, who has released two exquisitely thought-out albums. Renaissance was one of the most impressive musical works I’ve ever listened to (and I went to the opera one time, so). It checks every single box imaginable, and it’s clear that she spent YEARS making it. The production is immaculate. The songs flow into each other like a symphony. Nothing feels derivative, even though she is referencing constantly.
Listening to TTPD, I feel like the production is missing. Say what you will about Midnights, but it had pretty damn lush production; I would highlight Lavender Haze and Midnight Rain as examples. I just don’t think she took the time to experiment.
Returning to the Beyoncé comparison (because it’s always important to pit talented women against each other), I am continually blown away by how in each new album, she not only breaks genre and challenges herself artistically, but somehow finds a new vocal technique to showcase. She is constantly changing our perceptions of who she is and what she is capable of.
Taylor, I believe, has changed our perceptions of who she is and what she’s capable of many times. She has grown exponentially as an artist since her first album, and in all her albums leading up to this, there’s been at least one song that I feel like truly felt surprising. (some notable examples: I Knew You Were Trouble, Blank Space, End Game, The Archer, Peace, Glitch).
Unfortunately, I’m having trouble finding that in this album. I felt that Midnights was ultimately a step backwards for her artistically; I was so excited after Folklore/Evermore to see what she would do musically, and just didn’t quite feel like the album was a leap forward artistically. That isn’t to say that it didn’t contain great songs… it just didn’t feel mature.
The PR campaign for The Tortured Poets Department suggested that the “new element” to be excited about this time around was lyrics, which she loudly labeled as poetry. However… a few listens in, I don’t think this album is particularly breaking new ground lyrically for her. If the goal is to show off an extensive vocabulary (which is a very 19-year-old goal, in my opinion), she used an entire thesaurus to write The Lakes. If we’re talking gutting, emotional poetry, I don’t think this album is noticeably more impressive than her previous work (“you kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath,” “you weren’t mine to lose,” etc.). If anything, there is a higher percentage of drek on this album than her previous works (I will not be singing along to “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist”).
At any rate, this led me to think… what would I want to see from Taylor?
My dad has taught me that the least popular person in a comedy writers’ room is the one who nixes jokes but offers nothing to change them to. And so, to appease the clamoring masses, here are some (earnest!) pitches.
8 Perfect Songs
I will preface this by saying that I know there are financial incentives for her to release a shitload of music (my tallies above didn’t even include remixes), but I would love to see an album that felt really, really intentional. I think Folklore was her most impressive in this regard to-date; maybe it’s because she had nothing to do in quarantine but pore over her music, but it felt really carefully written, organized, and produced. I think it would be cool to see her winnow a 30-track album down to 8 or so tracks, and release another body of work that wowed in quality, not quantity. To pit Taylor against one of her friends (so important to do), I think “Melodrama” was a terrific example of this. 11 songs, and in my opinion, no skips.
A Concept Album/Musical
The thing about Taylor is that she writes musicals already. She is queen of the story-song, and her remixing of her own body of work at the Eras tour has proven that she has mastered the art of weaving previous songs together into reprises. Jukebox musicals are all the rage right now, and she has a lot of very theatrical songs (I personally think “The Moment I Knew” sounds like it should’ve been in Moulin Rouge). However, I think she has the talent to Waitress it and write her own musical based on an existing property (I’m SURE there’s something she’d love to adapt); or she could write an Anaïs Mitchell-style concept album with the intention of adaptation. I am positive there’s a market for this, and since her bid for an Oscar failed, why not try for a Tony?
A Slow/Fast Album
Taylor has now a few times released pared-down versions of her pop songs (most notably “Forever and Always”). They always bang. I think it would be really cool if she released like 10 upbeat pop songs, and then released slow, acoustic orchestrations of all of them as well, to show that her songwriting ability is not limited by tempo. She soooorta did this conceptually with Folklore: The Long Pond Sessions, but she chose an album that was already slow and mostly acoustic, so I find that the two sound nearly exactly the same.
Alternatively, I think it would be really cool if she released an album with absolutely no production/extremely pared down production - just her and a guitar, a la “Betty” (a top Taylor song for me). I would eat. that. shit. up.
A Covers/Collabs Album
Since we’re playing in the world of imagination, I would love to see Taylor do what Paramore did, and hand over some of her songs to her favorite artists to get their takes on it. Alternatively, she could just feature them in new remixes (like the completely-forgotten-about “Lover” feat. Shawn Mendes). Some ideas of mine, in order of how far-fetched I think the collaborations would be (starting with most plausible):
Better Than Revenge feat. Panic! at the Disco • Fifteen feat. Sabrina Carpenter • Should’ve Said No feat. Hayley Williams • Hoax feat. Lorde • Cowboy Like Me feat. Kacey Musgraves • You Belong with Me feat. Carrie Underwood • Don’t Blame Me feat. Hozier • Holy Ground feat. Chappell Roan • Maroon feat. Sza • Mine feat. Miley Cyrus • 22 feat. Carly Rae Jepsen • The Way I Loved You feat. The Jonas Brothers • Paper Rings feat. We the Kings • Look What You Made Me Do feat. Britney Spears & Billie Eilish • A Place in this World feat. Hilary Duff • Style feat. Harry Styles • Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve feat. Olivia Rodrigo • The Moment I Knew feat. Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor (I know I’m insane, but it would be incredible. I will die on this hill.)
Note: Maggie Rogers’ “Tim McGraw” is not on this list because a) it exists, and b) at this point, it’s a Maggie Rogers song that Taylor covered.
An Album with All-Female Producers
Most of the Swifties I know agree that the time has come for her to find new producers (such as not Jack Antonoff). While it’s clear that there are some producers (Jack Antonoff) that feel almost like family to her, in terms of reading her mind and knowing exactly what she wants, her albums are beginning to all sound the same, and a lot of that is the production (by Jack Antonoff). Her experimentation with Aaron Dessner was clearly a success, and I think she needs to continue to seek out new talent to develop new sounds (that sound less like Jack Antonoff). I think a cool way to do this would be for her to do an album with all-female producers (so she has a clear-cut reason to let Jack Antonoff down nicely).
A Triumphant Return to Country
Lastly, many of us fell in love with Taylor as a country artist, and while she occasionally dabbles (again, “Betty”) to prove that she’s still got it, I think it’s crazy that we got Beyoncé and Gaga country albums before a Taylor one. I miss the twang!
Anyway, those are my unsolicited ideas.
I went through a lot of versions of this essay, one of which included a surprise second newsletter drop at 2 am, which critiqued this essay (re: me being a man who knows nothing about music critiquing a woman who is probably the most successful musician alive). Ultimately, I decided that it would be massively ironic for me to overwrite about this, for hopefully obvious reasons. So we will be saving my thoughts on my internalized misogyny for a later date!
To end this rant, here’s me with the cursed other side of the Speak Now blanket.
Running with my dress unbuttoned,
Johnny