Album Review: Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department

To an outside observer, Taylor Swift has just about everything going for her. She is the biggest music star on the planet right now, with a vast army of followers who seem to hang on her every word. She has achieved critical acclaim as well as commercial success. Her records are instant No.1s all over the world. She can send out the film of her Eras Tour to the places her live circus can’t reach and her fans lap it up. There is, it appears, no stopping her stratospheric rise.

And yet, on her latest record, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift places vulnerability to the fore. It feels like an attempt to shunt the commercialised Taylor Swift into the sidings and emphasise the singer’s human side.

With thirty-one tracks to journey through, she takes a long and winding road to that destination, frequently deconstructing her ivory-towered image along the way to remind us of the star-crossed romantic the world fell for.

As fans will know, at her best, Swift has a marvellous knack for taking specifics and creating universal experiences of them. On The Tortured Poets Department, however, she appears to be more concerned with unpacking, redefining and defending her personal life – oh, and with doing more than a bit of score-settling in the process. She deconstructs and reworks her own lore, becoming all the more precise in her self-deprecation.

Sometimes – as on ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart' – it works.

But there  are also times, when the album feels sheltered yet hollow, wanting yet overdone. The inflated venom of ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ and the – to me – lukewarm musings of the title track characterise this drift towards emptiness.

The album is not without its fine points. Aaron Dessner’s gentle and evocative production elevates the record on songs like ‘Clara Bow’ and 'The Albatross'. There's a handful of catchy pop numbers that are also clever and smartly woven lyrically, including the opening track ‘Fortnight’ (feat. Post Malone) and ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart'. The gauzy drum machines and bubblegum synths act as a feather-down cushion to support the mock-blasé lyricism. The irony is that Taylor Swift has never sounded so large and untouchable, even in the record’s tenderest moments.

There are times when it seems that she is self-conscious to a fault – but hardly self-aware. Her status as pop music’s first official billionaire notwithstanding, Taylor had mastered the art of making her songs seem casually profound and relatable, capitalising on the girl-next-door persona that has been part of her armoury. But here, the likes of ‘Down Bad’ and ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ sound like attempts at getting back in touch with the girlish romantic archetype that don’t quite add up.

Swift is a deft writer – there’s a sweeping discography to pull examples from – but the incessant ramblings on her internal life become increasingly flat and indulgent. Her lockdown releases – folklore and evermore – provided welcome relief from this confessional mode because she successfully tried her hand at writing fiction, constructing new characters and worlds.

In some ways, hers is a tricky position to be in. By describing her own experiences of love and lust, maybe Taylor Swift is just getting it all out of her system, demonstrating that art really can work as therapy.

Or perhaps she is genuinely trying to let us know that – despite all the wild trappings of success and the money that goes with them – she is just another mere mortal, subject to the kind of heartbreak, disillusion, bitterness and anger that can afflict anyone who falls in love and sees it all turn to dust.

Either way, to me The Tortured Poets Department feels like just too much of a not-always-good thing. Its ambition is to be grounded in storytelling, but it isn’t musically inventive enough to carry off the two-hour running time. The effect is that the aesthetic too often feels bland. Combined with what are often curiously slapdash lyrics, it’s more like a newly-built house than a home that's lived in.

Success can be a blessing and a curse. By taking on the industry and winning – in the saga of the re-recorded albums – Taylor Swift has proven that she can do more or less what she wants.

She has some of the industry’s top professionals at hand and a surfeit of resources to work with. She is at the peak of her powers, well poised and capable of creating groundbreaking work.

But what The Tortured Poets Department suggests is that what she really needed was someone to say ‘Hang on, Taylor. You can do better than this’. Then again, the tills are ringing. So who needs critics telling you what to do?