The product of imperative songwriting, Taylor Swift released her “lifeline” album on April 19. “The Tortured Poets Department,” or TTPD, is the singer-songwriter’s 11th studio album; it features 16 songs, including collaborations with Post Malone and Florence and the Machine.
On the night she won her lucky 13th Grammy for Best Pop Album with her 2022 album “Midnights,” she also announced TTPD in her acceptance speech.
“I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand-new album comes out April 19,” Swift stated on the Grammy stage. “It’s called The Tortured Poets Department. I’m gonna go post the cover backstage.”
In the initial post made about TTPD, Swift provided a poem along with the first album cover; at the end of this poem, she describes herself as “The Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department.”
Fans have theorized that this album represents the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Swift confirmed this by making five custom playlists of the “stages of heartbreak.”
These playlists’ names are as follows: “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life Songs” (denial), “You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad Songs” (anger), “Am I Allowed to Cry? Songs” (bargaining), “Old Habits Die Screaming Songs” (depression) and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart Songs” (acceptance). They also include voice notes from Swift, in which she explains the reasoning behind her song choices.
Fans have noticed that the words on the heartbreak covers are each shaped like letters that together spell out “Joe”; they have deduced that the playlist is about Joe Alwyn, whom Swift was with for approximately six years, the longest of her publicly known relationships. Additionally, it has also been noted that many of the songs in TTPD seem to be somewhat longer than the average Swift track.
Swift released the tracklist for TTPD in March. The song titles are as follows: Side A features “Fortnight (ft. Post Malone),” “The Tortured Poets Department,” “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” and “Down Bad”; Side B features “So Long, London,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “Fresh Out the Slammer” and “Florida!!! (ft. Florence and the Machine)”; Side C features “Guilty as a Sin?”, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” and “loml”; Side D features “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Alchemy” and “Clara Bow.”
The fourth side will also include a bonus track called “The Manuscript” in the physical editions. There are four different variants of the album: the one featuring “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter Edition,” “Albatross Edition” and “The Black Dog Edition.” The new bonus songs “The Bolter,” “Albatross,” and “The Black Dog” have sparked even more theories and excitement among diehard fans.
Abby Dreistadt, Editor in Chief