Taylor Swift's music was once much bigger than her. A born storyteller, she collected the emotional ephemera of her life and fashioned them into indelible songs about herself, but also about young women – about their sorrow, their desire, their spirit and their will. She was the girl next door with the platinum pen, for her feelings worth hearing not just because they existed but because she turned them into art.
Those days are over. Swift, pumped to mythic proportions by verbal oxygen, is larger than the body of her work – without knocking the body of her work. He is her own pantheon: a tragic hero and a justified villain. an unwitting antitrust crusader and a one-woman incentive package. Alleged criminal and climate fixer. The girl's face of the year. For the past 13 months, she's strapped on her bodysuit and performed a herculean feat three nights a week on the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning her famous billion-dollar valuation. Her musical achievements are remarkable. But no one makes a billion dollars just from music.
The Department of Tormented Poets, Swift's 11th studio album, feels this widening gap between Taylor Swift the artist and Taylor Swift the phenomenon, and she wants to fill it with some fireproof material. The weight of expectation is significant: This is Swift's first set of new work since the end of a long-term relationship and a pair of high-profile romantic whirlwinds — one of which, with 1975's Matty Healy, seems to have provided much of the inspiration here . The fans came to Tormented poets looking for emotional catharsis, or at least the spontaneous details. Swift, it seems, wanted the comfort of intimacy. Returning to Jack Antonoff and the National's Aaron Dessner, her primary songwriting and production collaborators in recent years, Swift takes cues from Folk-more and Midnight without pulling anything loose.
Tormented poets' expanded Anthology The version clocks in at over two hours, and even in the shortened version, its sense of sprawl reaches the level of the song, where Swift's writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, clearly wanting for an editor. The winking title track—a joke about its subjects' self-seriousness—makes fun of the performance of creative labor, which is funny, given the show Swift makes of herself. He piles metaphors into thick chunks, throws things at the wall even after something has stuck, picks up the things that didn't stick and uses them anyway.
