The Story That’s Holding Taylor Swift Back

The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”

Against this backdrop, late in the year, a 16-year-old ingenue arrived who radiated not sex appeal but feeling. Taylor Swift at this point was a country artist, welcomed into a genre that embraced the kind of romantic imagery she played with in her lyrics: small towns, broken hearts, blue jeans, innocence that’s bruised but not shattered. Her self-titled debut record was full of diaristic songs that courted intimacy with her listeners, sharing adolescent dreams and secrets (“In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that you never read”). But it also introduced motifs that Swift has returned to over and over since then: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love.

Every song on that record except two, in fact, deals with love, but in terms that make it feel more like a subject she’s intent on exploring than a consuming personal affliction. This is a novice storyteller’s idea of emotion, patchworked together out of movie clips and imaginative sincerity. On “Cold as You,” Swift compares an emotionally unavailable love interest to a rainy day: “You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray.” In “Picture to Burn,” furious after a betrayal, she declares, “Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time.” The album is softly romantic but also notably sharp. Listening to these early songs now, I sense the initial construction of a character who’s already constrained by archetype, unsure of who she might actually be outside the apple-pie conventions of a genre.

Almost 20 years later, the same metaphors and frustrations are present in Swift’s new record, The Tortured Poets Department, but they’ve calcified into a mode that, in lyrical form at least, feels like it’s suffocating her. Over 31 songs—the last 15 added in the early hours of the morning as a surprise drop—Swift portrays herself as a woman stuck in a spiral of obsessive overthinking, with new cuts seeming to open up old wounds. The pain seems realer now, more lived in, but the imagery she uses to describe it is the same as it was when she was 16. “If all you want is gray for me / Then it’s just white noise, and it’s just my choice,” she sings on “But Daddy I Love Him,” barely animated by chilling fury. Time, again, taunts her; on “So Long, London,” she sighs, “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”

This is the saddest album I’ve heard in a long time. And I’m fascinated by how jarringly it strikes down public perceptions of Swift from the past few years: the golden girl swept into a jubilantly triumphant romance with the football star, the impossibly beloved auteur of women’s emotional lives, the billionaire savior of entire economies, the lyrical subject of study at Harvard. The song that feels the most revelatory is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which tears down the curtain to reveal the truth behind it, scored to a frantic, pulsating, almost obscenely jaunty beat. “There in her glittering prime / The lights refract sequin stars off her silhouette every night / I can show you lies,” she sings, numbly. “I cry a lot but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”

What are we to do with all this pain? People wanted a boppy summer soundtrack, and they got an exorcism instead—a messy, sprawling litany of musically familiar grievances. The immediate reviews have not been kind, pointing out the clunkiness of certain lyrics and accusing Swift of solipsism bordering on self-obsession or of digging up old grudges better left buried. Critics both amateur and professional have rushed in to excavate which songs seem to be about which real people, turning a creative work into confessional fodder for the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame—a habit that Swift herself has seemed to encourage. (“I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”)

I can agree with my colleague Spencer Kornhaber, who described much of The Tortured Poets Department as “a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic.” Yet the album is also intriguing to me as an autofictional work that’s chafing at its own layers of lore and artifice. Swift has long constructed her identity out of archetype, cliché, and torn-up fragments of Americana. She’s a people pleaser, a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, a dreamer, a schemer, a wronged woman, a vengeful gorgon, a cat lady, a girl next door. But at 34, she seems to be butting up against the reality that there are no cultural models for what she’s become. Too earnest to be a diva, too workaholic to retreat into reclusion or retirement, she’s stuck being an extraordinarily rich, influential, and powerful woman who still, somehow, feels like she has no real power at all.

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In an Instagram post announcing the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift described the record as:

an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.

Swift is asking us to read the album as a metamorphic bid for catharsis—the idea, espoused by Aristotle (whom Swift name-checks on TTPD), that staging pain and tragedy as artistic spectacles can help purge us of their effects. As someone once inexplicably compelled to write about the worst time of my life, I can empathize. But the finality with which Swift declared matters to be closed for debate is striking. This is what having an arsenal without authority looks like. Swift knows, at the end of the day, that there’s actually very little she can do to influence what people make of her.

[Read: Fans’ expectations of Taylor Swift are chafing against reality]

And yet, the simple existence of the record is an assertion that her version of events will be the one that endures, the one we remember. History, even recent history, has not been kind to women who attempt to reify their side of the story. In ancient Rome, a woman named Gaia Afrania who tried to argue for herself in court was enshrined by the writer Valerius Maximus as a “monster.” For speaking honestly in King Lear, Cordelia is disinherited and then executed by her lying sisters. Nora Ephron was likened to a child abuser in Vanity Fair for lightly fictionalizing her husband’s infidelity while she was pregnant with their second child in Heartburn. And when Rachel Cusk wrote about her divorce in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, one critic branded her “a brittle little dominatrix and a peerless narcissist.”

Still, writers keep trying, possibly inspired by Ephron’s assertion, via Heartburn’s narrator, that “if I tell the story, I control the version.” Swift’s mission with her new album seems testimonial; she wants to have certain facts entered into the cultural archive. “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on,” she states on the title track. It’s the weakest song on the whole record, with a jangling, Bruce Hornsby–like piano riff in the background and lyrics that feel half-baked. So why is it here? I would argue, for context: It documents all the particular texture of a betrayal—the grand emotional duplicity and the intensity, the beauty of flashing-neon warning signs. In the following song, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” there’s the inevitable follow-up: “He saw forever, so he smashed it up.”

Illusion also plays a big role on this record; events blur and coalesce into a fuzzy narrative wherein the clearest emerging thread is Swift’s own pain. Autofiction is a particular example of writing that performs “a push-me, pull-you of cloaking and revelation,” the critic Alex Clark wrote in a 2018 analysis of recent works in the genre. Women writers and writers of color, she argued, are the ones who are most “bedevilled by the expectation—from readers and critics—that their work is based in the reality of their own lives; what follows is a treasure hunt for the ‘real’ in their imagined worlds, and a diminution of its importance.” Since the beginning, Swift has dropped breadcrumbs throughout her albums that have been analyzed fervently by her fans. Never has it felt less like a rewarding practice than it does now, with her lyrics hovering awkwardly between the neatness of legend and what the French writer Marie Darrieussecq described as “the authentic cry of the autobiography.”

Swift seems to think that if she’s not keeping us busy, we’ll get tired of her. But this mentality, too, is a trap. “The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 more times than the male artists,” she explains in Miss Americana, a 2020 documentary about a tumultuous period in her career during which she dealt with backlash for the first time and became more open about her politics. “They have to, or else you’re out of a job … I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” In another scene in that movie, she responds to perceived failure by saying, “This is fine. I just need to make a better record.” The perfectionist’s impulse is to just do more and work harder, to try to annihilate failure with relentlessness. That narrative is a particularly American one too—as familiar as Johnny Appleseed or standing by your man. Swift loves storytelling. So why is it hard to shake the feeling that it’s ruining her?

She seems, on her new album, like a woman stuck in a fairy tale, who escapes one gilded cage for another, and then another, and then another. This possibly accounts for the music feeling so static—it’s the first record she’s made that hasn’t shifted musical modes, the first whose lyrics lack methodical precision. My hope is that this album is catharsis for her: the purging not just of an emotional moment in time but also of a preoccupation with the motifs that are holding her back. On “Mastermind,” my favorite song from 2022’s Midnights, Swift herself observed how limiting romantic tropes are for women, how they have to plot with intention not to be “the pawn in every lover’s game.” The legends and stories that both her music and her persona are built on simply don’t contain enough substance for her anymore. Swift is going to have to write her own way out.