Taylor Swift: Songs beyond lyrics

Highest single-day Spotify album Streams (300 million), most significant single-week vinyl sales (7000,000), most streamed song on Spotify in a single day, biggest pop album by first-day stream on Apple Music, most streamed album (799 million) in a single week across all platforms- all the records broken points to only one direction- The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) by American singer-songwriter Taylor Alison Swift. Even while this piece is being written, Taylor has just beaten the Beatles for the record of the fastest artist to rack up 12 UK number-one albums with her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.

With 16 songs released on April 19, 2024, TTPD has become emotionally abrasive for Taylor Swift's fans, also known as 'Swifties.' Taylor released an additional 15 tracks in what she calls 'The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology', which makes the whole album consist of 31 songs. Currently, 34-year-old Taylor is enjoying her skyrocketed career, which is now higher than ever, and she seems to have surpassed everything with TTPD. 

The album has become a mystery box, and she weaves the web of that with her poetry. The poetry is refined in the use of diction and similes as if each song has a clue, and as soon as the album is released, fans clamor to find the clue, solve the mystery, and then also crave more. This makes TTPD the pinnacle of Swifties' fandom culture.

Taylor has established herself as a songwriter above all other things by saying, "I write songs, and my voice is just a way to get those lyrics across." 

The inspiration behind Taylor Swift's lyrics

Taylor's biggest strength as a songwriter is her ability to tell stories through music. Her songwriting and poetry have influenced the music industry, popular culture, the economy, and politics. Her autobiographical songwriting ability has made her different from others over the years. 

Taylor uses her diction, humour, emotion, and experience to write songs that match the feelings, events, and happenings in our day-to-day lives and those around us. 

Her songs and poetry are human relationship-focused, and everything seems to fit our lives. It seems that somewhere, somehow, she is talking about us.

In her early albums, Taylor portrayed emotions from the perspective of adolescents. She portrayed toxic relationships, one-sided love, nostalgia, post-romance positivity, anger, heartbreak, and desire all at once. Reputation (2017) can be said to be her comeback album. After facing various controversies, she hid herself from the public eye. 

With the Reputation album, Taylor highlighted her mental state and the ironies of fame she faced then. If you listen to her previous albums – Fearless (2008), Reputation (2017), Folklore (2020), and Evermore (2020) - these albums are more conceptual and storytelling-based. Folklore and Evermore were more fictional narrative-based, where Taylor explored romanticism and escapism. But poetry-themed TTPD is just narratively messy, almost like a tortured melodrama. The humour she put on it is unbearable.

'I love you/it's ruining my life'—this line from the opener and cardigan of the album 'Fortnight feat. Post Malone is captivating to the audience. On TTPD, Taylor discussed her relationships with her exes and aspects of her relationship with fans. 

'Fortnight' lyrics- shade the difficulties of remaining friends even after a breakup. Following the end of Taylor's six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, she reportedly started dating British rock band the 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Healy was in trouble for laughing at racist jokes on a podcast. When the couple was first seen together, Swifties disapproved. They even petitioned her to break up with him. They eventually split up. The track 'But Daddy I Love Him' is about Swift's anger at fans for deriding her choice of partner. When Taylor sings- 'You said I'm the love of your life/about a million times' in 'Loml,' it's about the utter unreliability of love. 

TTPD has an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song—' Who's afraid of little old me?' Of course, Taylor's album is incomplete without this tone. Taylor's present relationship with a Chiefs football player, Travis Kelce, has made a sweet appearance in this tortured music collection in the song' The Alchemy.'

Taylor mentioned one of Hollywood's first icons, Clara Bow, in her song 'Clara Bow.' She explained- 'I picked women who have done great things in the past and have been these archetypes of greatness in the entertainment industry. Clara Bow was the first 'it girl.' 

She also mentioned famous people and bands like Charlie Puth, Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, The Blue Nile Band, Stevie Nicks, Aston Martin, Aristotle, and so many places in her whole album.

Fans think the Aimee of 'Thank you a IMee" is Kim Kardashian. Kim and her then-husband Kanye West famously tried to sabotage Swift's career, and Kanye West mentioned Taylor in one of his songs indelicately. According to Swifties, now Taylor replied to them with her lyrics- 'And one day, your kid comes home singing/a song that only us two is gonna know is about you.'

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