Swifties across the globe rejoiced at the release of Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. In my opinion, however, this album is not her best work. Many songs on the album have baffling lyrics; the most notably is “But Daddy I Love Him.” This track is almost a continuation of “Love Story,” but the lyrics show a bizarrely disconnected tone. During the chorus Swift gleefully sings, “I’m having his baby/No, I’m not, but you should see your faces”” to her disapproving father. The rest of the song shows this same carefree, almost childish disobedience. Then, the bridge enters with, “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing…/Sanctimonously performing soliloquies I’ll never see.” These lines would have been bad enough on a song that was taking itself seriously, but putting these lines together in a juvenile country song about loving someone one’s parents disapprove of makes it seem like Swift is trying far too hard to seem literary and poetic. She desperately needs an editor on her lyrics and her actual songs.
Only a few hours after The Tortured Poets Department was released, Swift revealed that it was actually a double album, called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. While I have nothing against double albums (one of my favorite albums is a double album), I do think that it is a little ridiculous that not even a full day after Swift released her new album, there were already three versions (The Tortured Poets Department, The Tortured Poets Department with Bonus Track the Manuscript, and The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology). I firmly believe that if one is going to release a double album, it should happen without all of the pomp and secrecy surrounding The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology is too long, with many songs in an entirely different musical style from tracks on the regular version that makes the full album sonically disjoined. Additionally, a lot of the songs seem remarkably similar to other Taylor Swift songs. “I Look in People’s Windows” sounded so similar to “Death by A Thousand Cuts”, “But Daddy I Love Him” is pretty much copied and pasted from “Love Story”, and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” sounds like every Reputation track. While Swift may claim “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith” in “The Tortured Poets Department”, it is clear that she desperately wants to be, and ultimately falls short.
