We knew it was going to be a big one well before Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department actually dropped. But, when the 14-time Grammy Award winner surprised fans with a whopping 31 new songs in the span of two hours, the Swifties lost their minds. Six days on, TIME Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year has smashed a litany of records, and conversation still centres around the who’s who, what, and why of each song. Will we ever know? Maybe, maybe not, because no one does music like her.
The Tortured Poets Department breaks records
Not only did Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, become Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in history in less than 12 hours after its release. The album — which dropped on Friday, April 19th, 2024 — also became the first on the platform to amass more than 300 million streams in a single day ever. Even before its release, the album’s Spotify countdown page broke the streaming service’s record for the most pre-saves in history. Apple Music also said The Tortured Poets Department had broken its record for the biggest pop album of all time by first-day streams shortly after its release.
Since then, it’s become the first album to rack up one more than billion Spotify streams in a single week, just five days after its release. The opening track, Fortnight, which features fellow artist Post Malone — broke Spotify’s record for the most streams ever garnered by one song in a day. After the first four days of release, the album has racked up 1.6 million traditional album sales, including a modern-era record of 800,000 of that in vinyl.
Surprise double album
Two hours after the 16-song record went live and everyone had time to bunker down and binge it, Swift released a surprise second instalment. She announced the project was actually a double album titled, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, with 15 additional songs — bringing the grand total to 31. There’s no question that the number was ingeniously chosen as when the digits are swapped, they reveal Swift’s lucky number.
Swift has characterised The Tortured Poets Department as a “lifeline” album and one she “really needed” to make. At her Eras Tour show in Melbourne, she said: “I have never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
The story goes that she began conceiving it immediately after submitting her previous album, Midnights, to her record label, Republic Records. She also continued working on it in secret during the US leg of The Eras Tour in 2023.
In an Instagram post announcing The Tortured Poets Department release, she said the album was “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 further 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 said.
Critics are divided
While the album has polarised critics, who found it either brilliant or uninventive, the response is widely positive. The album features two collaboration tracks, including Post Malone on the opening track, Fortnight, which was released as the lead single, and Florence + The Machine on Florida!!!.
Who and what are the songs about?
All the while, the Swifties — one of the largest, most devoted, and influential fan bases in the world — have been busy dissecting the “easter eggs” and clues littered throughout song titles and lyrics. And on a song sequence centred around the five stages of grief, we can confirm there’s more than you can poke a stick at.
From her long-term boyfriend of six years, Joe Alwyn, to fleeting old flame, Matty Healy of the 1975, her blossoming romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and all the way back to Harry Styles. However you read into it, no one but Swift actually knows who or what these songs are about. So, the question remains, will we ever really know?
Here’s who the Swifties are matching to the songs:
Matty Healy
Fortnight
The Tortured Poets Department
But Daddy I Love Him
Guilty As Sin?
I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
The Black Dog
Down Bad
Joe Alwyn
So Long, London
Fresh Out the Slammer
Florida!!!
loml
I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
How Did It End?
Travis Kelce
The Alchemy
So High School
Harry Styles
But Daddy I Love Him
This article was originally posted on So Binge.
