Tortured Poets Department: How Taylor Swift album lyrics captured modern dating despair
For two female journalists in their 30s – who also happen to be massive Swifties – there’s a lot about Taylor Swift’s new album that rings true.
From exes who strung us along, to comfort-eating after a breakup. We’ve all been there, and pop’s biggest superstar has too.
Swift is no stranger to writing about personal subject matters. And she’s also by no means the first musician to sing about heartbreak, pain and sorrow.
But in The Tortured Poets Department, Swift pinpoints the unique 21st Century anxieties that so many of us millennials have experienced when dating.
Perhaps more than any other song on her new album, So Long, London is the real sucker punch.
“I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free,” she laments, in a track widely thought to be about her ex-partner, Joe Alwyn.
This feels like a pivotal moment in the album. A moment so raw, that you’re stopped in your tracks.
It doesn’t matter that Swift is a world-famous musician, with A-list friends and a massive billion-dollar fortune. Beneath all of that, she’s a 34-year-old woman, who understands all too well the anxieties about running out of time to find “The One”, settle down and start a family.
Rebecca Reid, a Swiftie in her early 30s, told BBC News it felt like The Tortured Poets Department could have been written for her in mind.
“With So Long, London, but honestly, almost every single song, there’s so much on there about the idea that you gave somebody your youth and that you can’t get that back,” she said.
“And that’s definitely a feeling that I really resonate with.”
In another song, Take Down Bad, Swift sings: “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym.”
Again, these are lyrics that strike a chord for many. Who hasn’t experienced the depression of a breakup, which leaves you in tears as you try to go about your everyday routine?
Other lyrics see her too depressed to get out of bed, while in Manuscripts, Swift writes about comfort-eating children’s cereal (which cereal, we found ourselves wondering).
or Saira Thwaites, who’s almost 30 and a committed Swiftie, the more she listens to the tracks, the more she can relate to them.
“Her stories are so specific, and they really sum up the numbness and emptiness of a breakup,” she says.
Even when Swift’s on stage, surrounded by adoring fans during her Eras tour – a tour so successful that it’s made her a billionaire – her grief remains in place.
“Breaking down, I hit the floor / All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting, ‘More’,” she sings on the deceitfully upbeat I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.
