No. 15: The Tortured Fans Department

TSwift’s Turn from Pop Star to Novelist

I have listened to The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift’s new album, and I’m not sure what to do next.

This is a strange thing to say, because the obvious thing for a Swift fan is to play the album a second time and then a third and to soak in it again and again until it quilts into consciousness, like I have every album before.

But I listened to the new album only once.

Which is why I’m writing this diary.

To find out why.

Understanding storytelling in all its facets, as both artist and audience is the reason for this diary — and every lesson I learn here is tucked away into my new novel (which is as far from School for Good and Evil as TTPD is from 1989). Which makes Taylor such an endless source of joy and inspiration. She does evolution with more courage, boldness, and success than anyone ever (Madonna will argue) and that evolution is part of a larger artistic mission to be ruthlessly honest to herself and her muse.

“Try and come for my job,” she sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and the line makes me wonder. Because while she confesses to being a “pathological people-pleaser” in real life, when it comes to music, she’s gone in the opposite direction: from churning out highly-disciplined, people-pleasing pop hits to following feelings, deeper, deeper, into atonal rabbit holes, free-form poetry, and depressive, often mind-numbing, confession loops. 

I keep thinking about her well-known love for the novelist Sally Rooney. Because TTPD feels more like a Rooney novel than a Taylor Swift album.

Sally Rooney.  Photo by Ellius Grace, NYT

Both Rooney and TTPD throw off the conventions of narrative — melodic highs and lows — and instead hold characters accountable in monotones, examining their same actions again and again, no matter how thuddingly repetitive, in the hopes that clarifying every last facet of a stone will polish it to diamond.

I should note that Sally Rooney is my favorite novelist of the last decade. Less because of the plots of her stories — really, nothing happens — and more the brutal honesty and precision of language. If I ever got a tattoo, it would be from somewhere in this Rooney passage:

“His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I’m not just saying that. I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory, she will find this moment unbearably intense and she’s aware of this now, while it’s happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”

The change in perspectives from him to her; the projection of time from present to past to future past to present; the clarity of conclusion… It gets me every time. Reading a Rooney novel, for me, is this same feeling — that I am having new revelations, a beginning of something — again, again, even on my fourth or fifth re-read.

I wonder, though, if I have this reaction because Rooney’s male heroes are curiously blank. Connell in Normal People, Nick in Conversations with Friends: both are such ciphers that it’s easy to slot your own love affairs into their steads and become the swooning, lusting heroine yourself. The books are designed for vicarious emotion in their archetypal simplicity.

Joe Alwyn plays Nick, in Hulu’s adaptation of Conversations with Friends.

Taylor is more than capable of achieving the same effect. She’s done it on 10 albums before by using her memory and imagination to find the beating heart of her own stories, regardless of who these stories are about, Jake or Tom or Harry or Calvin or whoever, because who the stories are about really doesn’t matter. What matters is the transposition of earthbound life into the starry boundlessness of music. That’s what earns the hundreds, thousands of replays for me. That’s what beds a song into the soul’s jukebox.

But here’s where TTPD derails, I think.

This time, the men aren’t ciphers. We know exactly who they are. 

There’s no mystery to inhabit. There’s no room left for the listener.  

Instead, TTPD is straight-up autopsy. It’s 64% about Matt Healy, 28% about Joe Alwyn, 8% about Travis Kelce. It’s a burn book with identifiable details (i.e. a pill-popping, loud-mouthed, “tattooed golden retriever”), so we’re not finding our own portals into anthems, but instead are held prisoner to the deaths of two relationships, then a cremation by burn-book. Over and over and over, for 31 tracks, like we’re forensic detectives stuck in a time loop.

Photos from Getty Images.

Swift knows this. It’s why the imagery, the videos, the palette all invokes the process of post-mortem, but there’s also innate sterility to a post-mortem — the conscious feeling that it’s an investigation of something to be moved past — that replicates itself in the listening experience. There’s no progression to a post-mortem. No bellowed bridges or swinging from the hooks of a bop or thunderous rips from the heart. It’s tick, tick, tick of check boxes on a coroner’s report. It’s accounting. It’s dissection. And you listen, not just for the curiosity of that report (who killed who), but to feel something in your own half-dead heart, to believe in miracles, to rise things from the dead… Only it never happens. After line item #31, the accounting is over. For both the artist and you. Time to move on.

The strangest part about is that Swift notes all this herself in a remarkable piece of writing, called “The Summation,” included on the physical album. Here’s an excerpt:

At this hearing
I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department
With a summary of my findings…
Lovers spend years denying what’s ill fated
Resentment rotting away galaxies we created…

Some stars never align
And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky
Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues
Then a crash from the skylight
Bursting through
Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new…
Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips
He never even scratched the surface of me
None of them did…
And so I enter into evidence
My tarnished coat of arms
My muses, acquired like bruises
My talismans and charms
The tick, tick, tick of love bombs
My veins of pitch black ink
All’s fair in love and poetry

Photo by TAS Rights Management LLC; Beth Garrabrant.

This is the true forensic report out of TTPD, almost more than the songs, because in this, we have good old-fashioned Swiftian folklore — the tale of a deadening, listless, soul-draining long-term relationship given way to the manic, kinetic chemistry of a rebound, followed by a reckoning, an understanding of the mistakes, the poor choices that led to both, which might one day pave the way to hope.

A story we all have known and lived.

Well, almost know.

Because I added that last part about hope, which isn’t in the Summation.

I added it, because to keep listening to TTPD, hope needs to be the invisible collaborator on this album. Hope that both artist and audience must trudge through this forensic tit-for-tat, the check, check, check of the bureaucratic blame game, to get to the other side, which is open hearts and new invention and the unleashed effervescence of possibility.

Which brings me to another thread of Taylor as novelist.

In retrospect, I think her best quality as a musician might not be her songwriting, but her editing. Her albums are pruned to their absolute essentials. Songs are just beats of a bigger story, a conscious and disciplined progression, an arc that moves us through thematic mythology. We have proof of this in her Taylor’s Version re-records – look at the absolute bangers that 1989 left on the cutting room floor. “Suburban Legend”, a vault outtake, is one of my top 5 TSwift songs, ever! And yet… I wouldn’t argue for it to be on the original album. Yes, it’s a killer song. But it’s just not part of the story of 1989.

Every novelist knows this dilemma with visceral pain. I’ve had to cut full chapters out of books that I absolutely love to protect the larger work. Most chillingly, with my new novel, I threw out the first 110 pages and started from scratch. Dark days. But in a lot of ways, the beginning of a new creative era, of a big new work like a novel or an album, feels a lot like writing this entry – coughing out ideas free-form, journaling, drafting without destination.

In other words, a diary.

But a novel is not a diary, not if it wants to achieve its effect, which is to engage and entertain and inspire, and to get to that point, every page, from cover to cover, will have been mercilessly sharpened and polished and examined and turned around and held to the light, because that’s the exhausting, timeworn process of how rocks in the rough become gems.

With 31 songs on TTPD, Taylor’s given us a diary instead of an album. A willful rejection of editing. It’s bold and fearless. But what to do with a long-form diary other than to wade through it and thank the artist for baring their soul and then look for a deeper, more fulfilling source of engagement?

Anyone feel me? Tell me below. These pages are my diary… but the comments are yours.

Until next week!