Swift’s 11th studio LP, ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ released at midnight Eastern time, follows a busy period in the 34-year-old’s personal and professional spheres.
Taylor Swift has spent years warning us not to believe everything we hear about her. As the biggest star of pop music’s parasocial age, she argues that the facts of her existence are constantly warped by gossip and misinformation, which is one reason the Easter eggs and coded messages she’s long built into her work have helped create such a tight bond between her and her fans. Pay close enough attention, the thinking goes, and her art will always tell you the truth.
Except when it doesn’t.
Toward the end of her juicy new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift unloads a sparky electro-pop song called “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” In the song she essentially admits that last summer, as she was crisscrossing the country on her record-breaking (and far from finished) Eras tour — a show centered on her constantly living her best life — the singer was actually falling apart inside.
“They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it,’ and I did,” she sings over a whooshing groove that feels like it’s slowly picking up speed, “Lights, camera — bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die.” These are the makings of a very sad song, but “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic. The point isn’t that she suffered through this experience — it’s that she soldiered through it. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” she crows in her perkiest voice, explaining why in the next line: “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like a plague.”
Swift’s 11th studio LP, released at midnight Eastern time, follows a busy period in the 34-year-old’s personal and professional spheres: Beyond launching the Eras tour, which itself followed 2022’s hugely successful “Midnights” album, Swift — deep breath here — broke up with Joe Alwyn, the English actor with whom she was in a romantic relationship for more than half a decade; had a reported dalliance with Matty Healy of the 1975 that ended amid an uproar over offensive comments he made about Ice Spice; notched insane commercial numbers with re-recordings of two of her older albums; took the Eras production into movie theaters; and, oh, yeah, started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs before his team won Super Bowl LVIII in February.
Its sound pitched somewhere between the synth-soaked “Midnights” and 2020’s rootsy “Folklore,” “Tortured Poets” touches on all this, not least the split with Alwyn, whom she portrays in songs like “So Long, London” as a cold and disinterested partner.
