Taylor Swift has offered fans more insight into her new album The Tortured Poets Department with a new track-by-song commentary on Amazon Music. The American music superstar launched the 16-track album on Friday morning and just two hours later revealed it was a double album with an additional 15 tracks available on The Anthology edition.
Swift has since taken fans “behind the scenes” in pre-recorded messages about several of her hit songs on the new album, including lead single Fortnight with Post Malone. “Fortnight is a song that I think really showcases a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album, one of which is fatalism — longing, longing away, lost dreams,” Swift said.
There was also a music video for the song that featured American actors Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles from the classic film Dead Poets Society, and Post Malone posing as Swift’s star-crossed lover in a dystopian romance.
Following its release, fans speculated that the lyrics to Fortnight were partly about 1975 singer Matty Healy, who she was rumored to be briefly dating last year after her split from British actor Joe Alwyn. Meanwhile, Swift said that My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, another song rumored to feature Healy, is a song she wrote “alone”, describing it as written from the perspective of a child’s toy.
“Being someone’s favorite toy, until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore,” the 34-year-old said. “So many of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person at the beginning, and then suddenly they break us or they devalue us in their mind.
“We’re still sticking to ‘No no, no, you’d have seen them the first time they saw me, they’ll come back to it, they’ll come back to it.'” So it’s kind of a song about denial really so that you can live in this world where there’s still hope in a toxic broken relationship.”
While Florida!!!, the song Swift said she wrote with British group Florence + The Machine, is about “what happens when your life doesn’t fit or the choices you’ve made catch up to you”.
Swift said her song titled Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? was a song she wrote alone, sitting at the piano when she felt “bitter” about the way society treats musicians. “Being in the public eye since I was a young teenager, it has a lot to do with your perception of the world, your perception of yourself,” she said.
“The idea that the world has this sense of ownership and not just a right, but they feel they have a responsibility to judge you and to criticize you and to weigh in. That can really play with you.”
The American star said the concept of putting artists and creatives “through hell” is a running theme throughout the album. “We love to see artists in pain, often to the point that sometimes, as a society, we provoke that pain and we see what happens – so there are lines about feeling like I’ve been to the circus, that kind of metaphors, feeling like I’m like a witch in a haunted house, she said.
The last song with an opening from Swift is Clara Bow, which she describes as a “commentary on just what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time”.
She continued: “I used to sit at record companies trying to get a record deal when I was a kid. And they’d say, ‘You know, you remind us of,’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d say something derogatory about her, “But you’re this one, you’re so much better in this way or that way”. And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, as if you can be the new replacement for this woman who has done something good before you. “
Swift said she “chose women who have done amazing things” to feature in the song. She added: “Clara Bow was the first ‘it girl’. Stevie Nicks is an icon and an incredible example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”
The Tortured Poets Department became the first album in Spotify history to reach more than 300 million streams in a single day, while Swift also became the most streamed artist in a single day on the platform when her record was released on April 19, according to the streaming service.
