2024-04-24 06:19:57
American singer Taylor Swift surprised fans on Friday by announcing that her long-awaited record The Tortured Poets Department is actually a double album. The music industry’s biggest star today released his 16-track eleventh studio album at the stroke of midnight on Friday. Two hours later, she unexpectedly threw in another 15 songs.
“Over the past two years, I’ve written so much anguished poetry that I wanted to share it with you,” the artist explained on Instagram. The name The Tortured Poets Department can be translated as The Tortured Poets Department.
As expected, the response is extraordinary. Spotify streaming service on Saturday she informed, that the new song broke the record and became the most streamed album in a single day. It took her less than 12 hours to reach the top spot.
The 34-year-old American singer, who last released the Midnights album in 2022 and was already listed among the dollar billionaires by Forbes magazine for the first time earlier this month, has been rewriting one record after another in recent years. The month before last, she already won her fourth Grammy for album of the year, which no one had achieved before. Already last year, the musician, whom Time magazine declared the personality of the year, surpassed Elton John’s record in the number of tickets sold for one tour with her The Eras Tour concert series. It continues in Paris next month.
The release of the new album has now caught the attention of ticket holders as well, who are looking forward to more songs being added to the repertoire. The concerts, at which the singer recapitulates her ten albums to date, now last over three hours.
Most of the songs on the new double album revolve around unrequited love. They reflect “the events, opinions and feelings of a fleeting and fatalistic moment that was as wonderful as it was sad,” Taylor Swift wrote on Instagram, where she is followed by 283 million people.
“Only when we tell our saddest story can we begin to free ourselves from it,” says Taylor Swift. | Photo: Beth Garrabrant
She added that she had already closed this period of her life. “When the wounds are healed, there is no need to take revenge and settle accounts. Especially when it turns out after a while that a lot of the injuries were self-inflicted,” she said. “Only when we tell our saddest story can we begin to free ourselves from it,” she indicated that the project was therapeutic for her.
Fans and the media are now speculating whether Taylor Swift is making amends with former lovers through new songs. According to the British BBC, for example, it can be inferred that the song So Long, London is about the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom the singer had a relationship for six years. She even moved to London to be with him, and Alwyn was credited as a co-writer on her albums Folklore and Midnights under the pseudonym William Bowery. They broke up in April 2023. Alwyn’s spokesperson would not comment on the track.
Another song called But Daddy I Love Him seems to comment on her only denied, never confirmed relationship with Matty Healy, the frontman of the British band The 1975, adds the BBC. Healy has yet to comment on the song either.
Because of the release of the album, many fans of the singer, who are called Swifties in English, stayed up all night on Friday night. They wanted to be among the first to play the songs on streaming platforms. “I’ve heard a few things so far and I’m obsessed. Taylor, thank you so much,” X listener Nikki wrote on the social network.
Others headed to stores to buy the record on CD or vinyl. Fifty-nine-year-old Mike Batt co-owns the Silver Platters music store in Seattle, USA. As soon as he opened on Friday morning, he was already faced with an onslaught of customers asking for the new Taylor Swift.
Rapper Post Malone makes a guest appearance on Taylor Swift’s new single Fortnight. Photo: Beth Garrabrant | Video: Republic Records
“What’s interesting about her is that she’s not a quickie. She started out with country and gradually developed into a writer who is closer to pop,” Batt recalls, noting that the singer signed her first record deal as a fourteen-year-old in 2004.
At that time, she was referred to as an interpreter of acoustic country pop. Two years later, her debut record featured acoustic guitars, banjo, pedal steel guitar, violin or dobro, a type of resophonic guitar.
Since then, the musician has come a long way through stadium pop-music with electronic elements, through two intimate recordings during the pandemic and a stage where she re-recorded her first albums due to legal disputes, to now, where she is simply the biggest music star in the world.
According to the New York Times, the news shows that while Taylor Swift has had one success after another in recent years, her personal life has been rocking. The record does not follow the character studies from the pandemic titles Folklore and Evermore, which had a chamber mood closer to folk. On the double album The Tortured Poets Department, she returns to what she’s always done best: autobiographical, often snarky song stories about broken hearts that are full of detail and autobiographical references.
Aaron Dessner from the band The National once again took part in the album, just like on the pandemic ones, but judging by the sound and the frequent use of synthesizers and drum machines, producer Jack Antonoff had the decisive say. The singer has been working with him since the breakthrough recording called 1989, released in 2014.
According to the British newspaper Guardian, her new effort oscillates precisely between opulent stadium pop-rock following the sound of the 80s of the last century, which Taylor Swift developed on the album 1989, and more intimate recent recordings. There are also references to her country past, such as slide guitar in the new song I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) or violin in the song But Daddy I Love Him. In several places, it seems as if Taylor Swift is deliberately holding back and avoiding first-plan gestures. Even the guests, singer Florence Welch and rapper Post Malone, do not draw too much attention to each other.
The Guardian states that Taylor Swift has reached an apparently historically unprecedented position in world pop culture. “It’s hard to find a comparison to the situation when the American presidential election can be decided by which candidate to support, and when the Singaporean prime minister is arguing with his Thai counterpart about which country will have exclusive rights to the South Asian part of her tour,” the journalist recalls the situation from the beginning last month.
The Thai prime minister announced at the time that Singapore had paid the singer three million dollars for every concert there, in order to boost tourism, on the condition that she would not perform in any other country in South Asia, not even in neighboring Thailand. Singapore’s Ministry of Culture responded that the amount was not “that high”, but did not want to specify it.
With the track So Long, London from her new album, singer Taylor Swift may be commenting on her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. Photo: Beth Garrabrant | Video: Republic Records