Listen to Bruce, Taylor!
Swift swerves with 'The Tortured Poets Department'
Diary of the Late Republic, #12
I just wish she would get married and have children.
One of the axioms of cultural criticism is that you interpret the work an artist has produced, not the work you wish she had produced. It’s a good rule, and one I’ve tried to honor in my four decades as a reviewer of various works of popular culture. But I feel compelled to say that Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, has left me impatient.
In at least one sense, that’s certainly unfair: I’ve only spent the weekend with it, and solid opinions take a while to form. (Turns out I like Midnights, which I reviewed here, less than I thought I did, while Red has now edged out 1989 as my favorite Swift album.) But I’ve heard enough to know that this is Swift in a familiar mode: lush, keyboard-driven songs in which she excavates her inner life and relationships with the sometimes-prickly air that has been discernible since at least the time of “Dear John” from Speak Now. (Really: it’s unseemly for a person who has become an industry colossus to write an autobiographical song with a title like “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” A misstep after the much more compelling “Anti-Hero.”) I will nevertheless acknowledge that however much I may or may not like these 31 songs, it is truly remarkable that amid the maelstrom of fame she has experienced in the last eighteen months—the emotional cost of which she documents in Tortured Poets—Swift has nevertheless produced a highly polished double album. Her talents are prodigious in quantity as well as overall quality, even if they are inevitably uneven.
Based on the timing, it would appear Swift wants to keep fueling her stratospheric status. Since the release of Midnights in late 2022, she has undertaken national and international tours, released a hugely successful movie based on them, and remained in the public eye thanks to her relationship with Kansas City Chief star Travis Kelce. As a fan—of TK as well as TS—it’s been fun to be along for the ride, and to share the experience with a lot of people way outside my usual demographic. But I have to imagine that it can’t have been easy for her to maintain her sanity, never mind her artistic vision, amid such circumstances.
My frame of reference here, not surprisingly, is Bruce Springsteen. In 1985, Springsteen was on top of the world. Over the course of the previous year, his album Born in the USA had sold millions and millions of copies, had spawned a half-dozen singles, and Springsteen had served (to his chagrin) as a character reference for Ronald Reagan, who cited him on the campaign trail. Springsteen had also married the actress and model, Julianne Phillips, making him catnip for the paparazzi. His 5-LP/3-CD anthology Live 1975-85 shattered sales records when it was released for Thanksgiving of 1986.
By that point, however, he had long been laying low. “I really enjoyed the success of Born in the U.S.A., but by the end of that whole thing, I just kind of felt ‘Bruced’ out,” he explained years later. “I was like ‘Whoa, enough of that.’ You end up creating this sort of icon, and eventually it oppresses you.” Springsteen was 35 then; Swift will reach that milestone in December.
When Springsteen returned in late 1987, it was with Tunnel of Love, a notably intimate album of love songs about marriage. Judging on the basis of those songs, it was a clearly troubled one (and he and Phillips would be divorced by decade’s end). But the album remains among the best in Springsteen’s voluminous catalog, and one of the best documents of adult experience in rock canon.
It seems safe to say that Swift’s fans, like Springsteen’s, are on a lifelong journey with her. There is simply no one who has captured female adolescent life with the sheer ingenuousness that she has, and she has charted a course into adulthood with charming songs like “22.” But as she ages, Swift seems more likely to look back—in “Betty,” from Folklore, the 29-year-old Swift captures high school life with stunningly moving clarity—than look forward. There’s a song on the new album, “So High School,” that casts an adult crush in jejune terms. Swift is too old, even figuratively, to be talking in terms of another song title, “But Daddy I Love Him.”
Marriage and children aren’t for everyone. And I realize it’s possible to interpret my complaint here as sexist—after all, what great song about fatherhood did Bob Dylan, who has six kids from two failed marriages, ever write? But Taylor Swift’s core demographic is people who live conventional American lives: she has been a standard-bearer for us normies. I have no right to expect, much less demand, anything of her personally or professionally. But contrary to the sentiments of her ode to childhood, “Never Grow Up,” I would be very glad to hear anything this not-quite-young woman has to say about middle age. Because it’s about time.
