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Yes, this almost-fifty-year-old stayed up until midnight last Thursday to get a first listen of Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album release, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD). And I was still up when Taylor surprised everyone by releasing 15 more tracks at 2:00 a.m., too much poetry to be contained by a single album.
This is the first Taylor Swift album that I have participated in the launch of, and I had no idea what to expect. She released no singles leading up to the final release, and really only started unveiling cryptic puzzles a week before the launch date. Mysterious QR codes began popping up in cities across the globe, and millions of fans made TikToks trying to decipher the clues she had hidden in the library popup her team had set up at The Grove in LA.
After all that, all that was left was release night. And what a release night it was. Here are just a few of the jaw-dropping milestones the album has already hit, and it hasn’t even been a week yet:
More than 200 million streams in a single day, making it the most streamed album in a single day in Spotify history.
The top nine songs today on Apple Music’s top 100 are all from TTPD (with just a single song from Drake coming in at number 10, followed by 12 more TTPD songs).
Sold 1.4 million copies in traditional album sales in its first day, no small feat in this era of streaming music.
These are massive numbers, especially when you realize how fractured our media landscape is now. But given the massive following Taylor Swift has amassed, this isn’t surprising to me. Some tepid reviews from some legacy outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times hasn’t stopped hundreds of millions of her fans, including myself, from drowning ourselves in the overflow of pain, introspection, and newfound love Swift has spilled with gallons of black ink for her new album.
I’ve listened to it multiple times at this point, and I’m still coming to terms with the emotion-filled trap doors, escaped asylums, back rooms, and labyrinths that play out in her lyrics. So far, here are a few of the ones that have me enthralled (although this list grows and changes with each listen):
How Did It End? A simple piano refrain underlies the pain she paints of friends (and the millions of people and tabloids across the world that track her relationships breathlessly) asking her such a seemingly simple question at the end of a love affair. Do people really want to know about her feelings (how the death rattle breathing/silenced as the soul was leaving), or do they just want to know how it ends? It’s the same morbid curiosity and gossip that accompanies the beginning of a relationship; think about the twist she makes to the traditional children’s rhyme about catching people kissing in a tree (My beloved ghost and me/Sitting in a tree D-Y-I-N-G).
So Long, London. I don’t care about who this song is about, and I find the fervor over trying to determine which song is a about which person sad and exhausting. To me, the beauty of this song, and all of her songs about love and heartbreak, is how perfectly and painfully she captures the universal emotion of heartbreak. The song starts off with echoes of the chorus (So Long, London) made to almost sound like wedding bells. As she takes you through the long and weary journey through the tragedy (I’m broken every time when her voice breaks down a beat on the word “free” in the phrase And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free), those bells fade and the sad words of “so long London” are the only echoes that you hear at the end, whispering over two graves, and not a wedding altar at all. Beautiful.
I Can Do It with a Broken Heart. Lest you think that all of the songs are sad relationship dirges, along comes the pop beats of this song. But don’t start dancing with wild abandon just yet. The song is all about performing and still putting on your best face even though you’re in the worst of your darkest days. The chorus (I cry a lot, but I’m productive, it’s an art) has become an anthem for women everywhere on TikTok who play the line as they talk about being a mother, going to work, doing the hardest things and putting on a happy face even though they’re dying inside. It’s also a comment on how she performs her heart out to tens of thousands of fans who shout “MORE!” Why does it seem like giving your all is never enough?
Big sigh here. I could write pages and pages of bullets about so many more songs. I’ve not been a Swiftie for long, but this is definitely one of my favorite albums of hers. It’s mature and blistering insight into her life as a celebrity but also her life as a woman. A wonderful, wonderful album that I’ll be listening to on repeat for a long time.