'The Tortured Poets Department': A track-by-track listener's guide to Taylor Swift’s 31-song double album

Taylor Swift released 'The Tortured Poets Department' on Friday, a 31-track surprise double album.

Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, a 31-track surprise double album, and she’s clearly in an emotionally evolved era.

On its surface, the album offers a pretty mellow listening experience, sounding like a marriage of the haunting depths of 2020’s “Folklore” and the synthy riffs of 2022’s Midnights.

Underneath it all, however, you’ll find a boldly vulnerable expression of the pop star poet’s innermost thoughts, and it takes some reading between the lines to understand the scope of her message – with some entries requiring a deeper dive than others. For that, we’re here to help:

In an audio clip played during iHeartRadio’s Album Premiere Special on Friday, Swift said this song “really exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album,” including “fatalism, longing, pining away, lost dreams.”

“I’ve always imagined that it took place in this, like, American town where the American Dream you thought would happen to you didn’t, right? You ended up not with the person you loved and now you have to just live with that every day, wondering what would’ve been, maybe seeing them out,” she said. “And that’s a pretty tragic concept, really. So I was just writing from that perspective.”

It looks like the album’s title track may be about The 1975 band frontman Matty Healy, to whom Swift was first linked in 2014 and then later, briefly, after her 2023 split from British actor Joe Alwyn.

Clues include the opening in which Swift sings, “You left your typewriter at my apartment.” (Healy expressed a fondness for typewriters in a 2019 interview with GQ magazine.) Honorable mentions in this track also go to Lucy and Jack – who could be Swift’s friend Lucy Dacus of the band Boygenius and Jack Antonoff, her friend and frequent collaborator – and Charlie Puth, who Swift directly name-checks in the song and declares “should be a bigger artist.”