Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' scribed in blood-red ink.

Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' scribed in blood-red ink.

 

Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' scribed in blood-red ink.

For all its fetishization of new sounds and attitudes, pop music was born and still thrives by asking fundamental questions. For example: What do you do with a broken heart? It's a terribly familiar question. And yet romantic failure feels different every time. Its isolating sting creates a kind of obliterating obsession: my pain, my shattered illusions, my hope for healing. A broken heart is a crying baby that wants to be held, coddled and nurtured until it grows up and learns to function properly. This is just as true in the era of the one-percent glossy goddess as it was when blues queens and torch singers organized society's cry sessions. For Taylor Swift, the connection between songwriting and healing has remained steadfast ever since she debuted "Teardrops on My Guitar" 18 years ago. This enduring link is evident in her 11th album.The Tortured Poets Department, is as messy and confrontational as a good girl's work can get, with blood on the pages in a classic shade of red."

During her Lemonade era, characterized by a transformative spirit stemming from personal adversity, Taylor Swift found herself in parallel with Beyoncé, her friendly rival. While Beyoncé emphasized the importance of financial security as a form of empowerment, asserting "Your best revenge is your paper," Swift adopted a different approach. For her, the pen became her ultimate weapon. This sentiment is encapsulated in one of the initial tracks from her latest album, Tortured Poets, titled "The Manuscript." The song portrays a woman revisiting her own narrative of a tumultuous romance, highlighting Swift's affinity for storytelling. Beyond music, Swift explores various literary aspirations with this project, including screenwriting. Leading up to the album's release, Swift collaborated with Spotify to establish a mini-library at the Grove mall in Los Angeles. Here, new lyrics were meticulously inscribed in aged books and parchment, creating a setting that blended artistic expression with religious reverence. In each photograph capturing the installation, Swift's name adorns every bound volume, symbolizing her authorship not only of her music but of the world around her.

For years, Swift has been pop music's leading auteur, exploring new dimensions of confessional songwriting with her work, making it the foundation of a heavily mediatized public-private life. The standard refrain about her teasing lyrical revelations (and it's accurate on one level) is that she's all about piquing the interest of fans. But on Tortured Poets, she's tapping into a much more established and respected tradition. The use of autobiography as a sword of justice is as old as the female saints who slew abusive fathers and priests in the name of the early Christian Jesus; in our own time it has been employed, especially among women, by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard, and literary stars like Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. And, of course, by Swift's reluctant spiritual mother, Joni Mitchell.

Even amidst today's cacophony of voices in our cultural landscape, a woman breaking her silence can reverberate as revolutionary. This act of courage is a cornerstone principle within many literary circles, echoing sentiments expressed by Natalie Ginsburg in "Writing Down the Bones," a revered writing manual of the 20th century. Ginsburg articulates the cathartic power of writing from pain, aiming to transform it into strength and solace, forging a home within the pages of her own narrative. Swift's titular track on her latest album encapsulates this ethos with the line, "I think some things I never say," a seemingly casual remark that belies the profound truth of her artistic journey. Through this album, Swift delves deeper into the intimate realms of love than ever before, bravely confronting her own vulnerabilities and exposing the raw complexities of her romantic experiences. Unflinchingly, she fills the narrative gaps surrounding her highly publicized relationships, viewing this act of revelation as a form of liberation that has fortified her spirit. Swift's lyrical introspection spares no one, not even herself, as she candidly reflects on her own naiveté and desires through the lens of maturity. Despite acknowledging moments of folly, she now asserts authority over her own narrative of heartbreak, reclaiming agency over its contours and repercussions.

This also includes other people's sides of their stories. The songs on Tortured Poets, most of them mid- or uptempo ballads in the breathy style that has defined Swift's confessional style since Folklore, form a self-contained universe of private and even stolen moments inhabited by only two people: Swift and a man. With a few illuminating exceptions that deviate from the album's plot, she rarely looks beyond their interactions. The point isn't to observe the world, but to reveal the details of a sometimes shared life, to expose what others haven't seen. Tortured Poets is the culmination of a catalog full of songs in which Swift takes us into the bedrooms where men pleasured or seduced her, the bars where they charmed her, the empty playgrounds where they sat with her on swings and promised something she couldn't deliver. When she repeatedly sings that one of the most suspicious people on the album told her she was the love of her life, she's sharing something that no one else has heard. That's exactly the point. She's testifying under her own oath.

Insert the names themselves. They're important because their backstories are key to Swift's appeal; they humanise her and enhance her fame. Swift's artistry is tied to her use of celebrity, a slippery state in which a real life becomes emblematic. Like no one before, she has transformed her spotlight-illuminated daily life into a conceptual project that comments on women's freedom, artistic ambition and the place of the personal in the public sphere. As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: with her model and musician friends, with her actor/musician/athlete friends, with brands and even (cautiously) with political organisations. And with her fans, the co-creators of her celebrity.

Her songs, however, stand for themselves. They're still the primary means by which Swift, despite her unimaginable fame, insists on speaking only for herself. The listener has to strain to find the "we" in her soliloquies. There are many songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of "Down Bad" to the click of recognition in "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)" But Swift's unconcern about whether these songs speak for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album. It's the sound of her freedom.