Taylor Swift live: The Tortured Poets Department songs take aim at Matty Healy, mourn Joe Alwyn relationship

With its playful narratives and hooks like anchors, Swift’s 11th studio album is a terrific reminder of her storytelling powers, Helen Brown writes:

Along with ‘Daddy I Love Him’, ‘Do It With a Broken Heart’ addresses Swift’s public persona, in this case the need to grin-and-bear-it even as she struggles in the aftermath of a breakup.

She sings on the chorus: “’Cause I’m a real tough kid/ I can handle my shit/ They said, “Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it” And I did/ Lights, camera, bitch, smile/ Even when you wanna die/ He said he’d love me all his life/ But that life was too short/ Breaking down, I hit the floor/ All the piеces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting “More”/ I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’/ I was hitting my marks/ ‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart.”

Much was made of the fact that Swift continued on her Eras tour even after news broke that she had split from her boyfriend of six years, British actor Joe Alwyn. She also delivered flawless performances amid relentless scrutiny over her brief dalliance with The 1975’s Matty Healy, and then as she began dating Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce.

“I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art,” Swift sings. “You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”

Positive reviews coming in from publications other than The Independent, including five stars from The Times and four stars from The Guardian.

The Financial Times has gone with four stars, too.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petredis praises Swift’s lyrics on The Tortured Poets Department, writing: “Less cluttered and more conversational than those on Midnights, they return Swift to what you might call her safe space, letting a well-known ex have it in no uncertain terms. While ‘So Long, London’ appears to hymn the end of her six-year relationship to actor Joe Alwyn, the album primarily puts a shorter-lived ex in the firing line: tattooed unpopular with her fans, erratic, given to public statements cooler heads might think twice about, the figure animating many of these songs is evidently Matty Healy of the 1975, with whom Swift had a short-lived dalliance last year.

“But if we’ve been here before, it’s still hard not to be impressed by Swift’s efficiency and wit – ‘Oh, here we go again, the voices in his head,’ opens ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys’, one of a number of lines that you imagine accompanied by a roll of the eyes – or her ability to turn a celebrity boyfriend into a relatable archetype: everyone knows, or has known, someone a bit like the poser depicted in the title track or ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.’”

Fans have quickly reached the concensus that Swift’s new song “But Daddy I Love Him” is a fierce rebuke to critics of her fleeting romance with Matty Healy.

She sings: “I’d rather burn my whole life down/ Than listen to one more second of all this bitchin’ and moanin’/ I’ll tell you something ’bout my good name/ It’s mine along with all the disgrace/ I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.”

Then on the bridge: “God save the most judgmental creeps/ Who say they want what’s best for me/ Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see/ Thinking it can change the beat of my heart when he touches me/ And counteract the chemistry/ And undo the destiny/ You ain’t gotta pray for me/ Me and my wild boy/ And all of this wild joy/ If all you want is gray for me/ It’s just white noise/ It’s just my choice.”

In keeping with the literary (if ungrammatical) album title, Swift is on her most piercingly polysyllabic form here. In a year when pop music has been slammed by academics for dumbing down the youth, Swift will be charting words like “rivulets” and “litany”, as she eye-rolls at her own “teenage petulance”. She’s not claiming any grand titles for herself. On the title track she dismisses all pretensions – “You’re not Dylan Thomas/ I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel… We’re modern idiots” – before undercutting that self-awareness with a genuine plea for love and connection. Her ability to put her lines over is as compelling as ever. I defy anyone not to lean into Swift’s concisely charged storytelling.

Her conversational tone is given dramatic ballast by the mighty Florence Welch on “Florida!!!”. Drums come pounding through the soft, synth beds and the English singer howls of being “barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine/ Me and my ghosts had a hell of a time”. Welch can yowl threats where Swift’s thinner voice could ever only hiss – but that doesn’t mean Swift isn’t a woman in full command of her powers. The force she brings to “But Daddy I Love Him” is thrilling, as she lassos a few country tropes to charge her horses at online trolls. “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing,” she warns, reminding fans that her “good name” is hers to “disgrace” with a “wild boy” if she so chooses. Their “sanctimonious soliloquies” are “white noise to me”, she sings. Swift is equally uncompromising on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” – a track on which she assures listeners she is more than capable of standing up for herself. On piano ballad “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, she sneers at a lover who appeared to roar like a lion and left her with the blandest goodbye.

Read the full review here:

The poem reads, in part: “He was in love with her / Or at least she thought so / She was broken hearted / Maybe he was too / Neither of them knew,” Nicks writes.

“She was way too hot to handle / He was way too high to try…

“He really can’t answer her / He’s afraid of her / He’s hiding from her / And he knows that he’s hurting her / She tells the truth / She writes about it / She’s an informer / He’s an ex-lover…”

I imagine for a long time, fans were expecting that The Tortured Poets Department would be, for the most part, a post-mortem on Swift’s longterm relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn.

While some songs certainly do delve into that (”So Long, London,” most devastatingly), plenty of other songs have closer ties to her brief dalliance with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy.

She heaves a weary sigh at the opening of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, referring to a man in his “Jehovah’s Witness suit… who the f*** was that guy?”

“You tried to buy some pills from a friend of friends of mine / They just ghosted you,” she sings. “Now you know what it feels like…”

Swift has posted to Instagram as she releases her 11th album…

“The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure,” she wrote.

“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. “And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry. “THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT is out now.”