A shortened version of this piece was originally published by The Columbia Chronicle on April 26, 2024.

Rather than displaying the full excellence of Taylor Swift’s talents, her latest studio album “The Tortured Poets Department” gets bogged down by nonsensical lyricism, monotonous production and an omnipresent creative rut. 

What is apparent across all 31 tracks of the album is a prioritization of quantity over quality. When the demands of the pop music market reach high levels, some artists’ output can become diluted by high-speed efforts to appease audiences. Everyone from Elvis to The Beatles, Willie Nelson to Dolly Parton has fallen victim to over-feeding the commercial market machine. In these cases, it becomes clear that the age-old saying “quality over quantity” still holds true.    

Swift’s latest LP follows 2022’s “Midnights” and is her tenth studio album overall, and ninth record released (re-recordings included) within the last five years. Her creative output has only been further heightened by the record-breaking success of her billion-dollar “Eras Tour” and re-releases of her earlier albums to reclaim ownership of her master recordings. Swift has seemed eager to deliver just about anything she can to feed her hungry audience. So it was really no surprise when her latest album was quickly followed up with an expanded “Anthology” edition with 15 additional songs just hours later.  

Listening to “The Tortured Poets Department” as a self-proclaimed Swiftie of over 10 years fills me with an unsettling poignance. Not because of the breakup tales, but because I struggle to understand what I’m missing. While the other members of Swiftienation dox critics for doing their job and reassure the internet that “Tortured Poets” is in fact the pièce de résistance to Swift’s catalog, I sit here, scratching my head and feel like I’m letting my 11-year-old self down. He would surely want me to adore this record, right? Am I missing some great big key factor to the music that’s barring me from fully enjoying the album? Is this phase of my life just not conducive to this set of Swiftian tales? Or, scariest of all, am I simply outgrowing my idol’s music? (Afterall, according to Swift’s former BFF Lorde, “all the music you loved at sixteen, you’ll grow out of.”) I sure can’t think so. 

Opening the album is “Fortnight,” a collaboration with Post Malone that follows the mid-tempo, synth-pop style first distinguished on “Midnights.” The song’s palatable, modest production follows throughout most of the album, at times pushing further into danceable bedroom pop territory with “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” and cathartic drum outbursts on “Florida!!!.” The album cascades along with a few sonic mirages that save listeners from the dizzyingly monotonous reality of lackluster synth-pop — such as the cool, head nod-worthy sounds of “Down Bad,” the sunny, quasi-country cut “But Daddy I Love Him” and the dreamy “Guilty as Sin?.” For the “Anthology” half of the album, “The Albatross” flutters with whimsical strings in the vein of her 2020 album “evermore,” the double entendre of “imgonnagetyouback” is reminiscent of Olivia Rodrigo’s “get him back!” (though Rodrigo’s execution reigns supreme) and “So High School” delivers a manageable amount of cliché atop an early-aughts sounding instrumental.

But among these standout tracks, and even throughout some of them, sleepy production and reductive lyricism overshadow Swift’s heartfelt storytelling. 

When playing the album front to back — which takes all of two hours if you include the 15 “Anthology” tracks — the songs slowly, but surely begin to fade into one another in a manner that leaves the listener more fatigued than enthralled. The record possesses little ingenuity that has not already been done prior (and better) by the singer herself. 

Subtle synth, acoustic guitar and piano comprise most of the songs in a manner that generally makes for some easy listening, but when repeated 31 times over, can’t help but feel a bit tiresome. Many of the songs sound like a hybrid between the “Midnights” synth style and the acoustic ballads of “folklore,” though the result sounds more dull than the original copy.

Really, how many times can an M1 synthesizer be used before everything starts to sound too eerily similar?

Why Swift decided to pen such to-the-point, literal lyrics when she has been writing masterly lines such as, “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest,” since she was barely of legal drinking age is challenging to understand. How we’ve somehow landed at, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist,” is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. The literal nature of many of the album’s lyrics weaken their impact upon listening. The line between easy to understand lyrical metaphors and just downright diluted, play-by-play recounting (e.g., “And my friends all smell like weed or little babies”) is thin, and the songs tend to lean toward the latter.

The life of America’s favorite sweetheart is far from uneventful — the last year of her life alone was filled with the end of a six-year relationship, a billion-dollar touring endeavor, a rumored fling with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, a new relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and a record-breaking night at this year’s Grammy Award ceremony. 

For so much action happening in her very public life, “The Tortured Poets Department” startlingly contrasts the perception of her action-packed trip around the sun through songs that sound as if she has led a quiet, gray existence. No one knows the inner workings of the singer’s life, so it would not be fair to doubt or belittle any sadness or struggle that may exist behind her superstar persona. However, if there has been personal strife, it’s not presented in a revelatory way. Swift’s artistic specialty has always been her ability to capture the vivid nature of complex emotions and experiences in life — take the kaleidoscopic entirety of her 2012 LP “Red,” for example. But on this latest set of musical narratives, this once reliable vivid encapsulation seems to have become dulled or over-exhausted. 

Given Swift’s laborious role in the pop culture landscape, it’s understandable that her pen may become less razor-sharp at times. Regardless of how cathartic it may have been for her to write these songs, they indicate that a tighter editing process could (and should) have taken place before sending them off into the world.  

One can’t help but think that Swift conjured up as much material as she could and threw it all out there in hopes of finding what sticks. In the past, at least her tales of breakups and sadness were spun into cuts that didn’t sound like she was grasping at straws to exploit every last miniscule detail of a breakup for musical material. Her eagerness to release as much music as possible is reminiscent of a long-standing occurrence in popular music. Take Elvis Presley’s endless array of soundtrack albums released throughout the 1960’s for example. Or, try the careers of both Dolly Parton and The Beatles, which both often delivered multiple LPs in a single year. Willie Nelson’s humble number of 150-plus albums also might illustrate a thing or two. 

All of these releases possess hidden gems and great songs, but it’s hard to keep up as a fan when the artists you love seem to be pulling material out of thin air. Perhaps the artists are simply overly inspired and music flows freely from their minds. More likely, they’re just trying to keep up with the demands of an ever-hungry music market and weakening their artistry in the process.

After days of mulling Swift’s album over and pushing myself to not reach for that skip button, I realized that Swift is like the friend who you love, but need breaks from every now and then. Like the friend who you go on a trip with for a week and need to detox from for a good two to three afterwards. After you spend endless hours together and are constantly interacting with them, you just need to not hear from them for a while — otherwise, you’ll start to harbor some real, genuine annoyance with them and all of their quirks. 

Perhaps more than anyone I know, I have paid my Swiftian dues — all by my own volition. I have spent an immeasurable amount of hours listening to Swift’s music, learning her lyrics, attending Swift-themed nights at clubs and have spent almost just as much money on tour tickets, CDs, LPs and more t-shirts with her face on it than I can wear in a week. But after all of that, when a 31-song musical over-exhaustion arrives in my Apple Music library, I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of burnout. 

In the time since “The Tortured Poets Department” has been released, I’ve repeatedly gone back and tried to trick myself into discovering some secret genius behind the music and have come up short. Moral of the story: Taylor, I’m tired. As much as I don’t want to be, I am. Give me some space and time to miss you, so that when you release your next 31-song anthology about whatever else you muster up as inspiration, it’ll sound more fresh and less of a plateau. 

Photo by Beth Garrabrant.