Taylor Swift Reveals the Real Meaning Behind The Tortured Poets Department Songs; Taylor Swift explained the meaning of The Tortured Poets Department and provided succinct commentary on five of its tracks.
Taylor Swift thinks some things she’ll never say, but she’s explaining The Tortured Poets Department anyway.
→ Swipe to see more articles
Days after releasing her 11th studio album, the “Fortnight” singer gave some insight into some of her record’s more convoluted tracks—including the aforementioned single, “Clara Bow” and “Florida!!!”—in Amazon Music-exclusive commentary.
Users of the streaming platform can declare, “I’m a member of The Tortured Poets Department,” on their Amazon device and switch on the special feature, during which Taylor provides her insight on five songs, including the album opener featuring Post Malone.
“‘Fortnight’ is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album,” she explains.
“One of which being fatalism—longing, pining away, lost dreams. It’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death.
‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say.
It’s that kind of album.” Later, Taylor breaks down “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” a song she produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.
Taylor explains, as the title suggests, the song is about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore.”
“Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind,” she adds.
“We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that.’”
And the “Florida!!!” singer even delved into her duet with Florence Welch, a song that was actually inspired by her love of Dateline.
“People have these crimes that they commit; where do they immediately skip town and go to?
They go to Florida,” Taylor posits. “They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in.
When you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name.
I want a new life. I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ And so that was the jumping off point.”
Other songs like “Clara Bow” and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” explore the difficulties that come from life in the public eye.
As she says, Taylor wrote the latter song “alone, sitting at the piano in one of those moments when I felt bitter about just all the things we do to our artists as a society and as a culture.”
“There’s a lot about this particular concept on The Tortured Poets Department,” the 34-year-old continued.
“What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell.
We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens.”
And as for why she dedicated an entire track to a 1920s film star? Reflecting on her almost two decades of stardom, Taylor calls the song a commentary on “what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time.”
Ultimately, the track is a message to the women in the industry who forged a path for younger artists.
“That’s how we teach women to see themselves, as like, you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you,” she added. “I picked women who have done great things in the past and have been these archetypes of greatness in the entertainment industry.
Clara Bow was the first ‘it girl.’ Stevie Nicks is an icon and an incredible example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”
But that’s just the beginning of all the hidden meanings within the 14-time Grammy winner’s new album. Read on for all of the annotations on The Tortured Poets Department.
