(Yes, it’s a Taylor Swift column. The reason is simple: This is a pop column, and every artist in the industry knows better than to release a pop album the same week as Taylor Swift. What else is there to write about? Pearl Jam? UB40? Raffi?)

I don’t think of myself as a contrarian about music. But I have one consistent contrarian streak: I almost always like the Taylor Swift albums other listeners don’t, and vice versa. It happened with Reputation, and it’s happening with The Tortured Poets Department. The reason is simple: I prefer Taylor Swift’s music when it’s ambivalent, and if not emotionally raw then at least emotionally messy. I’m less of a fan of her other mode: careful, competent arrangements paired with the rubric-perfect turns of phrase of an A+ MFA student and the image-consciousness of someone so protective of her PR that her publicist has a Wikipedia article. The New Yorker, reviewing the album, criticized its lyrics for “[lacking] Swift’s signature precision.” Precision can be dull. I’m not saying that’s what makes the lyrics good – there are many clunkers, all of which have been extensively dunked on elsewhere – but I am saying that it’s why I like them. (I’m not alone in this.)

However, Reputation and The Tortured Poets Department are very different albums. The messiness of The Tortured Poets Department isn’t in the music but in the surrounding black hole of lore that has sucked everything around it into its parasocial pull. This was bound to happen. Swift has worked with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner for years now, and their production styles are solid but not showy, leaving not a whole lot to say besides lyrical analysis.

Those lyrics often have a self-referencing specificity that, as Leah Donnella of NPR wrote, makes them perfect for celeb speculation but stubbornly resistant to listeners identifying with them: “There comes a moment in a lot of Taylor Swift songs where you realize that this song is not about you. This song is about Taylor Swift.” Thing is, this isn’t necessarily how her fans feel; a lot of the Taylor Swift Discourse probably stems from the fact that online adults and media people are more likely to encounter the people deciphering clues in public on Reddit than the people soothing their heartbreak alone in their bedroom, or down bad crying at the gym alongside her. The obsession with Swiftie lore has led to a self-reinforcing cycle, leading people to fixate on fan misbehavior to a rubbernecking degree and read things into the album that aren’t actually there. In short, you all need to calm down.

Let’s start with the lyrical clues, as most have. Few artists write songs as pure thought exercises. Imagine an axis: On one end might be balladeer Diane Warren, who has insisted over several decades that despite writing hundreds of love songs, she’s never been in love herself. On the other end, some songwriters go beyond veiled references and drop their actual diaries, annotating their songs with the exact life events that inspired them. (By coincidence, or maybe because the subject matter lends itself well to the dark side of fame, “Clara Bow” shares a title with a song by Kristin Hersh’s band 50 Foot Wave; in Hersh’s memoir, she ties the song to an encounter with Old Hollywood star Betty Hutton where the actress called reaching It Girl status “the darkest, ugliest, death mask a woman is capable of wearing.”)

Taylor Swift notoriously exists on the confessional half of that axis. Her songs are often about people she has actually dated – in The Tortured Poets Department, that’s usually the 1975’s Matty Healy. But when people talk about Swift’s music, they talk about it as if she’s alone there. She is not. Beyoncé, the only musician who occupies the same tier of star; is right with her; Lemonade was dissected as if its contents were more subtweet than song. There is an entire universe of lore surrounding ‘90s alt rock, with endless newsgroup posts speculating about Tori Amos referencing Courtney Love referencing Trent Reznor and Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain. “You Oughta Know” (about Dave Coulier) and “You’re So Vain” (about Warren Beatty and others) exist. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours exists. Rap beefs exist. VH1’s Behind The Music exists!

Here are some things that don’t exist: The reference to “Mr. Steal Your Girl” in “Loml” is almost certainly not about Trey Songz, as The Cut and Slate claim. The “Sarahs and Hannahs” of “But Daddy I Love Him” miiiiight be a deep-cut insult about Biblical women without children, as some rando claims. Or it could just stem from the fact that Sarah and Hannah are in the top 10 most common on names for millennials and zoomers respectively, and are assonant in the way songwriters like. (It’s probably not a coincidence that a lot of these supposed clues originate from lyric farm Genius, which rewards users with “IQ” for contributing content.) A line like “I keep these longings locked in lowercase, inside a vault” could be a teaser for Swift’s vault of unreleased songs, and the “lowercase” part might be a hint that those songs could be from the lowercase-styled folklore and evermore. It could also be a succinct and evocative description of what those longings may feel like. Even for the most autobiographical of songwriters, not every lyric is an Easter egg.

If the hunt for hidden information has gotten out of control, on the other hand, it’s become too easy to disparage Swift’s fans for being curious about the backstories of her songs. The term “parasocial,” like “toxic” before it, has semantically drifted into an amorphous TikTok-brained term to criticize all the supposedly wrong ways people interact with other people. But we are social animals, whose brains are equipped with a sophisticated pattern-matching apparatus and wild imagination machines. Most of us, when we encounter people, wonder what their stories might be. When we catch a whiff of gossip, we want to hunt it down. People don’t like to talk about this, because it’s one or two steps away from justifying actually invasive behavior, but when people speculate about other people, they are sometimes right. (One recent musical example: Rumors circulated in the ’90s that two of the Spice Girls hooked up with each other, which seemed like wild unfounded speculation until Scary Spice said, decades later, that they were true.)

Swifties, famously, love this speculation, a phenomenon Swift called “empathetic hunger” (pejorative). And so there’s a tendency to portray them as unusually deranged with a generational sense of parasocial entitlement, and Taylor Swift as unusually willing to indulge them. This is just ahistorical. Sure, it’s rather invasive for fans to call Matty Healy a racist fuckboy they’d prefer to hear less about. But that’s nothing compared to the things said to pop stars and pop-star paramours in the early 2000s, who ended up on dozens of Tripod or Angelfire hate sites suggesting that listeners “put razors in her lipstick” or “just knock the bitch out” for the crime of dating their faves or even just existing. (No links, no names.) Yes, Taylor Swift invited a bunch of fans to her house a few years ago. This was a promotional gimmick. Artists do that. Rihanna hung out with a throng of journalists on a wild plane junket for days, a shitshow arguably worse in terms of boundaries.

For people exhausted by all the discourse, it’s tempting to imagine a parallel universe where Taylor Swift music exists untainted by Taylor Swift headlines. (I wonder whether Swift was a bit relieved that her big 2023 hit, “Cruel Summer,” was from an older album era and thus safe from speculation.) “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” could simply be a 1989 successor about gaslighting yourself into girlbossing, in true millennial form. (I’ve already seen it on Hiring TikTok.) “Florida!!!” could be the Disney adult song of all time. This, though, would also be an overcompensation. You can’t separate The Tortured Poets Department from the discourse. It’s there in the promotion, the visual presentation, and the music. Like many of Swift’s past albums, the liner notes invite fans to speculate on the music’s real-world inspirations. The lyrics video for “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” mimics the experience of clicking on spoiler tags to reveal a story.

And the album is largely told through the tropes of fandom: true-crime tales, fictional narratives consumed from outside. “The Tortured Poets Department” is about a real-ass relationship (when someone leaves their typewriter at your apartment, the situation is no longer parasocial). Swift writes about that relationship as if she is less a participant than a fan, watching a TV show or reading a book and being the one person who really gets it: “Who else decodes you?” The Manuscript” uses a similar metaphor; so does part of “The Prophecy.” “Guilty As Sin?” is about real-ass flirting that becomes the prelude to a non-parasocial emotional affair. But it’s also about the one-sided, wholly imagined, and thus parasocial affair that exists in parallel. There’s a song called, as obviously thematic as a title can possibly be, “I Look In People’s Windows”: a distant, lonely act.

Swift delves into every nuance of this fame-induced alienation and every way that it disconnects her from her own feelings. It’s the album’s biggest accomplishment, but also its ultimate downfall: a record that’s often about emotional flattening is an album that’s often emotionally flat. In addition to all the other things, “Guilty As Sin?” is a Taylor Swift song about drowning one’s heartbreak in songs by people other than Taylor Swift. Was there even romantic speculation about the Blue Nile? For some reason, I’ve never thought to check.

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CLOSING TIME