TTPD is a Traumatic Breakdown

The length is a feature, not a bug

My favorite review of The Tortured Poets Department is just a tweet: “this album is like tolerate it on crystal meth”

It’s perfect because it’s true.¹

Photo by Jovan Vasiljević on Unsplash

This album is chaotic and unhinged and messy and circular and it’s exactly what it is supposed to be. The content of the art is informing the medium and form it is presented in.

The newest album from Taylor Swift (released April 19, 2024), The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), is the musical representation of a spiral breakdown non-linear healing manic period (in the artist’s life, but also in the listener’s). It’s not a collection of radio-friendly singles, it’s a whole concept album, reflecting the inner turmoil of anxiety in love and work.

If you’ve been on the internet for the last week you have probably seen the NY Times review (or reactions to it) claiming that this album needs an editor. That specific review so badly missed the mark that Bloomberg published an article calling the music-critique industry is “broken.”

Thirty-one is a lot of songs to be on one album. It’s an overwhelming amount of songs if you remember the context of the artist is in the middle of an enormous world tour and just put out original music eighteen months ago. The Tortured Poets Department is messy and chaotic and circles the same motifs and revisits the same themes and that is all exactly the point.

In art, the form is part of the entire experience. In House of Leaves, the notations and different storylines are presented in the same claustrophobic, spiraling visual as the author is describing.

In TTPD, the artist is purging the traumatic and madness. She’s pouring it all out, and it still keeps coming.

It’s a manic feverish spiral.

It is deliberate excess and over-thinking and the exhaustion of swinging from one emotion to another.

This album is for the divorced girlies, who wasted too much time on the empty promises of mediocre men. This album is for the women who have learned that everything they’d been counting on was counterfeit and they need to start their whole lives over. This album is for the girls who pour pages into their journals to decode someone else’s behavior. This album is for anyone who had so much faith in another person and it was so badly destroyed that they truly cannot grasp it without overthinking, screaming, and every stage of the grief cycle—some more than once.²

Sure you can listen to one song here and there, or put it on shuffle, but the experience is in the deep dive.

She is breaking free of the expectations that have been on her for most of her life and doing whatever the fuck she wants (like, for example, releasing a double album that is long enough that critics claim it should be edited).

Even the album’s producer calls it “unhinged.”

This is deliberate. This is the point.

Complaining about the length of TTPD is just deliberate bad faith or laziness.

Sitting with all two hours of that music prompts a reaction from the listener that is fully crafted. It is sincere and earnest and raw to the point of making the listener uncomfortable.

It’s tangled and non-linear, like the processing of any heartbreak or trauma. If you as the listener is depressed and broken down after subjecting yourself to those songs for a couple hours, imagine how much worse it must have been for her to live it.

Taylor Swift knows how to put together a clean, tight, 16-song album for the masses. She has done that more than once. This is not that. This is not a collection of singles; the entire album is the experience. Her choices in making this album long and messy were deliberate, and it’s a disservice to the work’s interpretation to brush that off as “needs an editor.”

One thing about Taylor Swift is that the number 13 is very important to her (and she is very deliberate in her choices). Track 13 on TTPD is no exception. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is arguably the thesis of the entire album. Listen to “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” here. It contains lines like:

• “I’m so depressed. I act like it’s my birthday every day.” 

• “I was grinning like I’m winning. I was hitting my marks. ‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart.”

• “Breaking down, I hit the floor. All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was shouting ‘More!’”

• “Lights. Camera. Bitch. Smile. Even when you want to die.”

• “I cry a lot but I am so productive.”

• “Cause I’m miserable! And nobody even knows!”

I truly don’t know how you can listen to that song and still think that she should be holding back in any of this. She is giving her listeners permission to purge out everything that they are angry about, hurt by, and know that they will be able to come out the other side, even if they have to do hard things.

But this is not the only song with pointed falling apart, intrusive thoughts, suicidal lyrics.

Just a handful of lyrics that point to this album being a mental breakdown:

• “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.” (“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”)

• “You caged me and then you called me crazy” (“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”)

• “Guess who we ran into at the shops? Walking in circles like she was lost” (“How Did it End?”)

• “I was supposed to be sent away” (“Fortnight”)

• “I chose this cyclone with you” (“The Tortured Poets Department”)

• “Now I’m down bad crying at the gym… I might just die, it would make no difference” (“Down Bad”)

• “I look in people’s windows, like I’m some deranged weirdo” (“I Look in People’s Windows”)

• “Now I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes / And hire a priest to come and exorcise my demons” (“The Black Dog”)

I could go on. There are 31 songs, after all. 

And now we come to my entire point — The content of the art is informing the medium and form it is presented in. The experience of the song’s heartbreak and unrelenting pain is mirrored in the albums (seemingly) unrelenting length.

And music is not the only art that this can work in. 

— Muppets (yes, really). The physical embodiment of Oscar the Grouch was designed to be prickly, not soft and welcoming. The viewer gets the sense immediately upon seeing the character that he is going to be stand-offish. He doesn’t even have to say anything.

— House of Leaves * (haunted house novel by Mark Z. Danielewski). Goodness, this design of this book is claustrophobic and confusing, just like the house it is about. It’s not even offered as an ebook or audio book, because the medium the novel is presented in is so essential to its understanding.

— “Support,” a short story in my collection POISON. This short story is presented as an email, specifically to a member of the support staff. It is about the character writing the email, but as presented is a very different experience than just a straight-forward, third person POV short story. The reader feels that they are being manipulated and spoken down to as they read the email.

— Funny Games horror film. (*Spoilers*) The main character breaks the fourth wall and uses a remote to literally rewind the events of the film to re-do them differently. That could simply not happen in a book, podcast, painting or any other medium.

— Many (if not all) found footage movies. If the conceit is that whatever happened to the main characters led to their death or disappearance, finding only remnants or clues (found footage) only adds to that mystery.

You don’t have to like Taylor Swift, and you certainly don’t have to like The Tortured Poets Department. But lets please not pretend she didn’t know exactly what she was doing in presenting her songs about manic, anxiety-ridden, overthinking, exhausting heartbreak in a disjointed, spiraling, very long album³.

1. “If it's all in my head tell me now / Tell me I've got it wrong somehow / I know my love should be celebrated /But you tolerate it”

2. Me. This album is for me.

3. She’s alright now. When the album dropped, she posted the following: “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. 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. 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.”