In April of 2024, Taylor Swift released her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), which she wrote over the past two years, during her whirlwind Eras tour. While it marked a return to the emotionally charged tone of earlier albums, it also incorporated the lyrical sophistication of later ones, as well as a newfound (and arguably well-deserved) self-assurance.
For me, this album’s raw emotional power wasn’t immediately captivating. The songs seemed to blend together when I listened to it on release day, and the number of tracks (31) felt overwhelming. However, when I revisited it a week later as I recovered from an ACL reconstruction surgery, my experience was different. Wanting to focus on anything but the discomfort of my pain, my clumsy leg brace, and my inability to move, these songs provided a much-needed escape.
What struck me most on those subsequent listens was the lyrical depth of the album. During the COVID pandemic, Taylor diverged from her then-trademark style of writing autobiographical songs and instead favored narratives with invented characters and fictional emotional arcs. And in the indie-inspired albums of folklore and evermore, her storytelling capabilities reached new heights. This brings us to TTPD: the culmination of Taylor’s late lyrical mastery and early emotional power.
I Can Do It With a Broken (Knee)!
This data visualization is a celebration of the lyrics on the album. This data consists of my observations and opinions on the songs of TTPD, collected during my many (many!) listens while recovering from surgery–“research,” as I told my boyfriend, who remained unamused every time I’d walk around the apartment singing “I love you, it’s ruining my life!” As the visualization below shows, for each song, I depicted the emotions and primary theme of the lyrics, as well as how ‘singable’ I found it. These personal opinions are also complemented by more objective data, such as producer credits and songs in which Taylor Swift was the sole credited writer. But no celebration of lyrics would be complete without the lyrics themselves. As you engage with the viz, you’ll see some of the most poignant lyrics from each song, alongside my thoughts on the music. I consider this the grown-up version of doodling Taylor Swift lyrics in my notebook margins in school:
Lyrical growth: The Lucky One fulfills The Prophecy
I see The Tortured Poets Department as the older sister album to Red (2012). Both are emotional, highly personal, and cathartic, and speak to themes such as heartbreak, anger, love, and the consequences of fame. But unlike on Red, her lyrics on this album are more nuanced and sophisticated, utilizing complex imagery and rhetorical devices, and weaving stories and characters in the span of a few minutes.
On Red, “The Lucky One” tells the story of a Hollywood starlet who achieves stardom, only to realize the price of fame:
Now it’s big black cars and Riviera views
And your lover in the foyer doesn’t even know you
And your secrets end up splashed on the news front page
And they tell you that you’re lucky, but you’re so confused
‘Cause you don’t feel pretty, you just feel used
And all the young things line up to take your place
She decides to retire with her dignity to a quiet life, after which the song’s narrator appears on the scene as the shiny new “young thing.” The narrator then wonders if the lucky one was, in fact, the older star who left her life of fame and not, as the song implies up to this point, the one currently in the limelight:
They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere
Chose the rose garden over Madison Square
And it took some time, but I understand it now
‘Cause now my name is up in lights
But I think you got it right
“The Prophecy” seems to pick up the thread of this conversation a decade later in The Tortured Poets Department. In some of the album’s best lyrics, a more mature narrator bemoans the hand dealt to her by fate and fears it’s too late to change her life’s outcome. She worries that she has traded any chance at true love for fame and fortune; perhaps this is the unavoidable outcome–the prophecy–of fame.
Cards on the table,
Mine play out like fools in a fable, oh,
It was sinking in.
Slow is the quicksand,
Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand,
Oh, still I dream of him
The magical metaphor and fairytale imagery expand as the narrator goes to great lengths to find out if the prophecy can be undone:
A greater woman stays cool
But I howl like a wolf at the moon.
And I look unstable
Gathered with a coven ‘round a sorceress’ table.
A greater woman has faith,
But even statues crumble if they’re made to wait,
I’m so afraid I sealed my fate,
No sign of soulmates
The price of fame is far from a novel theme in art and poetry, but I was pleasantly surprised at the clever take in The Prophecy. TTPD was full of moments like these upon close listening to the lyrics. Including “The Prophecy,” I categorized 10 songs as most singable (3/3 singability). Of these, three others had similarly creative literary, fairytale, or childlike metaphors woven throughout–“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “Peter” (special mention of “The Albatross”, which brought me back to high school literature class). This lyrical creativity impacted which songs I considered most singable and impossible to skip.
On a scale from cheeky to snarky
Another thing that sets The Tortured Poets Department apart from her previous work is the prominence of a sassy and self-aware tone, sometimes verging on snarky. This results in some of the most singable songs in my opinion. She makes a stand against (and even takes shots at) those who have criticized and judged her, most notably in “But Daddy I Love Him”:
I’ll tell you something about my good name
It’s mine alone to disgrace
I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing
God save the most judgmental creeps
Who say they want what’s best for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see
I realized I had to make sassiness one of the main emotions I scored for each song, as it was a strongly recurring tone throughout the album. This characteristic manifested itself in different degrees, occasionally with a playful touch and sometimes with a more menacing undertone (think “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” versus “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”). The song “imgonnagetyouback” exemplifies this swing between playful sarcasm and angry shots:
Whether I’m gonna be your wife or
Gonna smash up your bike, I
Haven’t decided yet
But I’m gonna get you back
Of course, the phrase “get you back” can mean either “win your love again” or “get revenge on you”–a cheeky narrator never lets us know which it is.
But Daddy We Love Her
Overall, I found The Tortured Poets Department to be a wonderful album that may demand time to crack open, but that eventually reveals Taylor Swift’s growth as an artist and a songwriter who’s fully come into her own, doing it not for the critics, but for the love of her craft. Hopefully, this visualization is a worthy depiction of such an album.
Kelsey Nanan
Kelsey Nananis a data visualization developer from Trinidad and Tobago. She is currently freelancing and was previously part of McKinsey and Company’s Data Visualization Lab. She became passionate about data viz and open data while receiving her M.S. in Urban Science at New York University. In addition to listening to Taylor Swift and creating interfaces that are fun and intuitive to explore, Kelsey loves yoga, baking and Shaking It Off.
