Taylor Swift, Time’s 2023 Person of the Year and pop sensation who is the top artist on Billboard’s charts, recently released a new album, titled The Tortured Poets Department. The album originally consisted of 16 songs, the lead single being “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)” among the other immediate popular ones.
“My favorite song on the album was ‘But Daddy I Love Him.’ It (the album) definitely feels a little different than her other albums, but not in a bad way,” sophomore Sam Grau said.
Grau doesn’t regularly listen to Swift but stated that he still enjoyed the uniqueness of the new album. Many “swifties”—the self-proclaimed name for her fans—were surprised when, after many signs from Swift of the number two, she dropped a whole additional 15 songs at 2 am after the midnight release and titled the extended version The Anthology.
“I was a little overwhelmed at first because there were so many songs that kind of meshed together in my brain. I like it much better now that I’ve processed all the songs,” sophomore Chloe Leviton said.
Although The Anthology is not available on vinyl, the original album comes in four variants, each featuring one different song from the extended version (either “The Manuscript,” “The Bolter,” “The Albatross,” or “The Black Dog”). After its release and sudden extension to a full 31 songs, many swifties immediately began comparing it to other albums of hers as a form of evaluation.
“Lyrically, the album is a mix of 1989 and folklore, and sonically, it feels like an extension of Midnights with a more mature tie-in to her country roots,” junior Dhruv Ajit said.
Despite being one of her only albums that doesn’t have very many “pop radio” hits, with the exception of evermore and folklore, the album encountered immediate and great success; all 31 songs charted on the Billboard Hot 100™ list, 14 of which took over all the top spots. It also managed to sell 859,000 vinyl copies within its first week and garnered over one billion streams in that same amount of time.
Although there has been controversy over the topics addressed in this new album, especially in songs such as “thanK you aIMee,” which allegedly references Kim Kardashian as seen in the capital letters of the song that spell K-I-M, swifties are still profuse in their emphasis of one universally true fact that makes Swift’s music so popular—her relatable and eloquent songwriting.
“She explores themes such as flaws and confrontation which are decreasingly present in modern music. It can be quite verbose and even convoluted at times. However, I think this adds to its appeal and intricacy because nothing is redacted and nothing is sugar-coated—it’s a blunt picture of Swift’s mind,” Ajit said.
