Taylor Swift’s new album is exhausting

00:00 05:11

Graeme Thomson has narrated this article for you to listen to.

How to explain the supercharged star power of Taylor Swift? An undeniably gifted artist, Swift’s albums 1989, Folklore and Evermore, in particular, are excellent. She has written a battery of terrific pop songs. She is a generous and skilled performer. To suggest she is overrated is not an insult, therefore, but simply a comment on the absurd critical mass of her popularity, in which every lyric, scrap of artwork, cultural reference and personal tit-bit is weighted with a monumental significance which, it is becoming apparent, does her work few favours.

Anybody listening to Swift’s new album without prior knowledge of the layers of gossipy context surrounding it might well wonder what all the fuss was about. There are perhaps half a dozen decent pop songs, a couple of pleasant piano ballads, a lot of mid-tempo, middling meandering – and words, words, words, crammed into every cranny like a chainsaw running through
a dictionary.

The Tortured Poets Department is a break-up(s) album. It is, in some ways, a knowing exploration of what Swift terms the ‘teenage petulance’ of romantic despair, deliberately overplaying emotions for dramatic and sometimes comic effect; why else would a thirtysomething billionaire write a song called ‘But Daddy I Love Him’? It is also a jab at all those cool, sad boys cradling guitars and overly groomed misery.

Yet, my goodness, it is exhausting. While the commercially astute but artistically flawed plan to re-record every album she made for her previous label, Big Red Machine, continues apace, The Tortured Poets Department confirms the suspicion that Swift has no one around her to advise that less can be more. The album runs to 16 tracks, not counting another 15 on the ‘surprise’ second volume (which only came as a surprise to anyone unaware of Swift’s manic release schedule over the past few years).