The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title's odd capitalization: "thanK you aIMee." ...
topThe subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title's odd capitalization: "thanK you aIMee."
top... "Poets" that - surprise! - there was a second "volume" of the album, "The Anthology," featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.
top... subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title's odd capitalization: "thanK you aIMee."
topThe subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title's odd capitalization: "thanK you aIMee."
top"I can read your mind: 'She's having the time of her life,'" Swift sings on "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, "All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting 'more.'"...
topThe subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the...
top... mind: 'She's having the time of her life,'" Swift sings on "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, "All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting 'more.'" And yet, that's exactly...
top(Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift's sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of "The Anthology.") Antonoff and Swift have...
top... tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover's "messy top-lip kiss," 30-something friends who "all smell like weed or little babies.". . It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called...
topAt times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance.
topNarcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift's most trite and head-scratching writing: "Florida," apparently, "is one hell of a drug." If you say so!
topFor all its sprawl, though, "The Tortured Poets Department" is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff's production
top... of "The Tortured Poets Department" would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.
topEven better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift's voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding,...
top... lover to more daring poets before concluding, "This ain't the Chelsea Hotel, we're modern idiots." Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics - chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter...
top... vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics - chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth.! - is strangely humanizing.
topSylvia Plath once called poetry "a tyrannical discipline," because the poet must "go so far and so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals." Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit
top... thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics - chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth.! - is strangely humanizing.
topEven better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift's voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, "This ain't the Chelsea Hotel, we're modern idiots." Many Swift...
topThere is a sonic uniformity to much of "The Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks...
top... "The Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale
top... thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.
topThere is a sonic uniformity to much of "The Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale
top... Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.
topThere is a sonic uniformity to much of "The Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable...
topThere is a sonic uniformity to much of "The Tortured Poets Department," however - gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato - that suggests their partnership has become...
top... untangle on "Midnights," an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of "The Tortured Poets Department" that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept...
topSwift's new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of "The Tortured Poets Department" are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous "But Daddy I Love Him," the "wine...
topThe villains of "The Tortured Poets Department" are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous "But Daddy I Love Him," the "wine moms" and "Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best" who cluck their tongues at our narrator's...
topThat's a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on "Midnights," an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood...
topSwift doesn't name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching "So Long, London"), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed...
top... wrenching "So Long, London"), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed "But Daddy I Love Him") and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in - ahem - football metaphors (the weightless "The Alchemy")
top... people in her life (the wild-eyed "But Daddy I Love Him") and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in - ahem - football metaphors (the weightless "The Alchemy"). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on "The Anthology," a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club...
top... boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching "So Long, London"), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed "But Daddy I Love Him") and starting fresh with someone...
top... pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like "I love you, it's ruining my life" inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift's voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing...