"The Tortured Poets Department" is Taylor Swift's trip through heartbreak's agonies and triumphs
SalonTaylor Swift's ascension as pop music's head lyricist in charge didn't happen by accident. In a mega two-hour, dual album, released in two parts as "The Tortured Poets Department" and "The Anthology," Swift pens 31 different heartbreaks, triumphs and intimacies — tortured poems if you will. While Dessner's work dazzles in "The Anthology," and Antonoff's production in "Tortured Poets" lacks variety and mystery, it raises the question if the singer will ever tap other producers to work on her new music. This is where "Tortured Poets" falls, inevitably caught between Swift's bleeding bars and production that sounds like a Swift we already know. Jaded by love and her reality, she continues: I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose This place made me feel worthless Lucid dreams like electricity, the current flies through me And in my fantasies, I rise above it "The Prophecy" is a rumination of Swift's past patterns where her gentle vocals are laid over the light strumming of Dessner's acoustic guitar.