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THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY

merch concept - a patch/magnet for every track (click for full quality)

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ngl Down Bad makes me think of Bella in New Moon

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had a dream that i was interviewing joe alwyn about what he did to lose taylor, and he was like “I just wanted to be successful without my name attached to hers” and i was like “but are you successful?” and then i called him poor lol sorry joe

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the line “were you sent by someone who wanted me dead” is so painfully evocative, cause there’s just no way you would’ve hurt me like this if you hadn’t wanted me dead

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is this the end of all the endings? … come one come all it’s happening again… hand on the throttle thought i caught lightning in a bottle oh but it’s gone again… how did it end? ……… he’s got my heartbeat skipping down sixteenth avenue… i can’t find a pulse my heart won’t start anymore for you… stopped CPR after all it’s no use….. clearing the air i breathed in the smoke… six weeks of breathing clean air i still miss the smoke……. i want to teach you how forever feels… you and me forevermore… he saw forever so he smashed it up…….. your integrity makes me seem small you paint dreamscapes on the wall… when your impressionist paintings of heaven turned out to be fakes well you took me to hell too………. but i’m a fire and i’ll keep your brittle heart warm if your cascade ocean wave blues come… don’t want no other shade of blue but you… you sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days……… all’s well that ends well to end up with you… and i’ll still see it until i die you’re the loss of my life…………….

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it actually kind of blew my mind that taylor talks about thinking of matty before actually breaking up with joe so openly because she could’ve easily omitted that part, but i think she wanted it all out in the world and be free of it. chloe or sam or sophia or marcus being about how they’ve known each other for a decade and they could’ve been together if not for his issues and other people they were with, and how to get her this time, he simply just needs to confess he loved her then and loves her now. and thinking about how she’s talked about the songs being made in the last two years (not one), and then thinking about fortnight and how she talks about him constantly just being there (and him knowing about her issues with joe), and then thinking about how in guilty as sin? she talks about him sending her “downtown lights” and telling her bad thoughts are not a thing because she didn’t actually sleep with him while being in her relationship, and then in florida!!!, her singing “they said i was a cheat, i guess it must be true”… now the morality of all of this is a different topic, but she just needed a clutch to be able to leave and she lays out the story and how sinister it was that he knew about the cracks and made his way through, and her admitting that she can’t be abstained of guilt because she let it happen is just so. raw and honest.

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religion is one of the most prominent recurring themes on the album, and it has been present in some capacity for quite a few records now. taylor previously compared love to religion: her saving grace, her belief system, and a fated divine intervention (false god, cornelia street, and cruel summer are the best examples of this). ‘sacred new beginnings that became my religion’ and ‘we’d still worship this love even if it’s a false god’ are two of the defining statements about her philosophy on the lover album.

taylor doesn’t want to leave all of that behind on ttpd, at least not at the beginning. the first supernatural force she mentions is the spaceship on down bad, which she compares to a skylight of freedom in the epilogue. *something* has finally come to save her from her life of suffering. she doesn’t care if it’s a force of good at first; if anything, she’s just fine being taken away by aliens. she views this man as her destiny. it isn’t until guilty as sin? that taylor starts to ponder the moral implications of what she’s doing. is she guilty as sin for wanting to leave her previous religion and relationship behind? she comes to the conclusion that, even if she rolls the stone away and gets resurrected/redeemed, she cannot avoid the fallout. she is okay with the thought of having to wait, as long as both lovers vow to be together forever, just as she once did with someone else in false god. ‘I choose you and me religiously’ finishes the bridge of the song in a direct callback to cornelia street.

the next mention of religion has murkier imagery. she claims that she does not need the Lord’s help to save this man. she sees the halo that he has, and she can fix him herself. now that she feels free of her prior cage, she isn’t looking for divine intervention anymore. she wants control. she is their route to salvation.

when the relationship falls apart, she retreats back into the position of a believer rather than a divine figure. she compares him to a Holy Ghost who promised to save her and take her to heaven. instead, she is in hell in every sense of the word: she’s down bad and feels guilty for digging up the grave. he was a jehovah’s witness who promised that she could break free of the cage imposed by love without changing her religion altogether; she would’ve just had to switch denominations. she could still have a marriage and kids! she could still have a blue tortured poet! the man was different, but not the dreams they had together. the story of the first part of the album ends here. her faith has been broken, and she has only found any semblance of sanity by refusing to mention these belief systems altogether.

side b/the anthology blends the christian imagery of side a with goddesses, sorcerers, and prophecies. she bargains with these powers to let her have the future she wants (the prophecy). she doesn’t sound like someone believing in salvation. if anything, she feels cursed. she decides that the concept of divinely ordained timing will never work in certain relationships (‘the goddess of timing once found us beguiling / she said she was trying / peter, was she lying?’). this disdain extends onto her perception of other people’s faith (‘bet they never spared a prayer for my soul’). she does position herself as a prophet in cassandra, but even then, she admits that the role has hurt her. perhaps the pain in thank you aimee was meant to be, or perhaps she was just strong enough to build a legacy in spite of it, boulder by boulder. is she a martyr? does she want to be? or did she save herself?

the only real love song on this half of the album makes no mention of fate or any divine forces. it wasn’t meant to be. it’s not a supernatural invisible string or lightning in a bottle. she is just in love.

the album ends with the manuscript, which revisits an old story of a defining, formative heartbreak. as she sings ‘at last, she knew what the agony had been for’ while describing the legacy of her writing, she seems to revert to thinking about the purpose of trauma. the only exception is that, in this case, she is the one who found meaning in her pain by turning it into a manuscript. writing is her belief system now, and she proselytizes by telling her stories and thus giving up the manuscript.

ultimately, her belief in destiny has chewed her up and spat her out. she so desperately clung to her existing belief systems that she was fooled by a conman, which left her feeling cursed. religion is supposed to be with someone even in their darkest moments, but the album explains that taylor often felt abandoned. the only constant in her life was, well, herself. she’ll be okay, but her pen will be her saving grace.

[dearmirrorball]

i attend christmas parties from outside. how can i ever try to be better nobody ever lets me in. don't want money just someone who wants my company let it once be me. who could ever leave me darling but who could stay? i've never been a natural all i do is try. i'm alone on my own and thats all i know. fell behind all my classmates and i ended up here. to a house not a home all alone cause nobody's there where i pace in my pen and my friends found friends who care. i tuck myself in and turn my nightlife on i wish i'd never grown up. ones i loved trued to help so i ran them off and here i sit alone behind walls of regret. when my depression works the graveyard shift all of the people i've ghosted stand there in the room. i hate it here so i will go to secret gardens in my mind people need a key to get to the only one is mine. you're on your own kid you always have been.

[dearmirrorball]

I am deeply obsessed with the manuscript as the closing track of the anthology. returning to that first big life altering heartbreak, the one that inspired some of the most acclaimed and beloved work of her career, but it's a distant past now and it's almost as though it happened to someone else. and then, in the wake of all the intense loss and turbulence that the past two hours have documented, she knows what the agony was for. because just like all that now remains of that past relationship is the art that came out of it — including all too well, a song that was changed for her over the years into something beautiful and joyful — one day all that will remain of this period will be this manuscript, this album and all its feelings that eventually won't even be hers anymore but will belong to her past self and to its future listeners.

[dearmirrorball]

"we learned the right steps to different dances" is such a beautiful way to explain that nobody did anything wrong but it does not work out if you have different goals or different ideals of life, maybe sometimes things don't work out and it is nobodys fault

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Only when your girlish glow, flickers just so, do they let you know: It's hell on earth to be heavenly. Them's the breaks, they don't come gently. Clara Bow - The Tortured Poets Department (2024)

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TAYLOR SWIFT Lyric parallels in The Tortured Poets Department!

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i understand the “icdiwabh makes eras tour feel weird” mentality but also it’s important to remember that the song isn’t really about us. she’s not miserable bc of us, she’s miserable WHILE performing for us. a sea of strangers giving her their energy for a few hours (singing along to songs about her never-ending love(s) that did, in fact, end) is not a replacement or a fix for everything she went through last spring - we didn’t have the ability to “heal” her, nor should it be surprising to hear that we didn’t “heal” her. our love is unrelated to the loves she lost.

but she’s proud of herself for still giving us the shows she thinks we deserve WHILE also brokenhearted. she was entirely shattered WHILE the crowd was chanting “more,” not because of it. we gave her something she felt she could do and still do well, even when she wanted to just give up entirely, and i think that’s best case scenario

[dearmirrorball]

ok what’s your florence + the machine song. mine is rabbit heart (raise it up)<3

[dearmirrorball]

The analogy of Matty as a “forget him” pill in the Fortnight video and “I took the miracle move on drug, the effects were temporary” is the heart of it I feel. If you had to have an extremely painful surgery and could choose to go medicated or not, what would you pick? She had to end things with Joe but she couldn’t bring herself to do it for years because she knew the pain of actually losing him would be too much to bear, and along comes this person peddling that he can take away all the pain. He sells her a story about how he is the great love of her life, that he’s never forgotten her all this time, that it was supposed to be them all along. He can give her everything she can’t bear to let go of. And who wouldn’t want to believe that, when the alternative is … the love that you thought was forever just ends and there’s nothing and no one? So she does it, she takes the pill, she has the surgery, only to find he was selling not just snake oil but poison that leaves her far worse off than she was in the beginning. She feels all the pain of the surgery and the side effects of the drug in one fell swoop.

[dearmirrorball]

HOLY FUUUCCK! 314 million