Taylor Swift reveals inspiration and meaning behind song lyrics on new album
The Tortured Poets Department became the first album in Spotify history to reach more than 300 million streams in a single day.
Taylor Swift has offered fans more insight into her new album The Tortured Poets Department with a new track-by-track commentary on Amazon Music.
The US music superstar launched the 16-song album on Friday morning and just two hours later revealed it was a double album with 15 more songs available on The Anthology edition.
Swift has since taken fans “behind-the-scenes” in pre-recorded messages about several of her hit tracks on the new album, including lead single Fortnight featuring Post Malone.
“Fortnight is a song that I think really exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album, one of which being fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams,” Swift said.
There was also a music video for the song which featured US actors Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles from the classic film Dead Poets Society, and Post Malone posing as the star-crossed lover of Swift set in a dystopian romance.
“I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death,” Swift said.
“I love you, it’s ruining my life. These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say but it’s that kind of album.”
After its release, fans speculated that the lyrics to Fortnight were in part about The 1975 singer Matty Healy, whom she was rumoured to be dating briefly last year following her split from British actor Joe Alwyn.
Meanwhile Swift said My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys, another song rumoured to be about Healy, is a track she wrote “alone”, describing it as being written from the perspective of a child’s toy.
“Being somebody’s favourite toy, until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore,” the 34-year-old said.
“Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind.
“We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no, you should’ve seen them the first time they saw me, they’ll come back to that, they’ll get back to that’.
“So its kind of a song about denial really so that you can live in this world where there is still hope for a toxic broken relationship.”
While Florida!!!, the song Swift said she wrote with British group Florence + The Machine, is about “what happens when your life doesn’t fit or the choices you’ve made catch up to you”.
“I’m always watching (US television show) Dateline, people have these crimes that they commit, where they immediately skip town and go to, they go to Florida.
“They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. And I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.
“And so that was the jumping off point behind where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida.”
Swift said her track titled Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? was a song she wrote alone, sitting at the piano when she felt “bitter” about the way society treats musicians.
“Being in the public eye since I was a young teenager, there’s a lot that that does to your perception of the world, your perception of yourself,” she said.
“The idea that the world has this sense of ownership and not just a right, but they feel they have a responsibility to judge you and to critique you and to weigh in. That can really toy with you.”
The US star said the concept of putting artists and creatives “through hell” is a consistent theme throughout the album.
“We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where sometimes, as a society, we provoke that pain and we watch what happens – so there’s lines about feeling like I’ve been in the circus, those kind of metaphors, feeling like I’m sort of like a witch in a haunted house,” she said.
The final song with an introduction from Swift is Clara Bow, which she describes as a “commentary on just what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time”.
She continued: “I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid. And they’d say, ‘You know, you remind us of’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her, ‘But you’re this, you’re so much better in this way or that way’.
“And that’s how we kind of teach women to see themselves, as like you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you.”
Swift said she “picked women who have done great things” to appear in the song.
She added: “Clara Bow was the first ‘it girl’. Stevie Nicks is an icon and an incredible example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”
The Tortured Poets Department became the first album in Spotify history to reach more than 300 million streams in a single day, while Swift also became the most-streamed artist in a single day on the platform when her record was released on April 19, according to the streaming service.
