Switched on Pop - Taylor Swift's Literary Era

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift's 11th studio album, finds the songwriter in the world of literature. She interweaves personal romance with mythical creation and quotations from high and low culture: Genesis, Peter Pan and even Playstation. Despite calling herself a "modern idiot," less-than-subtle nods to Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, and Patti Smith reveal the artist’s literary aspirations and “legendary” status. The full length Anthology version contains a bookshelf of many genres: pulp fiction, diary entries, period pieces, epic poems, and her very own genre, Taylor Swift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched-on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, we have new Taylor Swift, a brand new record, The Tortured Poets Department. The anthology, a two-disc, two-hour-long album. Yeah.

Right. This is not just an album. It's a double album. It's an anthology. It's 16 tracks and then another 15 tracks. Yeah. And if I had to pick... one thing to kind of sum up this massive sprawling anthology.

It's this. On this album, we find Taylor Swift in her literary era. Hmm. What do you mean? Let's go right to this title song, Charlie, Tortured Poets Department. I laughed in your face and said,

you're not Dylan Thomas. I'm not Paddy Sman. This ain't the Chelsea Hotel, my modern idiots. And who... I laughed in your face and said, you're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patty Smith, this ain't the Chelsea Hotel, we're modern idiots.

So comparing herself to famous poets and songwriters, but also almost using it as a foil to say, I'm not them. Right, right. I realize I'm playing this excerpt, which defies the thesis that I just laid out at the top of this. This is Taylor Swift saying, I'm not Dylan Thomas.

I'm not. Patty Smith, and yet I think she protests too much. Oh, she does protest. Dylan Thomas, do not go gentle to that night. Patty Smith, you said, you described her as musician, but she's also a writer, a memoirist, you know, the Chelsea Hotel, the famous New York institution where many literary, luminary stayed. Right, right, right.

And I think despite this sort of tongue-in-cheek jab at herself as a modern idiot, I do think this is her aspiration is to be one of these literary luminaries. I think, Charlie, she is the tortured poet. Oh, she is the tortured poet. She is the tortured poet. She is the professor in the manuscript. Big reveal. Sorry, spoilers.

The final song on the album is called The Manuscript. She talks about a professor, maybe an allusion to the famous character played by Robin Williams in the Dead Poet Society. Like scenes of a show, the professor, said to write what you know looking backward, might be the only way. So she's taking on this professorial writer character. Well, unlike Taylor Swift, Charlie, you have no literary bent. You just gave away the ending before we even got to the beginning. But let me try and salvage this. Okay.

Why is literature important to Taylor Swift? I think we get maybe some insight into that in the song. I hate it here. 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. I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child. No midside city hopes and small town fears.

We'll go to Secret Gardens in my mind. people need a key to get to the only one is mine i read about it in a book when i was a precocious child perhaps the power of words is the power to transport you somewhere other than where you are right to somewhere safe somewhere comforting somewhere that only you know i i don't know but i can imagine being one of the most scrutinized people on planet earth that being able to retreat to a fortress of words could be a very necessary and sort of self-sustaining process. And I feel like in many ways that's what's being celebrated throughout this album. People will tell you otherwise, Charlie.

People will say, no, the song is about this figure in her life, this friend, this lover, and perhaps that's true to a degree as well. But I actually think it's the power of fiction that is what's being celebrated here. Okay. So you're saying she has entered her literary era. Yes, I mean, I don't know if the next tour is going to be her in a massive arena at like a writing desk with a quill and a parchment or something. I can't speak to the sort of stage spectacle of how this will play out. But I think as you go through this album, Tortured Poets, excuse me, anthology, tortured poets department.

That's a very poetic term in itself, Charlie, anthology. We find almost different literary genres that she's playing with. And these will range from, I think, very well-established ones to ones that are totally her own. So if you're persuaded by this literary era theory, maybe we can run through some of the different literary genres that appear throughout this massive sprawling two-hour-plus opus. I really hope that we get some young adult sci-fi. Well, you joke. And yet I feel like some lunar landscapes of the moment. mind might unveil themselves as we go through. Okay, I'm excited. Where do we start? There's so much

going on here. We won't be able to cover it all, but I want to start with my favorite genre, the genre that speaks to me. What's that? The genre that I grew up with, because my dad is a novelist, and he wrote three incredible detective novels. I'm talking about the noir. Pulp, Charlie. I'm talking about exactly, noir, pulp, crime. Yeah. The shady. side of life, you know? There's some really good ones here, kind of also in the style of like country murder ballads. So what should we listen to?

Well, maybe we start with fresh out the slammer. This sounds like something that a hard-boiled detective in the 50s would utter while like, you know, inhaling a unfiltered marble red or something. Yeah. Let's hear it. Okay.

A blend of some kind of crime story plus romance once I get out of prison I know who I'm going to call yeah I mean to be clear I think it's easy to read the song as a metaphor for like for exiting a destructive relationship and entering a more hopeful new one I think that's what this you know central metaphor of leaving prison is about okay but the way it's delivered I mean fresh out the slam again this sounds like something that, you know, a Dick Tracy criminal would say.

Fresh out the slamma. Yeah, exactly. And here's the biggest pop star of our era using it. I think one thing I like by this album is that Swift is kind of unafraid to play with these cliches and these literary tropes and try to infuse them with some kind of new meaning. Yeah, I hear that. And I feel like on this song, that message is supported by a guitar tone that is full of kind of kind of,

kind of almost cartoonish bluster and like old west showdown kind of terror it's like a spaghetti western totally you're our resident guitarist what what's going what's producing that kind of twangy tone old style single coil guitar probably a telecaster associated with country playing really close to the bridge, so it gets really bright and twangy. And then through a reverberant guitar amp with a lot of spring reverb and tremolo, which gives it that whoa, whoa, whoa, kind of effect. The credits tell us that former Switch on Pop guest Jack Antonoff is the guitar player on this. So I like to think of him sort of imagining maybe a discussion with Taylor Swift.

Like, what does this song need? It needs this atmospheric guitar that will really set the scene. Again, to me, it's, it's pulp. It's exaggerated. It's playful. But it also might have a deeper meaning. Well, while we're talking about crime novels, can we talk about the other most ridiculous title on the album, Florida?

Florida. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Right. Florida is an amazing a town you're just a guest in. So you work your life away just to pay for a time shared down in destined. Florida. Florida is an amazing place in the popular imagination.

It's a place where the Florida man is who commits all kinds of bizarre crimes and mishaps. It's the place that endless people go for saving money on their taxes when they retire. And of course, it's a destination vacation land where the governor is in a constant culture war with Disney. Florida is everything. A literal and figurative swamp. No shade to the people of Florida. I'm glad you thought of this song too, Charlie,

because to me, this is the other pulpy moment on the album. And actually, these two songs are right next to each other, fresh out the slammer in Florida, exclamation point, exclamation point. And we get some really pulpy evocative language when we get to the third verse of this track. Okay, so I did my best, too late to rest, all of the bodies that have ever been on my body and in my mind, they sink into the swamp. Is that a bad thing to say in a song? Okay, so we have the wonderful Florence Welsh duet with Taylor Swift. Florence actually introduces her verse earlier with the hurricane with my name when it came, which is great because there was a famous hurricane Florence.

I know, right, which of course Florida is the place for hurricanes hit. Yeah, it's very good. She's singing about laying bodies to rest that have been on her body and putting them into the swamp. And so, again, maybe a metaphor about relationships, but using the framework of crime. First of all, the blend of Taylor Swift and Florence Welch's voice on this track is like one of the best things on this whole anthology to me. I love hearing Taylor's sort of very, very controlled and almost like vibrato-less timbre with Florence Welch's much more kind of dramatic and sweeping and expressive and heavily vibratoed timbre. The way those two kind of play off against each other, works really well for this song

because they're almost like accomplices or something. And it's like maybe like a Thelman-Louise kind of vibe. You know, they're very different, but they're allied in this common mission to sink the bodies in a swamp. Also, maybe shades of no body, no crime from Evermore. Yeah, with the high sisters. Another, yeah, murder ballads.

Right. Yet another read of this is that it's impossible for me not to summon the images of illegal presidential documents being hidden in Florida. Which is maybe absurd, but there is another song on the album where she talks about a famous spray-tanned person. Most certainly it's about her beef with Kim Kardashian, but you could imagine a spray-tanned politician who Taylor has had. had trouble criticizing in the past. There's a bronze, spray tan statue of you. My friend Abby has a theory that all of the album lover was about the former president. We don't need to go down that rabbit hole, but it does bring up this image of like,

there's a lot of people who commit serious crimes in Florida. Well, you know, ultimately we hear what we want to hear in these Taylor Swift songs. And I mean, and she acknowledges that, you know, on mirror ball, for instance, on an earlier out. We see what we want to see in these songs. Oh, that's cool. You know, on the song, Who's Afraid of Little Old Me? She says something very similar to Mirrorball. Putting our cardics into all of my song.

And that's why you still sing it all. We're all just hallucinating whatever it is that we want to see in her music. Okay. Moving from the literary genre of hard-boiled pulp novels, novels, I feel like we can... Turn the page. Oh, I said like what you did there. To the world of the teenage diary entry.

Yeah. And I say this in part because Swift herself has sort of referenced this. In a speech accepting a songwriting award, she described how she sees herself as using different pens to write different songs. And one of the pen she uses is this colorful gel pen that is maybe the pen that the pen that she uses when she's like accessing her her own childhood and and her own inner kid I guess and and I feel like we hear that gel pen on a couple of these songs for instance down bad now I'm down bad crying at the gym everything comes out teenage petulance

fuck it if I can't have him I might just die when make no this is a great example of some kind of musical transference between her and her younger fans swift is known to have been practicing for this giant errors tour that she's been embarking on by running on the treadmill, singing her songs, because that's basically what it is to be on stage doing all these dance moves and singing. And so using this image of running at the gym. Crying at the gym, while on the treadmill, with this sort of teenage petulance, which is such a... Yeah. That sings really well.

Teenage petulance. I like that. I cry at the gym, but for very different reasons. Just because I'm at the gym. And that depresses me. And so for her, it's a very specific place that she might be writing from with her own gel pen. But I think for any teenager who might be in high school,

they might have that same feeling of like being at the gym and that person who they're really in love with us over there doing the weights and they're not paying attention to them. I feel like that's the kind of teenage petulance that she's accessing in this song. So it's very appropriate. You mentioned high school. Oh, yeah.

I feel like that means we should listen to another one of these diaristic, literary songs from the anthology and appropriately it's so high school. I've never heard Aristotle and Grand Theft Auto in the same line. That's a great rhyme. That's a good stanza. That is so high school, right? You're supposed to be reading your Aristotle, but actually

you're playing Grand Theft Auto. Not to mention spin the bottle. So it's like, I mean, these five lines are like a tour through all of the high lows of that sort of high school experience. That's really funny. And if you're going to reference a franchise, I guess Grand Theft Auto is appropriate because it is one of those video game franchises

from like 20 years ago that still exists today. So it will speak to multiple generations. Yeah. Where are you on that divide, Charlie? Are you on that side of Aristotle? Oh, I was... Grand Theft Auto or spin the bottle. Those are your three.

Those are basically the three kinds of people you can be in high school. I mean, it's embarrassing. You know which one. Aristotle. I did my heart. Wasn't spinning the bottle. Obviously, we're here doing a literary analysis of the latest Taylor Swift album.

That shouldn't be a surprise. No, no. Wow. What a fun moment. I feel like you're a little bit defying your own thesis about this being a work of fiction. You know, there are so many songs where if you want, you can read into all of her relationships, which the internet is want to do. Right? She famously broke up with a six-year relationship with Joelle and the actor.

She briefly dated Matt Healy, who her fans were up in arms about. He's from the band, 1975. Who the hell was that guy? Of course, she's now dating Travis Kelsey, the famous football player. And if you want to examine her songs for clues about which boy is she writing about, They're all over the place. It's in there. I don't know.

Is this a work of fiction? Or is this? What do you call this? I see what you mean. It could be a Roman Aclay, perhaps. What is that? I think in the French, that would be a novel with a key that is like all the identities of the people are mapped to people in real life.

And the audience for the book would sort of tacitly understand who. each of those were. Although, didn't Swift just tell us that only she holds the key to her literary world? She did. Maybe to play devil's advocate to my own counter argument, all literature draws from real life. And the blending of fact and fiction is often where the delight is. I think so, right. That's interesting.

Like, is the tattooed golden retriever of tortured Poets Department, Maddie Healey, who you mentioned from the 1975. Five. Possibly, probably. Will I probably always think of him that way for the rest of my life. Whether or not it's accurate, yes. That is the power of fiction and a well-turned phrase, right? Sure. Right. But that's also what it is. It's like, it's just. a well-turned phrase. Or maybe you don't like that line. I think this specific line has gone under the microscope on Reddit. Many are not pleased with it. But sometimes you just find the words as a songwriter. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, and that kind of is like this thing, which I've gone through, and what people might know me for and what people might imagine it to be in their own life. I love that you're bringing up this tension because when we get to the end of our next literary

category, I feel like that tension is going to boil over. And the impossibility of sustaining both the persona of Taylor Swift and the actual person is going to prove untenable. But before we get there, let's introduce this final genre, which I'll call the period genre, right? Who doesn't love a good period piece, Charlie? You know, flowing blouses, ripped bodices, swash, swash, buckling swords, you know, all that. Right. Let's go to one of these period pieces, but daddy, I love him. I want to hear the course of this.

This feels like a updated version of her song Love Story, where she's telling the Romeo and Juliet story, and there is the rush to the dad to talk about the relationship. Yeah. I picture this transpiring in some sort of like. prairie setting, maybe even like a like a Mennonite community or something. I think maybe like a Jane Austen, you know, like I feel like we have like Elizabeth Bennett

running through the fields. I found my Darcy. That's good. I like that. I like that. Now, you know, her parents obviously were pretty supportive in the end. At least her father. Well, we don't need to get out. Austinian literary analysis. But this feels like one of those

secret gardens in Taylor's of mine, this song. You know, it's so creative. It's telling this whole story. Listening to the anthology with the eye to decoding different things, you'll probably listen to this and be like, wait, what? She had a baby. Or she's playing with people.

I think it's just all a story, you know? It's, and it's great because it's so detailed in the... I know who this one is about. I please, come on. Okay, okay. But it also doesn't matter. Part of what the song does is to back up your thesis about her literary era. Yeah.

This one really shows off her play with rhyme. I think in a lot of ways, as much as she might be colloquial in her language on this album, there's a lot of intense, very specific rhyming that is highly poetic. And you get a taste of that on this song. God save the most judgmental creeps who say they want what's best for me. Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see. Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies. Yeah, that's a great sesquipedalian turn of phrase right there.

A what? Cesquipedalia, a long word, essentially. A long word that means a long word. Okay, thank you. And I'm sure we'll hear on the next Taylor's Swith. Yeah, right, right, right. Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies. Yeah, there's a, I'm glad you brought that up because that is a very, very, sort of a very self-conscious literary moment, right?

There's a lot of those. And it's worth pointing out that one of the things that she is really strong at is finding not just your obvious perfect rhymes, but she really is a slant rhymer. She loves finding alliteration. She loves twisting words to fit together in ways that are quite poetic. Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies. I don't have the literary chops to be able to say every kind of rhyme type that exists in those three words. Yeah. Well, and then the next line, I'll never see.

So there's alliteration. There's internal rhyme. There's assonance. So, yeah, there's a lot going on. One more period piece on this album, I think, is the final song of the O.G. album, I guess, the original Torture Poets Department, track 16, Clara Bow. You'll be like a rose. This is one of those moments where you immediately have to go,

I got to Google that. Clarabot. Right. I mean, I had a vague idea that she was a actress from the early era of American cinema. But what did you learn when you Wikipedia did? Wikipedia to her. I think that's a verb now.

Yeah. Poets can word anything if they just verb. There we go. I learned that she was one of the few actors to successfully transition from the silent era into the talkies. Kind of like Taylor Swift transitioned from the CD era into the streaming era. And that Clara Bow also was the original It Girl. Huh. She was in a film called It.

And so she was the It Girl. And of course, the It Girl is the person who captures the most media attention at any given moment for their beauty and fashion and, you know, gossip, etc. etc, etc. As the song progresses, we encounter other it girls through history. We hear about Stevie Nix from Fleetwood Mac, of course, and various incredible solo efforts as well. Okay, so we've got yet another it girl, and I'm hearing now the expectations that are put on these people who are in the limelight, the expectations of performing, but also conforming to whatever those societal expectations might be. And we're creating an expectation in this song that we're going to hear about It Girls

from different eras of American history, which means when we get to the third verse, we're going to hear about one more. And who is it, Charles? She's pulled a little Trump-Loy, if you will, if we need to use some other terms from art history and literary analysis, the trick of the eye in French. She is singing about herself in a certain way you forget that she is singing a song because of this aura boris that she has made of singing about Taylor Swift as Taylor Swift. That's the last thing we hear on the original 16-track album, Torture Poets Department.

It's a kind of bold and heady move, I think, that I imagine will rub some people the wrong way to reference yourself like this in the song. Who does that? What is that about? The most famous person on the planet? I mean, I think you have to be self-aware. You do, but I feel like it crosses a certain kind of line to go that far in terms of self-recognition. Well, to this question of literary fiction versus maybe more memoir, evoking herself, I think, makes us question that even more.

I agree. Right. Like, if she is writing about Taylor Swift, is she narrativizing her own life or is she creating the legend of Taylor Swift? Is she playing into the larger fan narrative? That question is something I want to explore after a quick break, Charlie, with maybe one final genre that you won't encounter anywhere else. You won't find on a bookshelf in, you know, City Lights or something. But you will find on this album, it's the genre of Taylor Swift. Swift when we return. Attention Spotify. It has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera. A fragrance intense with character

gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolvente, toffee caramelized, and tonka tostastard. A combination that seduce from the first instant and a little bit more instant and she'll get aweller.

Discoveringlao-o-o-o-o-o-o-olever for susentia. Charlie, is it too bold to say that Taylor Swift is a genre unto herself at this point? Not at all. I think that's what makes her the most famous person on the planet. If she was making pop songs that sounded like anyone else's,

then she would just slot right into the top 40, and she's not that person. She makes a sound, which is Taylor Swift. She writes Taylor Swift songs. And as The Brilliant Ann Powers pointed out in her review of this anthology for NPR, even the release of this album suggests this literary genre. Taylor Swift created this art installation, I guess, with Spotify randomly at the Grove Mall

here in Los Angeles. That was a library. And all the books in the library were credited to Taylor Swift. She could have done it at the Glendale Galleria. I'm just saying. Oh, now we're talking. Love.

Shouts out to Americana brand memes. We've got to park at the gallery and walk to the Americana. Don't park at the Americana people. It's getting way to L.A. All right. So I think there is this compelling idea that at this point,

how many albums in, how many hundreds of songs in, this is a body of work that exists unto itself. And in some ways, I think this album is more than any other, perhaps, is made for the people who are already steeped in that genre. Yeah. The fans, certainly, but also just the people who have been along for this ride and had these sounds in their ears and had these lyrical references ready to go. How could we unpack this album as a metacomomicon? commentary on the Taylor Swift genre.

One thing that comes to mine. Yeah. Is that I feel like we were some of the first to see that across all of her eras, so-called, that there is a consistent Taylor Swift sound. She has a certain... Sorry, there's some dirt on your shoulder. We just brush it off for me real quick. Oh, there we go. Yeah, thank you.

There we go. Okay, yeah. We called out the idea of the T-drop, the special little melody that, sometimes goes, da da da, and there's a variation. Da da da da. She loves this.

And it's all over her work. You belong with me. Right? We found this in our second episode ever, I was switched on pop. This little thing that she does is everywhere. She does the T-drop all over torture poets. Yeah.

You can hear it on the title track, Torture Poets. Never say cool. It's on Down Bad. Understand it. Okay, I hear it. It's on But Daddy I loved him. Pray for me. Wow.

It's on So Long London. It's on L-O-ML, Love of My Life, 120. So every time you hear the T-Drop, you know, oh, that's a Taylor Swiftism. Yes. But it's not the only thing that she does. she in many ways is a folk singer. I think our songs at their core are country songs or folk songs. They are Taylor and her guitar, writing simple words and melodies.

And there are many other ways in which she connects the web of her music through mining her old material and putting them in a new context. For example, my wife says that the song Delicate is the Rosetta Stone of all Taylor Swift songs. And you can hear hints of delicate on tortured poets. We're crazy because I want you. That's very similar. I was wondering, this is a little insider switch on pop baseball here. Your aforementioned wife is currently visiting us here in Los Angeles. That's true.

And she was showing me all the texts. I'm outing you. She was showing me all the texts where you're pumping her for information about Taylor Swift. She has a deep Taylor Swift brain. I hear the melody, but I don't know the words, and she's able to connect them all together. Well, I was going in this recording, I was like, now I have the deep background here, and I'll know if Charlie is going to give her credit or steal these insights for his own. And I'm impressed and proud that you were very open about giving credit words to you.

Okay. So now onward, onward. So she unlocks delicate as this Rosetta Stone song. And you can hear more delicate isms on. the song Down Bad. Now I'm down bad crying at the gym. Everything comes out teenage petulance. Fuck it if I can't have him.

I might just die. We would make no difference. Wow. Yeah. So we have a similar cadence, similar sort of mostly single-note melody. Down Bad also borrows, I think, a bit from anti-hero. Check out the bridge. I loved your hostile takeover and closer.

And I should not be left to my own devices. They come with prices and vices. I end up in crisis. Similar rhyme schemes, which are unusual creative rhyme schemes and similar cadences. All right, how about this very surprising reference, which bridges genres? Let's listen to her song, Who's Afraid of Little Old Me? So I leap from the gallows and I'll ever take down your street. Crass the party like a record scratch as I scream.

Am I crazy to hear her pop country song, You Belong With Me, in those lines? I'm in my room, music she doesn't like, and she'll never know your story like I... Big tempo shift, totally different genre. You hear what I'm hearing? Do you play it again?

I need to hear it one more time. So I leap from the gallows and I levitate. down your street, cross the party like a rapid It's a typical Tuesday. Yeah, okay, there's something there. Same with kind of a melodic rhythm. Yeah, I don't know if it's a full eclipse, but it's a partial eclipse.

Okay, great, great, great. I love hearing all of these, Charlie, especially because I feel like there was a couple of albums where we didn't encounter a lot of T-drops, and it's good to hear them back in full force. And I feel like there's also a similar analogy here to what we were talking about in the first half of the episode

with the literary references. Are these intentional? Are they unconscious? Are they planned? Are they intuitive? Like, we might not know and it might not matter. These are part of her musical building blocks, her tapestry, the things that make her songs hers.

Yeah, you know, and I feel like you could say, oh, she's just recycling material. This is on original. Give me more unique melodies. But to stick with the literary metaphor, oftentimes you go to a writer because you love how they weave words, the kind of sentence construction, the way that they create metaphor.

And so with Taylor Swift, I actually really enjoy that there is such a strong sonic identity that make her songs so obviously Taylor Swift songs because I know I am. safely in her world and can go and travel through all of these different genres with her and still be safely in the world of Taylor Swift. Charlie, this is a sprawling record, 31 tracks. We've talked about a fraction of them.

What do you think? Is there anything I missed in my literary breakdown? I feel like there is another genre of the epic poem. Oh, okay. Right. So there are a handful of songs which reference essential, works of the past. Yeah.

Like, well, you could go with the biggest book of all. She has a song called The Prophecy in which she evokes the Garden of Eden and Eve, going back to the Bible. And it was written, I got cursed like Eve got bitten. Oh, was it punishment? She compares herself to Eve. She compares herself to the Trojan prophet Cassandra, who was a cat. cast out, right, exiled for predicting the end of the defeat of Troy.

Yeah. Exactly. So they killed Cassandra first, because she feared the words and tried to tell it sound. Correction, they didn't exile her, they killed her. You could look at the poem, the rhyme of the ancient mariner, which is about the albatross, a bird, which has cursed the crew of a ship. and she uses the same metaphor in her song, The Albatross. Finally, not quite an epic poem, but certainly an important work in children's you.

She's the Albatross. She is here to destroy you. Finally, not quite an epic poem, but certainly an important work in children's literature, Peter Pan. She tells the story of Peter Pan, who is supposed to reconnect with Wendy. You said you were going to grow up. Then you were going to come find me. Said you were going to grow up.

Then you were going to come find me. He said you were going to grow up. Then you were going to come find me. Words from the mouths of babes promises oceans deep. We've heard about Peter Pan and Wendy before on her song, Cardigan. And not only is she bringing characters in from the world of poetry and children's stories and the Bible and all these different poetic places, but she's also structuring her songs.

bit more poetically. Oftentimes, the final chorus introduces entirely new words. There are multiple songs on this album with a third verse, which is frankly anathema in pop music. Third verse, you've lost my attention. But she wants to take us through these narratives, and she's going to trust that her fandom is going to follow her all the way through multiple dozen songs with extra sections that are as poetic as possible. Thank you for introducing this episode. poetry genre to exist alongside the pulp and the diaries and the period pieces. And the Taylor Swift. And the Taylor Swift of it all.

You know, coming out of this discussion, I find myself asking a larger question about this album and Swift's career. If we hear tortured poets department as an exploration of these heady literary genres merging one's persona with one's truth, creating a web intentionally or not of musical and lyrical references to one's own body of work. Do we see Swift as maybe retreating from a mode of songwriting that tries to reach as many people as possible, that tries to create these universal world-beating smash hits, like, I don't know, shake it off, for instance? Absolutely. She doesn't need to shake it off anymore. She has the biggest audience on the planet, and they're going to follow her wherever she goes, and all of us are going to get caught in the wake no matter what. And so she just gets to make Taylor Swift music now. She gets to do whatever she wants.

Well, Charlie, my muse, my Greek goddess, my romantic poet, you are all that and more and more to me, my hard-boiled detective. Nate, my Joe, my Maddie, my Travis. What a treat to race through the shelves of this literary library with you. And let's say we'll close the book, but we'll doggier a few pages to come back to. Because I don't think this story is over. Oh, I like that. Oh, you did it. You did it.

Shepop is produced by Rihanna Cruz. This week, we're edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Alice Scott League, community mansion by Happy Bar. Scott Kerou as our executive producer or member of the Fox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine at NYMag.com slash pod. Find us on social media at Switchdown Pop and tell us everything you're hearing in TDP. No, TPD, I got it. T, T, T, T, TDP.

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listening unless you stick around for the easter eggs do do do do do do I like that. Very swift of you, Charles. Nate, there are some things that we did not get to discuss on this episode, which we have to. I'm sorry. Charlie just leaned in like he was like, I'm going to sell you a time share. Okay, what's going on? First of all, I have one major gripe with this album. Uh-oh.

I didn't want to make the Beyonce comparison. I don't think it's appropriate. The albums have nothing in common with each other, but there's a lot of, you know, dialogue about their commercial expectations. and awards, etc., etc. Both Beyonce and Taylor have something in common, and it's not that Post Malone is featured on Cowboy Carter and the Torture Poets Department. It's the fact that neither of them can say the word sandcastles.

Wait, well, I know you're beef with Beyonce's sandcastles. We built Sancastles. Lemonade is a perfect album, save for the moment that she sings Sancastle. And you know who also sings Sandcastles? Uh-oh. Taylor Swift on My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys. Mother Trucker, can't take it.

San Castles. No, Sancastles. I'm sorry. It's not working for me. Usually Swift is very proper with her prosody, but that is a rare misfire. It's a lapse of judgment. I'm sorry.