Beth Garabrant
Now that we've spent an entire weekend scrutinizing every lyric of Taylor Swift's sprawling 31-song The Tortured Poets Department, we've decided to give Taylor Swift even more context. He willingly came forward to provide it.
On Monday morning (April 22), Amazon Music launched a track-by-track album experience in which Swift provides commentary on the songs sprinkled throughout each of the album's tracks. Swifties can also listen to the album with Taylor's full commentary by saying, “Alexa, I'm a member of the Torture Poets Division” or in the Amazon Music app.
Regarding her first single, “Fortnite,” featuring Post Malone, Swift said: One of them is fatalism: longing, impatience, and lost dreams. I think this album is very fatalistic in that there are a lot of very dramatic lines about life and death. “I love you, it's ruining my life.” These are very pretentious and dramatic ways of saying things. This is such an album. ”
As for “Clara Bow,” another song fans have been waiting for, Swift said the song was inspired by her experiences in the entertainment industry and the tendency to pit female artists against each other. “I wrote 'Clara Bow' to explain what I've seen in the industry I've been in,” Swift says. “When I was a kid, I'd sit at record companies and try to get record deals. And they'd say, 'You remind us,' and name the artist, and they'd say she… Said something disparaging about “but you're this, you're so much better” by doing this and doing that. That's how we teach women to see themselves and be the new successors to this woman who accomplished great things before her. ”
'Florida!!!', a collaboration with Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, is said to be inspired by a true crime. “I watch Dateline all the time. People have crimes they've committed. Where are they going to get out of town right away? They go to Florida,” Swift says. “They reinvent themselves, take on a new identity, and try to fit in. When you go through a breakup, I think somewhere in your heart you think, 'I want a new name.'” New Life I want. I don't want anyone to know where I've been or anything about me at all. ” And that was the starting point. Where do you go to reinvent yourself and fit in? Florida! ”
The singer's 11th studio album sold 1.4 million copies on its first day of release in the U.S. and instantly became the most-streamed album on its first day of release on Amazon Music on Friday.
Other insights Swift shares include the origin of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” which she says is a metaphor woven from the perspective of children's toys. “Being someone's favorite toy until they destroy you and you don't want to play with them anymore. This is how many of us start out, being so valued by the other person, and then suddenly the other person becomes us.” We are in relationships that destroy us and devalue us in our hearts,” she says. to “No, no, no. You should have seen them the first time they saw me. They'll go back to that story again. They'll go back to it again.”