Not MY breakup album
Watch me go and build an anthology dedicated to the six-year heartbreak we all expected in The Tortured Poets Department
When Taylor Swift announced her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, people assumed it would be all about her angel of a boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The clues were all there: Joe’s suspiciously similar group chat, Taylor emphasizing she’d been working on it for two years, Jack announcing “You’re Losing Me” was actually recorded before Midnights. Even the tracklist seemed like there could be obvious ties to Joe and her devastation post breakup. And after five albums focused on the love of her life or fictionalized fantasies, people were ready for an album to recolor or eviscerate their perception of milquetoast white toast Joe.
We anticipated some new love for her new beau. And, sure, there would be some attention given to the rebound heard round the world, but nothing could have prepared us for the sheer amount of the Jehovah’s Witness suit-wearing, typewriter-carrying, chain-smoking and revolting, Matty Healy.
Coming to terms with Matty Healy’s presence on this album (and in her heart) is something I’m still working on. I am kombucha girl, enjoying a song before remembering it’s about this man. But for now the fun question of: what about Joe?
The truth is, I think Taylor may feel she has said all she needed to say about Joe. Over five albums with him—at least three of which we now know were not during the best of times—maybe she’s trusting her discography to speak for itself. Matty might be headlining this anthology, but Taylor scattering the truth of her lover Joe under our noses over the course of five albums? That’s just as dark. So gather up and gather round, let’s pour one out to Joe. Not because he deserves it, but because it’s all there. The writing on the wall no longer his birthdate, but sad songs she tried to write off as fiction. These desperate prayers of a cursed man revealing maybe things weren’t so golden after all.
If you’re looking for a solely Joe album, whether to remember Toe fondly, judge Joe harshly, or avoid thinking of Matty at all, here is the playlist you need. I have mapped out their relationship in, presumptively, chronological order based wholly on assumptions.
Of course, this should be taken with a grain (or thirteen) of salt. Some people may be offended by this paternity test of a playlist, but she did say the story isn’t hers anymore so I think she’ll be okay if I revise the manuscript.1
“Gorgeous” charts their first blush2 where Taylor imagines using her cats in a pickup line she’s too afraid to say to his face…because look at his face. Was it the boyish looks, the dimples, or the buzzcut that did her in? We’ll get hints of that to come.
In “Delicate” he’s texting her the equivalent of “u up?” and somehow that’s enough for her. Even though this was her summer with Loki, she’s lowkey interested in this bland boy who’s greatest charm seems to be his disinterest in her infamy (“my reputation’s never been worse so / you must like me for me”).
My girl has needs and Joe fulfills them with that boyish look that she likes in a man in the upbeat-but-always-horny ode, “I Think He Knows.”
It’s cat and mouse for a month or two or three over the course of a ~cruel~ summer. We get songs that detail their games as they both fall harder than anticipated.
“Glitch”: “Five seconds later, I'm fastening myself to you with a stitch”
“…ready for it?”: “Younger than my exes but he act like such a man, so / I see nothing better, I keep him forever”
“Don’t Blame Me”: “If you walk away / I'd beg you on my knees to stay”
She goes from writing in her diary “this summer is the apocalypse” to telling him she loves him which was not on her 2016 bingo card (“Cruel Summer”) — OR WAS IT?? (“Mastermind”).
They’re drinking beer out of plastic cups (“King of My Heart”), he’s calling out her bluffs (“End Game”), and both of them are barefoot in the kitchen at this sacred new beginning (“Cornelia Street”) she already can’t bear to imagine ending.
It’s in late November in “Call it What You Want” when she asks him, “would you
save merun away with me?”By “New Year’s Day” in London, she can tell it’s going to be a long road.
“Dress” is her at her most romantic as they hide their relationship (“And I woke up just in time / Now I wake up by your side”).
“London Boy” sees her integrate herself into his life.
“All of the Girls You Loved Before” lets her pour one out to all the ladies who made him the way that he is.
“Paris” sees her enjoying the honeymoon phase of this secret love affair (“Romance is not dead if you keep it just yours”)
And in “Long Story Short” she marvels at how she survived (“he feels like home”).
After 10 months of privacy, the world finds out and she gets panicked in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” (“You said there was nothing in the world that could stop it / I had a bad feeling”).
But that’s romance.3
Even with all her neuroses, he stays (“The Archer”) and that’s enough for her (“Daylight”). For now.
It’s a blissful commitment that feels fated (“Invisible String”). So she hides in suitcases and avoids the club and believes where the poets die is where she wants to be (“The Lakes”).
“Lover” sees her practicing her wedding vows in case the hint on “Paper Rings” wasn’t enough.
They get through the hard times in “False God” (“Daring you to leave me just so I can try and scare you”) and “Afterglow” (“Why'd I have to break what I love so much?”)
But going on six years of twiddling her thumbs means she has plenty of time to ponder what he’s bringing to the relationship. We get pandemic boxed-in glimpses of Joe rarely rising to the occasion in odes that sometimes read romantic, sometimes stifling.
“Peace”: “I'm a fire, and I'll keep your brittle heart warm.” She begs to know if it’s enough—her giving him her wild, her silence, her sunshine4.
“Exile”: they write this together, yelling at each other to just leave then
“evermore”: a bittersweet duet with the singers at odd with each other, discordant even as they come together. “Oh, can we just get a pause? / To be certain we'll be tall again.”
“Willow”: “I'm begging for you to take my hand / wreck my plans.”
“Hoax”: A deep cut that’s part romantic, part tragedy, a perfect encapsulation of those early years of loss and heartbreak and isolation. She paints his loving her as crueler than even being cancelled or losing her music because to lose him would somehow be more devastating5.
She starts penning scandals and breakups and cheats and fights and insisting they’re all just fiction6. “Tolerate It” mirrors what we get in later songs: a man as unwilling to love her, fight for her, die for her, as he is to end things with her.
And still she stays. The mourning must begin with denial.
She decides she doesn’t need marriage in “Lavender Haze,” that actually all she needs is a whole lot of nothing in “Sweet Nothing,” and that if “The Great War” is over then she can make it work.
But then the anger strikes: she gives a chorus to Big Red Machine in “Renegade”: “Is it insensitive of me to say get your shit together so I can love you? Is it really your anxiety that stops you from giving me everything - or do you just not want to?”
“Bejeweled” sees her ready to teach some lessons.
When that doesn’t work she turns to bargaining. “Do something babe, risk something,” she yells in “You’re Losing Me7.” It’s a song Jack Antonoff revealed they wrote in 2021, a year before Midnights even came out.
Depression is her longest phase, going from working the graveyard shift to overtime and a half.
There’s a one-way fight in a hallway in “Maroon”: “When the silence came, we were shaking blind and hazy / How the hell did we lose sight of us again?”
She’s throwing up outside of bars in “Hits Different”: “Dreams of your hair and your stare and sense of belief / In the good in the world, you once believed in me.”
She admits it’s not a healthy way to mourn in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”: “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die / He said he’d love me all his life.”
And she still doesn’t understand it as she prepares to tell the world in “How Did It End”: “The deflation of our dreaming / Leaving me bereft and reeling / My beloved ghost and me / Sitting in a tree / D-Y-I-N-G”
“Dear Reader” has her admit she’s walking “to a house, not a home, all alone 'cause nobody's there.”
Finally, acceptance. “So Long, London” sees her bid adieu to the city and the boy who never lived up to promises implied, never signed.
The entirety of The Tortured Poets Department is of course haunted by the trauma of him. He’s to be blamed in “Fresh Out the Slammer” where she recasts their relationship in gray-tinted glasses.
“Bright and blue and fights and tunnels,” all allusions to their origin story in “Cruel Summer,” “Cornelia Street,” “Paper Rings.”
“In the shade of how he was feeling” mirroring the shade in Hoax and Paris
“Watch me daily disappearing,” the sad throughline in “You’re Losing Me,” “Maroon,” even “Peace.”
“The Black Dog” sees her breaking down again when she realizes his location is still on and she’s forced to contend with who he could be with, where his life could be going, and how she still doesn’t know why it ended. “I just don’t understand / how you don’t miss me” is brutal. “She’s too young to know this song” because she knows how this goes. The sentiment from “So Long London” (“And I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free”) is even more potent wafting in the air around this pub.
“loml” reads as the blended deconstructing of the Joe and Matty convergence. Metaphors get tangled and accusations can’t stick as she tries to sort out this major loss. With so many Joe parallels like stitch (“glitch”), aglow (“afterglow”), being blue, being holy, “dancing phantoms on the terrace” (roofs and balconies across reputation and Lover) “You said I’m the love of your life / About a million times” (“illicit affairs”).
Finally, the last of it: a bittersweet acceptance in “The Manuscript.” More for her than for him, but I’ll give it to him anyways. If only to end on something akin to a happy ending.
Let’s raise our cold glasses up to Mr. Alwyn. Taylor built a legacy no one can undo and he…he averaged a 60% score on Rotten Tomatoes playing the worst men imaginable. In the end, he probably got more than what was owed in the breakup: a lineup of songs perhaps too generous but never cruel and a level of notoriety she brought him that he’ll never be able to top on his merit alone. Still. It’s not NOT a bop.
Obviously a lot of these songs are up for interpretation so consider this my sanctimonious soliloquy.
You might think this makes more sense being about Tom Hiddleston, but Taylor told secret sessioners this one was about her “angel of a boyfriend,” Joe
“I thought we had no chance / and that's romance” (Glitch)
Perhaps sitting in the basement when she wants the penthouse?
Later she sings in “The Prophecy,” “A greater woman has faith / But even statues crumble if they're made to wait.”
Looking at TPD now, I get the sinking feeling “Ivy” is about Matty Healy, the poetic pairing to “Guilty as Sin?” as she rekindled a friendship with him
Going from “Some boys are trying too hard, he don't try at all though” to “Do something babe, say something, lose something, risk something?” That’s depressing, babe.