Seems Taylor Swift has been one busy girl. And overnight she dropped the entirety of that effort, turning “The Tortured Poets Department” into a double album release and tacking “The Anthology” onto the title.
This cover image released by Republic Records shows “The Tortured Poets Department” by Taylor Swift. Republic Records via Associated Press
“It’s a 2am surprise,” she wrote on Instagram at 11 p.m. Thursday. “The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
We’ve always known T-Swift was a writer – now we know she’s the kind of writer who doesn’t want anything cut from her story.
Swift has been teasing the release of her latest creative bundle since winning the Grammy for Album of the Year for “Midnights.” It was her fourth AOTY victory, notching hardware for “Midnights” doing the same with “Folklore” in 2021, “1989” in 2016 and “Fearless” in 2010.
She also surpassed Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon‘s Grammy honors with her fourth win in that category; she had been equal with the three male legends at three albums of the year since “Folklore.”
Back to the present: When the heavily promoted first part of “The Tortured Poets Department” dropped at midnight ET, Team Swift posted another note to Instagram.
“The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time – one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure,” she said, likely referring to her six-year relationship with former boyfriend Joe Alwyn. (Swift is now with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs if by some chance the news skipped your part of the Antarctic.)
“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
All that’s left behind, the post said, “is the tortured poetry.” Turns out it is more tortured poetry than we thought.
So here’s the full 31-title track list for “The Tortured Poets Department: Anthology.”
“Fortnight” (featuring Post Malone)
“The Tortured Poets Department”
“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”
“Down Bad”
“So Long, London”
“But Daddy I Love Him”
“Fresh Out the Slammer”
“Florida!!!!” (featuring Florence + The Machine)
“Guilty as Sin?”
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”
“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”
“loml”
“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”
“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”
“The Alchemy”
“Clara Bow”
“The Black Dog”
“imgonnagetyouback”
“The Albatross”
“Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”
“How Did It End?”
“So High School”
‘I Hate It Here”
“thanK you aIMee”
“I Look in People’s Windows”
“The Prophecy”
“Cassandra”
“Peter”
“The Bolter”
“Robin”
“The Manuscript”
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