Taylor Swift is famous for writing personal, confessional songs, often about old love interests. Because of this, listeners may be inclined to assume that any song of Swift’s that is about a relationship is about one of her own relationships. A close listen to her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, reveals that many of the songs on this album are written from the perspectives of other people, particularly women in abusive relationships, often from lower class and/or fundamentalist Christian backgrounds. Swift uses her stature to give voice to this underrepresented group.
Some of the songs on TTPD are almost assuredly about old boyfriends. “So Long, London” sounds like it’s about Joe Alwyn. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is definitely about Matty Healy. “The Manuscript” revisits the subject of Swift’s magnum opus, “All Too Well.” “The Alchemy” might be about Swift’s current love interest, Travis Kelce, with its sports references.
I think it’s assumed that “But Daddy I Love Him” is also about Kelce. However, there are no specific details that point to Kelce in this song. It’s a picaresque pop-country song written in the voice of a young woman who is vilified by her small townsfolk for getting involved with a man they deem to be a bad influence on her. The protagonist of the song decries “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing ‘What a mess’.” She continues railing against fundamentalist hypocrites, singing, “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing / God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what’s best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquys I’ll never see.” And she says multiple times, “You ain’t gotta pray for me.” (The nonstandard English further attests to the speaker's social class.)
Swift calls out fundamentalism in other songs on the album. “Guilty As Sin” is about the fundamentalist prohibition against thinking salacious thoughts and self-pleasuring. The speaker sings, “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?” and “Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?” She says that as “My bedsheets are ablaze / I’ve screamed his name / Building up like waves.”
The speaker also calls out fundamentalism when she sings, “Someone told me / There’s no such thing as bad thoughts / Only your actions talk.” She sings, “They’re gonna crucify me anyway.” She laments that religious types require of her “long suffering propriety” and avers that her infatuation is a type of natural religion: “What if the way you hold me / Is actually what’s holy?” and “I choose you and me . . . religiously” (her ellipsis). And she asks twice, at the beginning of the song and at the end, “Am I allowed to cry?”
In “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” the protagonist sings, “They shake their heads, saying ‘God help her’ / When I tell ’em he’s my man / But your good Lord doesn’t need to lift a finger / I can fix him. No, really, I can.” Another major theme of the album is depicted in this song: abusive relationships. “Trust me,” she says, “I can handle me a dangerous man.”
When I first bought the album and heard the song “Fresh Out the Slammer,” I was a little dismissive, asking what Taylor Swift knows about partners in prison. It was only after I realized that many of the songs are written from the perspectives of different types of people that I listened more closely and really began to admire this song. The narrative dialogue is written from the perspective of both the man and the woman. The man opens the song with the refrain, singing plaintively in a high-pitched voice, “Now pretty baby I’m running back home to you / Fresh out the slammer I know who my first call will be to.”
The verses have a much more strident cadence, illustrating the woman’s apprehension and giving clues to their relationship prior to the man’s incarceration: “Another summer, taking cover / Rolling thunder he don’t understand me.” She speaks of being “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine . . . / In the shade of how he was feeling,” and “My friends tried but I wouldn’t hear it / Watched me daily disappearing / For just one glimpse of his smile.”
In “Down Bad,” she sings, “I’ll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it / How dare you think it’s romantic / Leaving me safe and stranded.” In “So Long, London,” she sings, “How much sad did you / Think I had in me?” and “Just how low did you think I’d go? / Before I'd self-implode / Before I’d have to go to be free.” She continues, “And my friends said it isn’t right to be scared / Every day of a love affair / Every breath feels like rarest air / When you’re not sure if he wants to be there.” And, “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days / And I’m just getting color back into my face.”
In “loml” (love of my life/loss of my life), she sings, “Who’s gonna tell me the truth / When you blew in with the winds of fate / And told me I reformed you / When your impressionist paintings of heaven / Turned out to be fakes / Well, you took me to hell, too.” Of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she says, “In public [you] showed me off / Then sank in stoned oblivion.” “I would have died for your sins / Instead I just died inside.” And “You said normal girls were 'boring' / But you were gone by the morning.”
Abusive relationships are at the heart of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” This mesmerizing number is about a formerly institutionalized woman (who may or may not be dead) who is tormented by the people of her neighborhood. The arrangement is ominous, with spooky chords and “ooh ooh” background vocals that suggest Halloween ghosts. “If you wanted me dead,” the protagonist sings to her tormentors, “You should have just said [so] / Nothing makes me feel more alive.” And then the arrangement becomes sprightly, as the speaker appears like a goblin: “So I leap from the gallows / And I levitate down your street / Crash the party like a record scratch / As I scream: ‘Who’s afraid of little old me?!'”
“You should be,” she intones. This is the story of the toothless woman on the block who is treated as an outcast, as if she were a witch. “So all you kids can sneak into my / House, with all the cobwebs / I’m always drunk on my own tears / Isn’t that what they all said? / That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn / That I’m fearsome and I’m wretched / And I’m wrong.”
She says, “They say they didn’t do it to hurt me / But what if they did? / I want to snarl and show you / Just how disturbed this has made me / You wouldn’t last an hour / In the asylum where they raised me.”
She says that it was the institutionalization itself that made her mentally unstable. “'Cause you lured me, and you / Hurt me, and you taught me / You caged me / And then you called me crazy / I am what I am 'cause you trained me.”
The title voices the feelings of many of the protagonists in these songs: Why are you so threatened by someone you clearly feel you have some sort of control over? These songs are deadly serious. Some of the stories are couched in pop arrangements (“Guilty As Sin,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), but most of them are straight-up ballads (with consistently sparkling arrangements). In her most mature album to date, Swift offers her fellow maturing listeners empathetic stories reflecting their own lives, helping them to see their situations clearly and hopefully to find a way out.
I would note that the relationship in "But Daddy I Love Him" has a happy ending. "But oh my God you should see your faces."
