Tortured Poets Department: All the Lyrics, Conspiracies, and Easter Eggs

Depending on whom you ask, April 19 holds cultural significance for Anglo-American relations in one of two ways: On this day in 1775, rebel colonists finally clashed with British redcoats at Lexington and Concord, which jumpstarted the Revolutionary War — an explosive split with a perceived oppressor that ended in independence. Nearly 250 years later, on April 19, 2024, American pop star Taylor Swift fired her own shot to be heard round the world, apparently aimed at several British men who may have committed intolerable acts of their own. The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, dropped Friday. Fans widely believed it would cover her breakup with English actor Joe Alwyn, and it does — though it’s Matty Healy, Swift’s rebound fling and one of Alwyn’s countrymen, who takes most of the heat.

TTPD’s timing could be a coincidence: Comparing the end of one’s transatlantic relationship to a transatlantic conflict that helped determine the course of modern history would be the height of melodrama, but then again, the two foundational principles of Swiftian lore are melodrama and cryptic references. Coincidence does not exist, but conspiracy definitely does.

Swift’s billion-dollar empire rests on meticulously constructed narratives, messages she codes into her canon for the fans to decipher and dissect. In her own telling, she’s been doing this since she put out her first album, using capital letters to encrypt notes in the lyrics. “That’s how it started,” she once explained to the Washington Post. “My fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.” The songs may not be entirely autobiographical — important to keep in mind — but if the Swifties can find any hidden meaning in them, it’s likely because Swift put it there on purpose.

When she announced the album’s imminent arrival at the 2024 Grammys, Swift gave fans several clues about its contents just by sharing the title. As Swifties quickly discovered, The Tortured Poets Department sounds a lot like the “Tortured Man Club,” a group chat Alwyn has with fellow brooding thespians Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Even the punctuation suggests a direction: The lack of a possessive apostrophe indicates that this fictional department is devoted to the study, analysis, and discussion of these poor poets, as if they were not tormented enough already. Imagine your most significant breakup, but now your ex is one of the most famous people on the planet, and they’ve just dropped a 31-track accounting of the split for the world to parse. Imagine the magnitude of their celebrity entrenching their side of the story as the story. This would be a nightmare scenario for anyone, but just how bad is it for these London boys? We recruited three highly committed Swifties, each with granular knowledge of the catalogue, to break down the double album’s damage, song by song.

Potential Poets

When the album officially dropped, Swift shared the following note like a foreword:

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. 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.

And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.

Which chapters of Swift’s life have closed since Midnights came out? Most notable, the Alwyn era. Many Swiftstorians date the onset of this period to late 2016, some months after Swift encountered Alwyn — and, incidentally, subsequent summer fling Tom Hiddleston — at the Met Gala. She seems to reference their first meeting on reputation, the first Alwyn album: “Flashback to when you met me, your buzzed cut and my hair bleached,” she sings on “Dress,” evoking her platinum bob and his then-shorn head. At the time, Swift was still with Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, though another song on reputation — the Alwyn-coded “Gorgeous,” which alludes to her older club-rat boyfriend — suggests they may have been on the rocks. For the not-yet-single Swift, Alwyn’s unattainability is devastating: “You’ve ruined my life by not being mine,” she sings.

By November 2016, however, a turning of the tide: That month, Swift and several squad members showed up to the premiere of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a movie many will not have heard of but that Alwyn was in. Whether she was there to enjoy a military thriller or to see her crush is a question without a clear answer, though I have my hunch — when Swift appears at an out-of-context function with a Haim sister in tow, romance is often in the air.

Also, Swift’s discography once again offers some hints: Liner notes for Lover, the second Alwyn album, include an excerpt from her diary that places the start of the relationship three months before January 3, 2017. A subsequent cover of “September,” by Earth, Wind & Fire, hints at September 28 as the couple’s anniversary. Anyway, when news finally broke, in May 2017, that Swift and Alwyn were dating, tabloid sources claimed they’d been slinking around London in disguises for several months already. The couple would continue to keep a deliberately low profile for the next six years, in deference to Alwyn’s reportedly private nature.

Still, during that time, things seemed solid: Swift supported Alwyn at various premieres, she relocated to the U.K. for lockdown, and he racked up a handful of songwriting credits on three of her albums (folklore, evermore, and Midnights) under the pseudonym William Bowery. There were even rumors that the couple had quietly gotten engaged or even married, though Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, recently refuted that theory as “insane.”

Given the outward appearance of domestic tranquility, the couple’s breakup stunned fans when it was announced in April 2023. The actual date of separation is not publicly known information: If one buys the tabloid timeline, it may have occurred that February. Swift herself has said that she began work on TTPD shortly after releasing Midnights in October 2022, and one of its vault tracks — “You’re Losing Me,” an anthem of imminent collapse — suggests the unraveling may have been happening while she was in the studio. As we have observed, Swift’s bonus material can sometimes “feel suspiciously timed to what she’s going through at that very moment.”

Straight out of the gate, a couple of clues suggested that Alwyn would be TTPD’s main subject: The color scheme for the artwork — black-and-white — recalls the one Swift used for reputation. This time, however, she’s inverted the accent colors, suggesting to some Swifties that if that was the relationship’s beginning, then this is its end. Then there’s the initial tagline Swift released for the album’s first version: “I love you. It’s ruining my life.” Sound familiar?

According to the Daily Mail’s sources, even Alwyn believed the album’s title to be an “undeniable” reference to him. Still, one “insider” told the tabloid that despite the album’s familiar name, “Joe has no reason to believe yet that she is going to diss him or their relationship.” And for the most part, she held back — at least in regard to Alwyn. The album’s titular song, for example, doesn’t drag Alwyn but (as far as the fans can tell) Healy, whom Swift started dating within a month of her breakup. Healy is the frontman of the 1975 and a controversial figure, to put it mildly. This chapter was anathema to the fans, and I don’t think we need to relive it here; mercifully, it quickly came to a close, sources purportedly close to Swift (Tree?) assuring assorted gossip rags that the pop star would “not be writing songs about this one.” But do you know what Swift loves almost as much as melodrama and hidden messages? A well-executed fake-out. As we will see, Healy’s penchant for irritating antics appears to have earned him a place in the catalogue. Boys only want love if it’s torture, is that how the song goes?

The Swifties

All the Swift fans interviewed for this article agreed on one thing: Swift’s songs aren’t necessarily about one single person. Rather, “she’s very good about weaving her life into fictional situations,” explains Melissa, a New York–based Swiftie who celebrates each album-release day with her best friend, Theresa. “She takes a lot of old things and can bring them into new situations to be like, This is how I thought about things and now this is how I’m thinking about it now.” The feelings, she adds, are real; the details may be fiction or at least embellished.

For another fan, who we’ll call Jackie, many of the songs effectively evoke the stages of grief, a framework Swift herself laid out for listeners. Jackie emphasizes that Swift’s music is about her more than anyone else: Her experience of relationships, rather than the men she’s dated. “She’s a storyteller at the end of the day.” And as is the case with poetry, “Everything is up to interpretation by the reader,” in these songs, Jackie says. “You don’t know the mind-set of the author — that’s the whole point. They’re putting the words down to the page and they’re pouring their emotions into it, but it’s up to the reader to interpret what is being said.”

Ultimately, Swift is speaking only for herself. Her feelings and her point of view underpin these narratives, but they’re not necessarily about any one person.

Lyrics and Easter Eggs

“Fortnight”

Some have pointed out that the term fortnight, as in two weeks, is a Britishism, though I honestly don’t know how many people under the age of 65 are out here saying “fortnight.” (Except, of course, for Swift herself.) Initially, Swifties proposed that this song might mine the final two weeks of her relationship with Alwyn, while others have noted that on the Eras tour, Swift swapped “The 1” — an indisputable breakup track — for “Invisible String,” a song about soulmates, two weeks before the split became public knowledge. For what it’s worth, this is also the song in which the line “I love you / It’s ruining my life” appears.

In actuality, it tells the story of two couples (neighbors in suburbia) and the fallout from an extramarital affair. As one TikTok analyst pointed out, the song skews heavy on “depression imagery” — alcoholism and asylums — and may serve as an allegory for Swift’s real-life breakup. This lyric, for example: “All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February / I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary.” February may refer to the month Alwyn and Swift split, according to this theory, and as the fans have proposed in the margin notes on Genius, “the miracle move-on drug” could refer to her nonstarter Healy phase. She has, after all, described love as a drug in other songs (“Don’t Blame Me”), so using it to move on from Alwyn could make sense here.

For Melissa and Theresa, though, this song is Healy influenced if it’s influenced by anyone at all. It deals with a short-term relationship — check — and it speaks to a situation in which feelings for a person are creating problems for the narrator. Theresa notes that when Swift embarked on her Healy journey, the media and the fans had a lot to say about it — an about-face from the period of relative tranquility that marked her relationship with Alwyn. “I think there was a little bit of that, right?” she observes. “Is this relationship now going to bring me back into this bad place?”

Since “Fortnight” is the lead single for TTPD, we also get a music video. In it, Swift and Post Malone play the song’s former lovers, while Dead Poets Society actors Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles pop in for cameos. Fun fact: This music video has the same cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, as Killers of the Flower Moon. Upon the video’s release, Swift said, “Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it.”

On Amazon Music, Swift broke down the meaning of several tracks, including “Fortnight.” “‘Fortnight’ is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams,” Swift said of the track. “I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”

“The Tortured Poets Department”

When the lyrics to “The Tortured Poets Department” leaked one day ahead of schedule, it wasn’t clear if they were genuine or an AI generated Healy smear. They sounded at once oddly specific and silly: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth / should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” But as it turns out, these are authentic, and this song seems not to be about Alwyn (no visible tattoos) but Healy (lots of visible, dumb tattoos).

The evidence: The song’s subject leaves a typewriter at Swift’s apartment — something only an avowed typewriter enthusiast, like Healy, would do. He also engages in self-sabotaging behavior, something Healy does frequently and on a grand scale. Healy’s band, the 1975, have a song called “Chocolate,” though I think we can all agree that Swift is talking about smoking weed, a favorite activity of Healy’s. But then there’s this disclosure:

Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me

But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave

And I had said that to Jack about you so I felt seen

Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be

Because we’re crazy

Here, fans believe that Lucy may be Lucy Dacus, friend and bandmate to Swift’s friend, Phoebe Bridgers. Both were standing in the crowd at one of Swift’s Nashville performances over the summer when the singer mouthed, “This is about you, you know who you are. I love you.” She apparently intended the message for Healy, also in attendance, as he’d mouthed the same thing during his Tokyo days earlier. While Bridgers and Healy are friends, he and Dacus don’t seem to be. Healy deleted his X account after he tweeted, “I told Lucy Dacus that ‘Boygenius’ had inspired me and George to start a new band called ‘Girlretard.’ I don’t really hear from her that often,” and she replied, “You don’t hear from me at all.” So maybe that accounts for Lucy, and maybe Jack is Jack Antonoff, Swift’s close friend and the person reportedly responsible for setting up this particular collab.

Then there is the “TTPD” chorus: “I laughed in your face and said / ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’rе modern idiots.’” For Melissa and Theresa, this skews the meaning clearly toward Healy. Alwyn doesn’t make sense as a comparison here, but Healy, “He’s kind of this literally a tortured poet,” Melissa observes. And he’s praised Puth publicly on at least one documented occasion.

“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”

Here, Swift goes hard on playtime imagery: army dolls, plastic smiles, sandcastles, puzzles — the list goes on, but the song’s subject is cast as childish and fickle; he treats his most prized possessions carelessly and throws them away once he gets sick of them. As for which ex Swift is talking about here, some fans think it’s Alwyn. “When she sings about being put back on a shelf and taken off a shelf, obviously, it’s playing on that doll imagery; the toy imagery,” TikToker TheThriftySwiftie explains. “But I feel like it’s really also playing on isolation. Like she said, ‘I shut myself up for years and I’m just not gonna do that anymore.’ She felt like she was put on a shelf and only taken down when he wanted to play with her or enjoy the fact that she’s Taylor Swift and a big star.”

She also points to Swift’s evocation of “playing pretend,” as a reference to the time she and Alwyn spent hiding from the public. “Like it’s basically saying it worked when we were pretending we were the only two people in this world, but that’s not life and we aren’t the only two people in this world.” But there’s also the idea that, when Swift and this ex first met, he was the one “head over heels in love,” this TikToker explains. In the song, the relationship’s balance of power has shifted: “I’m Taylor Swift, I’m the superstar, but now I’m just a toy with a tortured heart that he’s breaking.”

It’s possible, though Melissa and Theresa aren’t entirely convinced. “It could also be about any boy she’s dating being self-destructive,” Theresa notes. But if it’s referencing anyone, they believe it’s probably Healy. “Her references to sandcastles I thought were so interesting,” Melissa explains. “When you have a new relationship, especially with someone at that level of fame, there’s so much that goes into protecting it. Is there privacy? Is it public, is it not?” In this song, the person Swift describes is reckless, destroying their sandcastles with utter abandon. That doesn’t sound like Alwyn to her: “I feel like their relationship was so private and they did such a good job of protecting it.” The Healy thing, though — that “was a little bit messy.”

Swift revealed on Amazon Music that the song is about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore.”

“Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind,” Swift said. “We’re still clinging on to ‘no, no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.’”

“Down Bad”

Meaning: the fact of being in romantically rough shape; a feeling “marked by strong and usually unrequited feelings of attraction, desire, or infatuation,” or depression, or despondency, according (incredibly) to Merriam-Webster. This track finds Swift in the throes of a breakup — “Crying in the gym,” and, I regret to report, quite possibly over Healy. That’s what many fans think, anyway: “Down Bad” seemingly refers to a short romance (“For a moment I knew cosmic love”) which Swift’s with Alwyn wasn’t, plus Alwyn isn’t known for “indecent exposures.” Healy, on the other hand, absolutely is; he apparently enjoys building forts as well, which may explain Swift’s declaration: “I’ll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it,” a lyric that could refer to the public’s difficulty comprehending her thing with Healy. So maybe it’s him, or maybe it’s her whole season of breakups: “Down Bad” also traffics in ship imagery, and as we will see on the next track, that may be revealing.

For Jackie, “Down Bad” exemplified Swift’s progression through her stages of grief within this relationship: Over the course of the song, her attitude shifts from “Fuck it if I can’t have him” to “fuck it if I can’t have us” to “fuck you if I can’t have us.” “I think she has a turning point when she realizes it’s not me, it’s not everything else around me, it’s him,” Jackie theorizes. “She’s trying to show the emotions through each song, so I feel like there’s a little bit of denial on this, and then it kind of falls into the acceptance stage at the end of the song where she’s like, it’s not me, it’s him, and screw him. I’m going to go and do my own thing.”

Another Easter egg that Melissa and Theresa noticed? The callback in “Down Bad” to “The New Romantics,” from 2014’s 1989, which includes the line, “Please take my hand and / Please take me dancing, and / Please leave me stranded / It’s so romantic.” Here, Swift’s position has changed: “How dare you think it’s romantic / Leaving me safe and stranded?” And maybe it’s also worth mentioning — Swift and Healy first got together, briefly, in 2014.

“So Long, London”

Real heads will recognize Alwyn as Swift’s “London Boy,” in Lover speak — “took me back to Highgate, met all of his best mates” — so as soon as the track list dropped, it felt safe to assume that this one would be a heartfelt good-bye to all that: Historically, Swift has reserved slot five on her albums for her rawest emotions. That’s true here, too: “So Long, London” is a litany of fairly overt references to Alwyn — their house on the Heath, as in Hampstead Heath; keeping calm and carrying on, Britain’s most famous mentality — and a relationship between two people who are growing apart despite one party’s best efforts. The mood here feels very “You’re Losing Me,” with certain themes potentially linking several other songs from Swift’s recent catalog. Take her mention of stitches in the chorus: “On folklore, in ‘Hoax,’ in ‘Cardigan,’ even in ‘My Tears Ricochet,’ she has this imagery of deep deep wounds that have been stitched together,” TheThriftySwiftie explains, citing the line “You drew stars / around my scars / and now I’m bleeding” from “Cardigan” and “You knew it still hurts underneath my scars from when they pulled me apart” from “Hoax.” “He stitched up her scars, he drew stars around them, and the stitches are now undone in ‘So Long London.’” (Not that scars typically need stitches!) TheThriftySwiftie also clocks the reappearance of the color blue in Swift’s Alwyn songs: His blue eyes, his blues as sadness, and here, his sacrifice of their relationship “to the gods of your bluest days.”

Two other things to note: In “So Long, London,” Swift sings that she “stopped CPR” on the relationship once she realized “it’s no use / The spirit was gone we would never come to,” which sounds not unlike a line in “You’re Losing Me.” There, Swift sings that she “can’t find a pulse” and that her “heart won’t start for you anymore.” And she refers to her relationship as a sinking ship, as in the previous track, though I’m not sure that’s a revealing connection so much as a familiar and convenient metaphor.

“I think there’s a lot in this album about her realizing she needs to let go,” Melissa notes. “I think the CPR line, it’s like, I’m trying, I’m the only one resuscitating this relationship, and at what point do I need to just realize I have now gone crazy because I am the only one doing it.”

“But Daddy I Love Him”

In Disney’s 1989 animated classic, The Little Mermaid, Ariel offers this line to her father in defense of her infatuation with Prince Eric, the human for whom she will give up her voice. The 1989-born Swift is a fan of the movie, attending her own New Year’s Eve party in costume as Ariel in 2019. Swifties theorized that this song title would be a metaphor for their siren’s relationship with Alwyn, a famously discreet celeb whose discomfort with the spotlight allegedly obligated Swift to live a more under-the-radar life than she likes. That, according to the tabloid narrative of the breakup, drove a wedge between the two. “Joe has struggled with Taylor’s level of fame and the attention from the public,” People reported last year. “The differences in their personalities have also become harder to ignore after years together. They’ve grown apart.” But in the end, no! What we have here is a “Love Story”-style fictionalized account of a star-crossed couple whose pearl clutching, “wine mom” neighbors don’t approve of their union — maybe in the same way a certain subset of Swift’s fans didn’t approve of her fling with Healy?

“Fresh Out the Slammer”

Initially, I assumed this one referred to Swift’s relationship with Alwyn, which, rude way to (maybe, presumably) refer to one’s six-year, near-marriage, personal and professional partnership but okay! The reason why the fans and I believed this was the jail metaphor, first seen on reputation’s “Ready for It?”: “And he can be my jailer / Burton to this Taylor,” a sentiment that suggests Swift was happy to have this man lock her away in the beginning. Here, mentions of blue and a relationship that “splintered back in winter” may link back to Alwyn, though if the person she’s running to is Healy, the plot of this song speaks to a surprisingly long and deep history. Maybe that’s why one fan observed on Reddit that the outro is “giving Travis,” or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

Our Swiftie experts saw things differently, though. They didn’t think this song was about either of Swift’s recent exes, but about the feeling of freedom after a long-term relationship ends. But as Melissa and Theresa noted, the idea of rings — in this case, “imaginary rings” — come up again and again on this album. Here, the clearest callback is “Paper Rings,” a song about being so in love with someone you’d marry them with nothing. (That’s from “Lover,” and appears Alwyn-inflected.) For Melissa and Theresa, the marriage talk (which is everywhere on TTPD) also evoked a line from “You’re Losing Me”: “And I wouldn’t marry me either / A pathological people pleaser / Who only wanted you to see her.” Taken all together, these three stages of marriage ideation really do take us on a journey!

“Florida!!!!”

Swift played her first show post-split announcement in Tampa, Florida, which may give us some insight into the theme. But as Cosmopolitan notes, Florence Welch — the featured artist on this track — once claimed that Swift’s penchant for spilling her guts had helped her process her own breakups. This song could be that, or it could be a three-and-a-half-minute advertisement for the state of Florida. But Jackie, who is originally from Florida, has several thoughts.

“The lyric that has been getting stuck in my head is the part where they say, ‘I need to forget to take me to Florida / I’ve got some regrets. I’ll bury them in Florida,’” she says. Around the time of Swift’s Florida stop on the Eras Tour, several things happened that may be significant: Shortly after the breakup went live, Swift got dinner with Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who promptly unfollowed Alwyn on Instagram. A cascade of squad members — including Gigi Hadid and the Haim sisters — did the same, in a mass exodus that became known among Swifties as the Great Unfollowing. Swift was also switching up her set lists: At the April 15 Tampa show Jackie attended, for example, she performed “Mean” and “Mad Woman,” for which she brought the National’s Aaron Dessner onstage. “You reflect on it and you’re like, wow. She chose two very angry songs,” Jackie recalls. And in “Florida!!!” she can sense a bit of that anger. “It makes you think,” Jackie continues, “Did she leave it all there that night with ‘Mean’ and ‘Mad Woman’? Did she let it out right then and there and let it go?” And does the visually intense punctuation of this track title maybe evoke some of the whirlwind chaos of that moment? Maybe! But who knows what all that business with “that time share down in Destin” is about.

According to Swift, “Florida!!!” is inspired less by any specific person and more from “always watching Dateline.” She’s a true-crime girlie, who knew? On Amazon Music, Swift shared that she picked the Sunshine State because that’s the No. 1 destination for criminals on the run.

“People have these crimes that they commit; where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida,” she said. “They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name. I want a new life. I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ And so that was the jumping-off point. Where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida!” Very Spring Breakers of her.

“Guilty As Sin?”

Though some fans initially speculated that this song might delve into old (and it must be said, paper-thin) cheating accusations against Alwyn, “Guilty As Sin?” finds Swift in a relationship and agonizing over a blazing crush on which she has not acted. There are several possible references to Healy: The song opens on a guy sending her the song “Downtown Lights,” while she’s “drowning in the Blue Nile” — which may evoke either to the band that sings it or maybe Alwyn, who’s been linked to blue and drowning several times already on TTPD. But Healy, for what it’s worth, reportedly loves the Blue Nile. Taylor pointed to a Rolling Stone article, in which writer Rob Sheffield notes that Healy “basically rewrote” “Downtown Lights” for his song “Love It If We Made It” and also that “Downtown Lights” came out in the year 1989, which is catnip for Swift. She also muses about someone writing “Mine” on her thigh, while both she and Healy have songs with that title. Also relevant: She “dream[s] of cracking locks” on her “cage,” and “throwing [her] life to the wolves” to indulge her fantasies, which, to me, at this point, sounds a lot like escaping a stifling relationship at the risk of her reputation in order to be with whatever guy may or may not have inspired this song.

Another potentially notable connection: the religious references scattered throughout this track — sin, holiness, crucifixion, vows — which, for Melissa and Theresa, recall “False God,” from Lover. Though that one ostensibly has more to do with Alwyn, here, “It’s bringing the parallels back of, I know this isn’t something that’s going to work out, but let’s just try it and whatever. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.”

“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

Might this be Swift nodding toward her exes’ fear of her fame? Whether it’s because her breakup songs set them up for fan-fueled retribution (John Mayer) or, in Alwyn’s case, because living in her shadow allegedly, at least according to Swift’s sources, stirred some bitterness? That’s what we thought heading into drop day, but no: Here, Swift almost returns to her reputation era, but not for romantic nostalgia. Instead, this song heavily evokes her “Look What You Made Me Do” attitude; more a reflection on how she’s come back from controversies (the Kimye conflict comes to mind) not just stronger but as a sort of — and here I am drawing on the gallows imagery — unkillable force. Melodrama, I told you!

But there’s also a sense of humor here. “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,” Swift sings of her public perception, a detail that told Theresa that Swift is in on the joke. People will say things like “‘Taylor Swift will Sue you,’” she explains, nodding to the lawsuits over her music ownership and her merch controversies. “She makes light of it and the joke, and it’s like, Who’s afraid a little me? You should be.” Menacing!

My favorite of all the proposed Easter eggs to have featured so far, though, is Swift’s assertion that she puts “narcotics into all of [her] songs / And that’s why you’re still singin’ along.” Taylor believes Swift is referring to her own hidden messages here — that “her fans are enjoying it so much because she puts these little things in there that make them go, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God!’” The symbolism she embeds keeps them hooked. An Easter egg about her Easter eggs — mastermind, indeed.

Swift revealed that she wrote the song alone at the piano, while feeling “bitter about just all the things we do to our artists as a society and as a culture.”

“There’s a lot about this particular concept on The Tortured Poets Department,” she said. “What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell. We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens.”

“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”

If any song was going to be a Matty Healy diss track, it felt safe to assume it would be this one. Smoking like a chimney and offensive jokes also make sense here, but the lyrics are pretty general. Our experts agree, this is an evergreen sentiment that could apply to many (if not most!) relationships. It does happen to be the shortest song on the album and possibly a nod to the brevity of the Healy situationship?

“Loml”

An acronym for “love of my life” and also, as it turns out, “loss of my life.” “Loml” feels like it’s about Alwyn, not least because of the marriage imagery: “You shit-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles.” Still, a vocal minority of fans on Reddit are committed to the idea that the love-bombing to which Swift gestures points the finger squarely at Healy, though that risks giving him too much credit. “Loml” appears to trace a longer con, and then, she’s addressing herself to a “cinephile in black and white,” a “low-down” (London?) boy — sounds like Alwyn to me!

On “Loml,” Melissa and Theresa also saw a parallel to Folklore’s “Illicit Affairs,” in which Swift sings, “And that’s the thing about illicit affairs / And clandestine meetings and stolen stares / They show their truth one single time / But they lie, and they lie, and they lie / A million little times.” Here, Swift says of her subject, “You said I’m the love of your life / About a million times” — a statement she also considers a lie. “I think it goes back to those albums being a little bit more true to life than we all realized at the time,” Melissa says of Folklore and Evermore. “Those were when she was fighting for her life, trying to work it out.” Here, she also says, “I thought I was better safe than starry-eyed,” a possible reference to reputation’s “Call It What You Want,” in which she was “laughin’ with my lover, makin’ forts under covers” — forts again! — “Trust him like a brother, yeah, you know I did one thing right / Starry eyes sparkin’ up my darkest night.”

“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

This track name makes me think of a sentiment Swift expressed in her Time Person of the Year interview: “I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed,” she says. “That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.” Here, she discusses the experience of heading out on the Eras tour with her personal life falling apart.

What is interesting, though, is how Swift evokes the experience of performing onstage. “You felt like you were her at the concert, because you can hear, in the background, people talking,” Melissa says. It’s what Swift hears in her ear, she explains, adding: ”I thought that was a really good perspective. You feel like you’re pushing through and I gotta just do it.”

“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that Healy is (according to CelebrityHeights.com) five-foot-nine, making him … not the shortest man ever, but one of the shortest men Swift has dated. He is arguably the most likely candidate for having inspired this song. Here, Swift sings about an emotional scammer in a “Jehovah’s Witness suit,” maybe something along the lines of what Healy might wear in concert, who appears in her life only to ghost. The following lyric also suggests we’re talking not about a years-long relationship but about a situation confined to a specific period of time: “I don’t even want you back, I just want to know / If rusting my sparkling summer was the goal.” Another line — “it wasn’t sexy once it wasn’t forbidden” — could possibly shore up the theorizing around “Guilty As Sin?” while the following, to me, sounds like some real Matty Healy shit:

You’ll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars

You crashed my party and your rental car

You said normal girls were boring

But you were gone by the morning

You kicked out the stage lights but you’re still performing

Right?

“The Alchemy”

Again and again on Swift’s albums, references to Alwyn appear linked with the color gold, a pattern the Swifties have certainly clocked. Alchemy, meanwhile, is a branch of ancient protoscience associated with the desire to turn less precious metals into gold. Pre-drop, the prevailing fan theory here held that “The Alchemy” discusses a relationship that looked golden, but turned out to be boring poisonous burdensome lead. But actually, it appears to be the inauguration of the Travis Kelce era, at least if we are weighing sports references by volume: “So when I touch down / Call the amateurs and cut ‘em from the team”; “Shirts off, and your friends lift you up, over their heads / Beer stickin’ to the floor, cheers chanted ‘cause they said / ‘There was no chance trying to be the greatest in the league’ / Where’s the trophy? He just comes, running over to me.” Blokes warming benches? That’s the English men in her past! A couple on a winning streak? Sounds like Traylor and the Chiefs! The football themes are so heavy handed, some Redditors have derided the Kelce coding as overly obvious; an interpretation that feels “reductive and miss[es] a lot of subtext.” Certainly, “The Alchemy” feels like a triumphant comeback, and I suppose only Swift knows if that’s her love life bouncing back or her ego. But again, she never makes a reference she doesn’t mean to, and this track oozes football — never mind its uncomfortable title. It also serves as a reminder to fans: She’s moved on, she’s over it, she’s happy now.

“Clara Bow”

As in, the original “It” girl. Clara Bow was a 1920s movie star whose role in the film It established the idea of celebrity based on ineffable je ne sais quoi. Before Bow abruptly quit the industry — for love, a very Swift move — she reigned as “Hollywood’s ‘hottest jazz baby,’” per Fast Company. Here, Swift appears to be referencing her own massive popularity and relationship to fame; the fact of being “picked like a rose” from small-town obscurity and then picked apart on a public stage. But Bow isn’t the only famous woman Swift names here — she draws comparison to Stevie Nicks, seemingly positioning herself as one in a series of female superstars through which her industry cycles. (Though it’s worth noting, as Jackie points out, that the Tortured Poets LP includes a poem Nicks wrote for Swift.) Swifties have drawn comparisons to “Nothing New” from Red, where she wonders if her popularity will endure once she’s no longer young and novel. The same sentiment comes through here, particularly at the end: “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light, we’re loving it / You’ve got edge, she never did / The future’s bright, it’s dazzling.”

Swift said that the song was inspired by her experience as a young performer, when execs would tell her who she reminded them of. “I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid. And they’d say, ‘You know, you remind us of …’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her, ‘But you’re this, you’re so much better in this way or that way.’ And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, as like you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you,” she said. “I picked women who have done great things in the past and have been these archetypes of greatness in the entertainment industry. Clara Bow was the first ‘It’ girl. Stevie Nicks is an icon and an incredible example for anyone who wants to write songs and make music.”

“The Black Dog”

This is the first of the 16 additional songs that make up The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. In it, Swift opens with an incredibly revealing detail: She’s a Find My Friends user. The track starts with her checking Matty Healy’s location after their breakup — “I am someone who until recent events / You shared your secrets with / And your location, you forgot to turn it off” — and seeing him go into a bar called the Black Dog. We know she’s talking about Healy because of the chorus:

I just don’t understand how you don’t miss me

In The Black Dog, when someone plays The Starting Line

And you jump up, but she’s too young to know this song

That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming

Old habits die screaming

The reference to early 2000s emo band The Starting Line is what gives it away. Healy is a fan, having covered their biggest hit “The Best of Me” while on tour last April. Coincidentally (although you never know with Swift), it was at that same show that Healy apologized to Ice Spice for his racist comments about her.

“imgonnagetyouback”

Swifties are not too concerned with who this one is about, but there is a lot of discussion about Olivia Rodrigo. Last year, Rodrigo had a huge hit with “Get Him Back!” an earworm about a man who sucks but you can’t stop liking. She wants to get him back (in the relationship) and get him back (revenge). It’s clever! Now, Swift has used the same bit of wordplay in her own song, and the fans cannot agree about how they feel.

“Major loss of respect for Taylor after this song and the Olivia Rodrigo issue. I know Olivia won’t but I wish her team would push for song credits on this,” one person wrote on Reddit.

“This sounds nothing like Olivia Rodrigo. Seriously. The titles are similar but how many ways can you say that? The concept of living and hating someone that hurt you isn’t unique either,” wrote another.

The “Olivia Rodrigo issue,” as the first Redditor put it, goes back to 2021, when Rodrigo had to give Swift credit on her song “Deja Vu”  because of the claim that it interpolates “Cruel Summer.” Prior to this, Swift and Rodrigo had been friendly, but the two have not publicly spoken to or about each other since. Ultimately, they might both be ripping off Fiona Apple.

“The Albatross”

Ring the poetry alarm. Swift is referencing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the 1798 poem from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is the poem from which we get the idiom “an albatross around your neck.” In Swift’s version, the albatross is a woman “here to destroy” the male subject of the song.

“Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”

Oh my! There is no consensus on who, exactly, this song is about. Over on Reddit, some fans are saying that it’s Alwyn, while others think that it might be Harry Styles. The track is about an on-again, off-again relationship between Swift and someone who has now moved on. The most compelling argument, I think, comes from TikTok user @GirlBossTown, who thinks the song is about a “decade-long situationship” between Swift and Healy. In the first verse, Swift sings, “The decade would play us for fools.” Ten years ago, back in 2014, Swift and Healy set Tumblr ablaze when they were spotted wearing each other’s merch. Since then, they’ve always sort of been in each other’s orbit.

In case that wasn’t enough to convince you, check out this line: “So if I sell my apartment / And you have some kids with an internet starlet / Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon?” In addition to referencing herself — “Maroon” on Midnights recalls a passionate, messy relationship — she’s talking about Healy moving on. Shortly after they broke up, Healy began dating the model and influencer Gabriette. Do you need more? At one point, Swift sings, “You turned me into an idea of sorts / You needed me, but you needed drugs more,” perhaps alluding to Healy’s well-publicized battles with addiction.

“How Did It End?”

This one is easy. It’s pretty plainly about the way people are ravenous for details about the end of Swift’s relationship with Alwyn. Interestingly, she does kind of give us the answer. He was a “hot house flower” (someone who needed to be sheltered) and she was an “outdoorsman.”

“So High School”

This is the first song that is 100% about Travis (“The Alchemy” is a little unclear). What? Did you think that she was watching American Pie and hanging out watching men play Grand Theft Auto with Matty Healy? No. This is about her football man, and she makes it explicit when she sings, “Are you gonna marry, kiss or kill me?” When these two started dating, fans dug up an old interview with Kelce where he was asked to “Kiss, Marry, Kill” Swift, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande. He picked “kiss” for Swift, and that’s the power of manifestation.

“I Hate It Here”

This one is not about a guy, so there’s not a ton to decode. It’s just Swift singing about how sometimes she has to disassociate in order to feel safe. Woof. “I hate it here so I will go to lunar valleys in my mind / When they found a better planet, only the gentle survived,” she sings. This is also, unfortunately, the song where she says that if she could go back and live in a decade it would be “the 1830s, but without all the racists.”

“thanK you aIMee”

In case it wasn’t obvious from the cheeky capitalization, this one is about Kim Kardashian, who Swift refers to as Aimee in the song. Aimee the character is Swift’s bully, someone who “threatens to push me down the stairs at our school” and is “laughing at each baby step I’d take.” All these years later and Swift is still not over her feud with Kardashian, which itself is an extension of her fifteen-year long feud with Kanye West. Ultimately, Swift comes to the realization that she wouldn’t be where she is without Kardashian, and snidely thanks her.

“I Look in People’s Windows”

“I love love love when Taylor gives us a little ditty,” wrote one Reddit user. That’s what this is, there aren’t any easter eggs for us to pore over. This is just a little ditty about keeping your eyes out for someone you aren’t with anymore. Some good Swift trivia is that this song, at two minutes and eleven seconds, is the shortest Swift song ever. The more you know!

“The Prophecy”

The titular prophecy seems to be that Swift will have all the money in the world, but no one to love. Okay, Charles Foster Kane! Sorry, this is actually a really upsetting song.

Don’t want money

Just someone who wants my company

Let it once be me

Who do I have to speak to

About if they can redo the prophecy?

Swift sings about how she thought she found “lightning in a bottle” (Alwyn? Healy?), but it didn’t last. By the end of the track, she remains in a state of bittersweet hopefulness, still begging whoever is out there to change the prophecy.

“Cassandra”

She said, “It’s time for you guys to learn about Greek mythology.” Swift compares herself to the mythological prophetess, doomed to see the future but have no one believe her. While “thanK you aIMee” is getting a lot of attention, this one seems to be a much more bitter Kardashian-West diss track. The snake imagery in the song — “So they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say / Do you believe me now?” — pairs nicely with the serpentine aesthetic that fueled Swift’s reputation era. Allusions to family, greed, and a “Christian chorus line” all point towards KimYe, and the feud that’s still on Swift’s mind.

“Peter”

So many names on this album. This time Peter is a reference to Peter Pan, who Swift appears to be using as an analog for Healy. This one has a lot of backstory. On “Peter,” Swift sings “And you said you’d come and get me, but you were twenty-five / And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired.” Healy was 25 back in 2014, when he and Swift first encountered each other. Fast forward to folklore and the song “cardigan.” Swift sings, “Tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy.” Last year, at one of the Eras Tour shows Healy attended, Swift appeared to mouth, “This one is about you. You know who you are. I love you,” before singing “cardigan.”

So now, canonically, Matty Healy has a permanent spot in Swift’s catalog as the boy who never grew up. It’s much better than Scarf Guy.

“The Bolter”

What if “Getaway Car” was on folklore? That’s the question bravely posed by this track, which describes a woman who feels the need to “bolt” from relationships. Is it Swift? I don’t know, is Betty? As one helpful Reddit user wrote when someone asked if Swift had actually fallen through the ice as a child, “It’s a metaphor.”

“Robin”

Every now and then Swift likes to write a devastating song about a child, and this falls into that category. I imagine that one of Swift’s friends has a kid named Robin, and that’s who she’s singing about. “You have a favorite spot on the swing set / You have no room in your dreams for regrets,” she sings to this mystery child whose innocence she’s trying to preserve.

“The Manuscript”

Sorry, not to be crazy, but is this song about Jake Gyllenhaal? Rather, is it about “All Too Well?” The story follows a young woman who has a “torrid affair” with an older man, one who makes her “wish she was thirty.” “She thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years / Everything had been above board / She wasn’t sure,” Swift sings.

If you’ll recall, All Too Well: The Short Film, ends with a grown up Swift having written a book about her time with the scarf thief. Books, manuscripts, there’s a theme. At the end of the song, Swift sings, “Now and then I reread the manuscript / But the story isn’t mine anymore,” perhaps alluding to the fact that “All Too Well” has become something bigger than her relationship with Gyllenhaal ever was.