Transcript: Culture chat — Is Taylor Swift’s new album too much? 

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — Is Taylor Swift’s new album too much?’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which was the outrageously anticipated album released last week. It quickly broke records, becoming the first album in Spotify history to surpass 300mn streams in a day. And two hours after it was released, Taylor Swift announced that it was a surprise double album with 31 tracks instead of the expected 16. The Tortured Poets Department is widely interpreted as an album about break-ups and fame. It has references to her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, which ended last year, and her short subsequent fling with The 1975 singer Matty Healy and her new boyfriend, football star Travis Kelce. Today we have our favourite music duo back with us to talk about it. They were here last to talk about Cowboy Carter. I’m Lilah and all my friends smell like weed or little babies. Joining me in New York is the US labour inequality correspondent. She’s working her life away just to pay for a timeshare down in Destin. It’s Taylor Nichole Rogers. 

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Hi.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And on the line from London — he knew what he wanted, and, boy, he got her. It’s our great FT music critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney. Ludo, welcome.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Thank you, Lilah. Hello.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hello. OK, so let’s talk about this album. Top line, what did you think? Ludo, let’s start with you.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I enjoyed the album. I think, myself having not so rated its predecessor Midnights, which was a huge hit, I think that this is a more cohesive album, one which makes better use of its themes. Sounds better. And so for me, it may turn out to be the underrated Taylor album as a result of the previous album having been overrated. I do think it does well at projecting a sort of, the sort of downbeat aspects of a break-up album, with the sort of more pop elements that you would expect from Taylor Swift.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Taylor, what about you?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
For me, this was an album of high highs and low lows. I say this as a Swiftie who first saw Taylor in concert before her first album even came out. I’ve been in this game for a long time, and I did really, really enjoy most of the album. Like, the first 16 tracks I thought were really great. When we got into the anthology, the bonus tracks, I think there were entire tracks that could have been deleted. And so for me, that was difficult to process because I felt like we were going somewhere, and then we kind of just got lost like 90 minutes in.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. So for context, we’ve got sort of the experienced music critics’ point of view. We’ve got the true Swiftie since the sixth grade.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Since the beginning, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, since the beginning point of view. I am a fair weather fan. I’ve always liked her enough. I’ve liked her more as she’s gotten more famous because she’s just around more, and I found on first listen, I got quite bored by this album. And it felt a little, because we’ve been so saturated with her, it felt sort of like an AI version of her in a weird way. Some of the songs that felt quite familiar to old songs that all felt sort of beige. But then, on second listen and third and fourth, I started to like it more and some songs really stood out and I started to appreciate it. I feel like I would love to edit down this album into like, a tight 11 that’s my Taylor Swift, my version of this album, and pretend that the other 20 something just didn’t exist.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yeah, I can see that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ludo, I’ve been dying to ask you. So you wrote your review not knowing that this was a double album? That was like a total secret, even to critics. And you really liked it as a single album. How did you feel when it doubled?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
So I have to say that . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Did you change your opinion?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
So The Tortured Poets Department anthology, or whatever the title of the whole thing is, is a huge experience. It’s a monster. The thing is a mountain. And I mean, I think we do need to hack away at it in order to try to work out what we mean when we talk about the album. So for me, the extra tracks, I enjoyed listening to them. They were all right to listen to, they’re well made. They sound to me like vault tracks from Folklore and Evermore, her sort of quieter, pandemic-era albums. They sound to me like something which belonged to that particular of her eras, and don’t necessarily have a lot to do with the current one.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think I agree. Consistency has been something that she struggled with since 1989. In my mind, I’m just thinking back to like my . . . I also went to a listening party on Friday night — why am I really exposing myself — but I went to a Taylor Swift listening party on Friday night and everyone had the same reaction, and that was that we felt like the consistency has levelled off, and that makes albums harder to enjoy when you feel like you’re on a flow and then you get the song out of left field and you’re like, what’s going on? There wasn’t the same cohesive story that I’m used to hearing from Taylor, but it was a . . . there were some really great songs.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. OK, I would love to talk about the best and worst songs on this album — in British terms, the bangers and the clangers, if you will. Ludo, bangers. What is one song on this album that you really loved?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
The one which I really, which really stands out for me is “So Long, London”. Maybe as a Londoner, I feel this song with a particular sort of, like that sort of cuts particularly deep. This song is the one which seems to be most directly about the break-up of the six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, the British actor of which a lot had been made that this album was gonna be about. This song is very clearly about that. And for me, it is a song which is full of feeling. It’s very well made. It opens with her doing her vo-, a sort of multitrack Taylor doing vocals in the style of London’s bells ringing. It’s a really artful song. It’s full of feeling, I love it.

[“SO LONG, LONDON” PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I love it too. I also really liked — maybe this is an unpopular opinion — but I like “Down Bad”.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
That was on my list. That’s my current favourite.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s sort of was like a Lana Del Rey feeling, a kind of R&B feeling song. I really thought it was good. And I think she’s really, like, perennially good. And a lot of the songs, she reminds me how good she is at pinpointing very specific break-up feelings. It conjured the faces of many exes of mine, and I thought that was like, I thought, I don’t know. I think she really nailed it when she nailed it on this album.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I agree. I agree. The ones I would add to that are “But Daddy I Love Him”, which I think is a classic Taylor pop track, which I really loved. And then “Florida!!!”, which I thought was very musically interesting.

[“FLORIDA!!!” PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
What about the clangers? What were the songs that you really didn’t like?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think “So High School” is her worst song since “ME!”. And it pains me to say it, I think the lyricism is just ridiculous. It just sounds silly. And it makes me uncomfortable to think of Travis Kelce feeling her up, while his friends are playing Grand Theft Auto. I just, I can’t, and I have to say, I’m not the only one that feels this way.

[“SO HIGH SCHOOL” PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
There’s something very insulting also about saying, You play ball, I know Aristotle. I think it’s . . . (laughter) one that’s like, I know it’s smarter than you. I don’t know, I just, I don’t think really if that’s . . . if the love of my life wrote that song about me, I would probably walk right into the East River. (Laughter)

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I have to confess, I have to confess, sotto voce, that I quite like that song, I’m afraid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You did?!? Why?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
What?!? What about it?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I tell you I quite like that song, and I’m now embarrassed to quite like it. I’m actually now so embarrassed. No, I am, I’m blushing.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
You should be.

Lilah Raptopoulos
No, no, no. But the funny thing is, I keep thinking about that song. So maybe it worked, like, maybe actually it was good . . . 

Taylor Nicole Rogers
It didn’t. No, it didn’t.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Why did you like it? Why did you like it?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I mean, I quite liked it, but I think that the embarrassment I now feel about liking it, so I agree, that is an awful lyric. I feel like that embarrassment is actually part of liking Taylor Swift songs that you should actually feel embarrassed about it. There has always been an embarrassment to her lyrics. There has always been an embarrassing side to being a Swiftie, so to speak.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s true. You mean this sort of cheesiness? 

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
The cheesiness and the idea that you are gonna cringe a bit and that they’re a bit sort of thinking, oh, Taylor, no. And then you just like, fine talking back to those songs, you know, and you’re listening to them, you’re going, well, actually, I actually really quite like this. And so I think that the experience of feeling embarrassed is part of the experience of enjoying Taylor Swift, and that is something that humanises this huge giant megastar. And it’s a line you can trace all the way back to sort of like when she was a teenager.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
One thing that our colleague, Madison Derbyshire, said to me that really captured the feeling of this album was that it wasn’t very specific in the feelings, like she uses a lot of this, like, poetic, flowery language, which sometimes is beautiful but also makes it hard to relate to what’s going on. But in this song, it’s just . . . It’s confusing. Like, yes, you’re talking about Grand Theft Auto, but . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s vibes.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
It’s all about the vibe. You’re feeling like you’re in high school, but that doesn’t conjure up anything for the audience other than just images of Travis Kelce on her couch.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I think I found when this album didn’t work, I’d be curious what you both think but I felt like the themes felt a little repetitive and a lot of them felt, after a while, quite petty in a way that I like when she puts words to things that are, that are hard, but it felt a little by the end like, I get it, we all hurt you, but now you’re on top of the world. And, I felt by, yeah, about two-thirds of the way in, kind of like, OK, OK.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Do you both think that the . . . if we were to take the original 16-track album, do you think that that is more cohesive for you? Because for me, those first 16 songs do work together and the themes which are in there are actually quite well controlled, quite tightly done.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I agree. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, totally. If it ended at 16, I think we would be having a different conversation.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
We would be.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
We’ve got these themes going through it, of the of the idea of break-ups with whoever it might be. And then at the same time, there’s the gothic imagery which recurs throughout it, which I think sort of adds to the idea. She has cobwebs in houses, and the house up on the heath, which create the idea of sort of spinsters and in lonely, sort of windy houses and all of these go together. And then it sort of ends with Clara Bow, who was a 1920s silent film star. It ends with that track in which Taylor basically hands on the torch. It’s as though she’s doing another sort of break-up because she’s imagining the next generation who is going to come after her. And so for me, it all ties together quite, it ties together well. I mean, that there are problems on the album are to do with the fact that it’s, even with 16 tracks, that’s still a few too many. I mean, there are some songs which simply don’t work for me. “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” is a completely pointless song. So pointless. She literally gives up on that song at the end of it, because at the end of it, it’s almost just like it was all a dream and I woke up. It’s an awful song.

[“I CAN FIX HIM (NO REALLY I CAN)” PLAYING] 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, I would love to talk about how this pop star’s outrageous level of fame affects how we listen to her music. You know, I didn’t really want to do this episode because I had Taylor Swift fatigue. But you both said it was crucial to the culture and I’m really glad we’re doing it. But I’ve been trying to figure out, like, what’s so annoying to me about it, and I think it’s that it’s that, like, I feel like I’m stuck in this thing with her where I have to care about Matty Healy, and I don’t want to have to care about Matty Healy. And, you know, she’s my age, and I don’t want her to fail because I’ve watched us ruin so many pop stars. And they end up sort of dancing on Instagram like Britney Spears, and you worry about them. So I want her to stop and slow down. And then I find that maybe I’m being sexist by not liking this album very much or wanting her to stop and slow down. And then I think, wait, this is about the music. I shouldn’t even be thinking about her so much when I’m listening to this album, but I just can’t separate them. And that feels like a problem somehow. Ludo, what do you think? 

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I think it is possible to move beyond that. Hard, difficult, she encourages it, of course. And the blanket coverage makes it very difficult to move away from. So it requires an immense effort of will. But it can be tuned out, I think. Because I also think of her as being like an actress, really, in terms of how she presents herself. I love her singing, the way she sings, the voice she has. She’s found this style. I think one reason for her incredible prolificity is the fact that she has a way that she sounds, which you can just like tune straight into. It’s almost like the Ramones. You feel like she can do these songs over and over again. She can just go straight into and lock into them. And one way, one reason is the way she sings. Her vocal melodies, the intonations, the way she goes and brings life and acts out and is very dynamic in her songs. For me, all of these are like actor’s skills in a way. And so the fact that she’s kind of acting out songs and also the fact that songs have to be dramatic, I mean to say that no pop singer, and certainly no pop megastar is gonna be able to write a song about just feeling, oh, you know, I left this person, but it’s all right. I don’t really mind. I’ve turned every new leaf and everything’s great. No, that doesn’t work. So you do need to have all of these various sort of tortured feelings or whatever they might be, in order to go and make the song something that we want to listen to. Yes, she does admittedly encourage us also to read them as sort of memoirs in some way. She does encourage us to do that. But at the same time, I don’t think that we have to do that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. It’s good to remember that, like, all of this is on purpose. And it’s and she, yeah, and she could be . . . She’s playing as much of a part as . . . she’s probably playing much more of a part than we are thinking that she is.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
It is. Yeah. And I think in this album specifically, it seems like she’s more blurring the lines between what song is about who than in the past. Like, I think about some of her other big songs, like “All Too Well”. Like, no one’s questioning who that song is about. We’re actually debating, OK, this line of the song is Joe, this song line is Matty, this line of the song is Travis. Like, it seems like she has taken a step away from like the autobiographical a little bit in this album.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is she trolling us? Like, do you think the song “So High School” is just, she knows that . . . (Laughter)

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I just don’t know who else that one could be about. That one’s very specific. I’ll never get over the Grand Theft Auto line.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, I mean, it makes me like the album more if she’s just trolling all of us. I don’t know.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Maybe she is. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so my last question is — I would love to hear your predictions — what do you think could possibly be next for this pop star in our culture? Is there a way for her to get bigger? Ludo.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
So we have this album coming out, which, as you say, has been streamed 200mn times, 300mn times. The Eras Tour hasn’t finished. It’s now about to start its European leg and it will go on until December, and it’s already the highest-grossing tour ever. So she is at this sort of maximum inflection point. It’s hard to imagine how she could get bigger. I think that this coming year will be quite crucial. I think one thing, oddly enough, will be the American election, where there’s already lots of talk about who will Taylor come out for. So I think that we have this situation now where it’s like, has she got as big as she can get? And it’s this album which has attracted its detractors. Is it actually now that that is the maximum point, or will it actually be the case that this shocking amount of music is gonna sit there, just like sort of attracting everyone’s attention over the coming year as she goes and fills out stadiums across Europe, as she gets all of the column inches, which will come from that when she releases Reputation, her re-recorded version, and then when she goes and comes out for, let’s go and just to fantasise, Biden in October and suddenly we see the election being credited to her. It’s not impossible to imagine that this would then be literally the year that Taylor Swift was seen to save the world. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
That . . . Is that’s where we’re going? So she won the Super Bowl, and then she . . . 

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
That was just the . . . that was the hors d’oeuvre. No, no, no. That was just the beginnings of it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Taylor, what do you think?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I’ve been a Taylor Swift fan since I was in the sixth grade. Like she was, I think my second or third concert. And so I don’t think there’s any world in which I stop listening to Taylor Swift. What my guess is what’s gonna happen is that she was just in this really bad mental and emotional state, and then she had all this music. She just wanted to, like, get it off her chest, tell her side of the story. Show like that this has actually been a really difficult moment for her. Add some nuance to this like Taylor mania moment. And I think she’ll just finish Eras and then just take a break and then come back in two years with another like more classic pop album. And that’s where I see this going. I see this being just like an experiment in poetry that, you know, didn’t really hit all of its marks. This feels like I’ll just release everything else that’s in my voice memos app. You know, you guys have fun with it. I’m gonna finish my tour. And then I’ll come back and do something else.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And it ended then and then it loops back in, and world domination continues.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ludo and Taylor, this was such a delight. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[FT NEWS BRIEFING TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back to More or Less, the part of the show where each guest says something they want to see more of or less of in culture. Ludo, what do you have?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I’m gonna be greedy, actually, because I want to have more rap beef. Because at the moment there’s a lot of rap beef going on. (Laughter) You may be aware of it, you both. So there’s a big rap beef, which is basically the entire rap world against Drake right now. They are just like putting out these tracks left, right and centre. The whole thing is really kicking off. I want more of this. I want it to spread out. I’d like to also see . . . so far it’s been all of the male rappers. I’d like to see the women get involved. I want this to really spread out and get very, very big. I want it to be like the world, the WWE wrestling. I want it to be big, all in. More rap beef. Spoilt for choice so far. More please. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Amazing. Taylor, what do you got?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Keeping with the music theme, I want more, like summer pop songs, like we used to have, like, a song of the summer every year. I was really hoping from that. I was really hoping that Taylor would give us one. I don’t think we got it on this album. We have one from Sabrina Carpenter, which is “Espresso”. I think Dua Lipa is trying, but I, yeah, I don’t think we got it. So I want more just like fun, simple, catchy summer pop songs. Yeah. Do you have any, Ludo, that I should listen to?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I mean, I think April here is still really chilly, so I don’t think anyone’s got their summer pop song heads on. Dua Lipa, I mean, Dua Lipa’s new album is out on May the 3rd. So I would be astonished if that didn’t have a contender.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, she’s got to have one.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think she has some contenders. They just . . . it wasn’t future nostalgia for me.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Yeah, summer pop songs. I’ll think about that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I would like a . . . I’m gonna do a more too . . . This is sort of that week in April or those weeks where like the magnolias come into season and then they fall and then the cherry blossoms come into season and then they fall. And every time I look around, there’s like a new tree and it’s got a new type of flower. And I know that in a couple weeks they’ll all be done flowering and it’ll just be green. But my Instagram is full of photos of all these flowering trees. And I think that some people think that it could be annoying that everybody’s posting photos of flowering trees are basic, but I love it, and I want more. And I want everyone to just post photos of the flowering trees around them and be as happy about spring as I am. And this is the week of the year that every New Yorker stops being depressed.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And we should embrace it.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I love that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I think that’s it. Ludo, Taylor, what an absolute delight. Please come again soon. And thank you so much.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Happy to talk Taylor Swift any time.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Thank you very much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have links expanding on everything mentioned today, including Ludo’s review of The Tortured Poets Department. Every link that goes to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes, there’s a link to buy tickets to the US FT Weekend Festival in Washington, DC. It’s coming up on Saturday, May 4th at the REACH at the Kennedy Center, and we have a special discount for podcast listeners in the show notes.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]