Swifties are preparing for an emotional journey with the imminent release of “The Tortured Poets Department.”
After accepting her 13th Grammy win Feb. 4, Taylor Swift revealed her 11th studio album would come out April 19.
Within minutes of the announcement, fans took to social media to share theories about the album — and how it might connect to her ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn.
Swift is currently in a highly publicized romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. But during her album announcement, Swift said she had been working on “Tortured Poets” for two years, which overlaps with her former relationship with Alwyn.
Reports that Swift and Alwyn broke up started circulating in April 2023. They had been dating for six years.
Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn at the Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 5, 2020.Christopher Polk / NBCU via Getty Images
Theories about the inspiration behind “The Tortured Poets Department” only intensified after Swift released the song titles on Feb. 5. The track list alone suggests the album may be about a breakup, with songs like, “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” and “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.”
Then, during Swift’s Feb. 16 “Eras Tour” show in Melbourne, Australia, the singer surprised fans by unveiling a bonus track for the album titled “The Bolter” and spoke more about what the album means to her.
“‘Tortured Poets’ is an album that I think, more than any of my albums that I’ve ever made, I needed to make it,” she said. “It was really a lifeline for me, just the things I was going through, the things I was writing about, it kind of reminded me why songwriting is something that like actually gets me through my life. I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on ‘Tortured Poets.'”
Swift has previously said she won’t confirm what — or whom — her songs are about. Rather than address her personal life in interviews, Swift weaves details into songs.
“I don’t talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you’re going through,” Swift told Glamour in 2012.
Here’s why fans think her upcoming 11th album will divulge details about her former relationship with Alwyn.
The ‘Tortured Poets Department’ timeline
When Swift announced “The Tortured Poets Department,” she said the new album was a “secret” she had been keeping from fans for “the last two years.”
Swift and Alwyn were still reportedly together during that time, and Alwyn made a rare comment about their notoriously private relationship in an interview that April, telling the Guardian what it was like co-writing songs together.
“It wasn’t like, ‘It’s 5 o’clock, it’s time to try and write a song together,’” he said. “It came about from messing around on a piano, and singing badly, then being overheard, and being, like, ‘Let’s see what happens if we get to the end of it together.’”
But the relationship might not have been all smooth sailing.
Connections to ‘You’re Losing Me’
In addition to “Tortured Poets,” fans also suspected Swift sings about Alwyn in the “Midnights” vault track “You’re Losing Me,” which she released in May 2023. The song is a devastating look at the end of a relationship and came out just weeks after reports of their split.
But Swift’s collaborator, Jack Antonoff, later revealed on his Instagram story the song was written in December 2021, significantly before their breakup. This signaled to fans that the couple may have went through a rough patch before the release of “Midnights.”
With “You’re Losing Me” having been written shortly before the window of time when “Tortured Poets” became a “secret” project, fans are doing the math: Swift’s split with Alwyn may have inspired more than just one track.
Right after announcing the album’s alternative cover and bonus track during her Feb. 16 concert, Swift performed “You’re Losing Me” for the first time live, further connecting the two projects in fans’ minds.
Taylor Swift’s ‘five stages of heartbreak’ playlists
Swift has announced four special editions of her upcoming album, each with an alternate cover art and subheading. To promote “Tortured Poets,” Swift took those subheadings and created playlists inspired by them, revealing that each represents one of the five stages of grief, or in this case, heartbreak.
Swift built the playlists using songs from her own discography. The first playlist, “I Love You It’s Ruining My Life,” was said to represent denial.
“This is a list of songs about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion. Results may vary,” Swift said in a voice memo a the start of the playlist.
Songs on the playlist included tracks she co-wrote with William Bowery (Alwyn’s pen name), including “Betty” and “Sweet Nothing,” as well as “Lover.” The single from the 2019 album of the same name is often thought of as one of her most romantic tracks. The album, with songs like “London Boy,” was also thought to be about Alwyn, who she started dating around 2016/2017.
‘The Tortured Man Club’
One of the first connections to Alwyn that fans made involves the new album’s title.
Amid the announcement, X users resurfaced a December 2022 interview between Alwyn and Paul Mescal for Variety, in which the two revealed that they were part of a WhatsApp chat they titled “The Tortured Man Club.” Actor Andrew Scott was the third member of the chat, they said.
“It hasn’t had much use recently,” Alwyn said at the time, to which Mescal replied, “No, I feel like we’re less tortured now.”
The Revolutionary War
Some fans even brought a history lesson into the mix, noting that Swift is releasing the album the same day as the American Revolutionary War began in 1775.
The war reference might seem outlandish, but actually could align with released lyrics from the album, which have battle imagery. Further, Alwyn is from England; Swift grew up in West Reading, Pennsylvania.
“And so I enter into evidence/ My tarnished coat of arms/ My muses acquired like bruises/ My talismans and charms/ The tick, tick, tick of the love bombs/ My veins of pitch black ink,” Swift wrote over the black and white album art.
Track 5
Alwyn, born in Kent and later raised in North London, is considered to be the “London Boy” referenced in the track of the same name from Swift’s seventh album, “Lover.”
“You know I love a London boy/ I enjoy walking Camden Market in the afternoon/ He likes my American smile/ Like a child when our eyes meet, darling, I fancy you,” she sings in the upbeat track, with themes of falling in love with someone and the setting that raised them.
One of the tracks on “Tortured Poets” seemingly makes a similar reference, but with a very different tone. The fifth track of the upcoming album is “So Long, London.”
It’s not just the title that had fans reeling, but the track number as well. Track fives on Swift’s albums are known for being some of the most devastating, emotional and vulnerable songs in Swift’s discography. Some highlights include “Dear John,” “All Too Well,” “My Tears Ricochet” and “You’re On Your Own, Kid.”
Swift reportedly said on an Instagram Live in July 2019 that she puts songs that are “honest, emotional, vulnerable and personal” in the fifth spot intentionally.
‘The Little Mermaid’ theory
The “Tortured Poets” track list reveals another potential reference. The sixth track is titled “But Daddy I Love Him,” which is also a quote from “The Little Mermaid,” released in 1989 (wink, wink.)
In the scene, Ariel’s father has discovered she went to the surface to save Prince Eric. As he rants against humans, she shouts, “Daddy, I love him,” before he destroys her grotto and her collection of mortal treasures.
Diving through the Instagram archives, Swift’s connection to the “Little Mermaid” runs deep. In January 2019, Swift posted a photo of herself dressed as Ariel, writing that her group “decided to dress up as our childhood heroes.”
As a fan of the original film, Swift is likely to remember that in order to be with the man she loves, Ariel gives up her voice to Ursula, the sea witch. Her melodic vocals were stored in a seashell necklace — a symbol that briefly appeared in her 2022 music video for “Bejeweled.”
The central theme of “Bejeweled” is about a person feeling like they are being taken for granted and kept out of sight when they can “still make the whole place shimmer.”
What if I told you she’s a mastermind? YouTube
In the music video, the seashell necklace opens to reveal a stopwatch counting down the seconds until “exile ends.” (“Exile” notably is the name of a song from 2020’s “Folklore” that Swift co-wrote with “William Bowery,” Alwyn’s pseudonym.)
Putting this all together, fans predict “But Daddy I Love Him” will relate to Swift’s efforts at “giving up her voice to be with the love of her life.”
