I gave Taylor Swift’s newer music a shot this week after watching Gracie Abrams cover her song “Maroon”. I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift while growing up, and even now, she’s one of my most scrobbled artists. However, I stopped keeping track of her releases after Lover—partly because she hasn’t had a breakout hit, and partly because I lost interest. Unfortunately, the songs I just listened to, songs off her newest albums, The Tortured Poets Department and Midnights, are impossible to enjoy. She’s taken the diaristic style that made songs like “You Belong with Me,” “Back to December,” and “All Too Well” so effective and turned it into something weird and uncanny.

Consider, for instance, these excerpts from the title track “The Tortured Poets Department”:

You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate
We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist

and later,

At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger
And put it on the one people put wedding rings on
And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding

Or, the first verse from “Maroon”:

When the morning came
We were cleaning incense off your vinyl shelf
[…]
“How’d we end up on the floor, anyway?” you say
“Your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rosé, that’s how”
I see you every day now

These are not the depictions of relatable and formative experiences that comprise her earlier music, but random vignettes that are so specific that they’re almost inside jokes (at the very least, they alienate like inside jokes). I bet even the most die-hard Taylor Swift enjoyer gets nothing from these lyrics; not only do they fail to express an emotion or a thought, but they are so over-defined that they don’t even convey anything about her life. Yes, you now know that she used to date someone who got the munchies, but does that have any significance towards understanding what it means to be Taylor? When I started listening to these albums, I hoped to fall back in love with a childhood favorite, but now I can’t help but come to the unfortunate conclusion: these latest Taylor Swift songs are seriously broken.

To find out how we got here, let’s trace the evolution of personal details in Taylor’s music. From the beginning, Taylor has been known for diaristic lyrics. In songs off her debut album, she weaved excerpts from arguments with exes and moments from her life into her lyrics. She continued to write songs about her personal life in the followup albums Fearless and Speak Now. But while the details in newer songs seem random, the personal touches in her earlier work are undeniably authentic—and Taylor was aware of how these touches affected her audience. In a 2012 interview, she told NPR that the highly personal songs she was writing helped her foster a deep connection with her fans:

When I first started writing songs, I was always scared that my songs were too personal — like, if I put someone’s name in a song, people won’t relate to it as much. But what I saw happening was, if I let my fans into my life and my feelings and what I’m going through — my vulnerabilities, my fears, my insecurities — it turns out they have all those things, too, and it kind of connects us.

Around the time of this interview, Taylor dropped the album Red, and with it, the song “All Too Well”, a breakup ballad widely considered to be her best and most personal song. According to its oral history, “All Too Well” was conceived at a Speak Now tour rehearsal in an impromptu jam session provoked by her recent breakup with Jake Gyllenhaal. As the story goes, Taylor came in crying, sat down, ad-libbed the whole song, and cut it together later from an audio engineer’s recording. The song features a series of glimpses into their relationship, and her use of personal details was lauded by critics and captured the imagination of fans. The details set this song apart from the radio-friendly hits that dominate Red, elevating “All Too Well” to the pinnacle of Taylor Swift’s discography. They engender this sense of nostalgia and intimacy that makes you instantly understand why she was so emotional when she performed it at the 56th Grammy Awards.

However, the details hold no power in their own right. They derive their meaning from the stories they tell—stories about heartbreak, yearning, and growing up. The one told in “All Too Well” is about the loss of a serious relationship; the kind of relationship involving family, hometowns, and all the little moments that come from merging two lives together. Without the story of this breakup, the lines “I left my scarf there at your sister’s house / And you’ve still got it in your drawer even now” are empty rather than evocative of post-breakup longing.

But with all the praise for her details and the wind at her back, Taylor took her diaristic songwriting and ran with it. In 2019, she wrote an Elle Article valorizing the inclusion of personal details in pop music. In particular, she revealed that she deliberately tries to pack her songs full of her own memories and experiences:

The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melodic cadence you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.

She explains that it’s the details themselves that connect artists and fans—offering a glimpse into the artist’s life and something for listeners to relate to.

You’d think that as pop writers, we’re supposed to be writing songs that everyone can sing along to, so you’d assume they would have to be pretty lyrically generic… AND YET the ones I think cut through the most are actually the most detailed, and I don’t mean in a Shakespearean sonnet type of way, although I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl. Obviously. (See “Love Story,” 2008).

[…]

We actually do NOT want our pop music to be generic. I think a lot of music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive.

This glimpse into the artist’s story invites us to connect it to our own, and in the best case scenario, allows us the ability to assign that song to our memories.

These insights signify a shift in Taylor’s approach to songwriting. She no longer seems interested in connecting with fans through personal music, like she did in 2012. Instead, she seems to have embraced a more calculated—almost cynical—strategy of using personal details to create a sense of “instant intimacy.” The old Taylor never would have described her process as a “squeezing” of “evocative details”. She was just trying to write about “[her] life and [her] feelings and what [she was] going through.”

Emblematic of this shift is her 2021 release of a 10 minute version of “All Too Well”, marketed as a more faithful reproduction of the original tour rehearsal jam session from over a decade ago. Double the length of the 2012 track, this new release features new verses and extensions to the existing ones. However, it is obvious that these lyrics are newly written additions, not restorations. While the original song was centered around autumn scenes and domesticity, the new lyrics lack that unity. At the end of an existing verse about sharing childhood stories, for instance, she tacked on the lines “And you were tossing me the car keys, ‘Fuck the patriarchy’ / Keychain on the ground, we were always skippin’ town.” Not only do these lines have nothing to do with the ones preceding, but this situation where she dropped a feminist keychain definitely didn’t happen. The new Taylor Swift, represented in this 10 minute version, is all about detail for detail’s sake. As long as a detail sounds good and poetic, it’s going in the song—story be damned.

In a speech at the 2022 Nashville Songwriter’s Awards, Taylor reiterated her obsession with detail, this time framing it as “fountain pen” songwriting. To her, this style of songwriting is all about taking poetic license to describe modern situations—and it’s the approach she takes when writing the majority of her music. In particular, fountain pen style is steeped in visual imagery and specifics:

Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references, with a poetic twist. Taking a common phrase and flipping its meaning. Trying to paint a vivid picture of a situation, down to the chipped paint on the door frame and the incense dust on the vinyl shelf. Placing yourself and whoever is listening right there in the room where it all happened.

“All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” is featured on Taylor’s Apple Music playlist dedicated to fountain pen songs. So is “Maroon”, the song that alerted me to the messiness of Taylor’s new music. If these songs are representative of fountain pen style, then it must be a style marked by contrivance and pretension—and it’s no mystery why. By constantly forcing poetic detail into her lyrics, she falls into the trap of corniness that Aristotle cautioned against in The Art of Rhetoric. As he wrote, “It is from [the use of epithets that are either long or inapt or frequent] that the corny expressions of Alcidamas arise, for he uses epithets not as seasonings but as a main course, and thus they are long and too grand and conspicuous” ¹. By prioritizing details above all else, she has undermined her original intent, leaving the songs overwrought and difficult to relate to.

However, Taylor does not need to change her songwriting process if she wants to improve her music. Her discography is littered with songs that are just as nonsensical as her fountain pen songs, but you hardly notice the lyrics because the production is so much more elaborate. Consider the song “Red,” an older counterpart to “Maroon” that is also filled with color-themed nonsense lines, but features an exciting melody and an uptempo beat that keeps the focus off the lyrics. And the song is so fun to listen to! It is only when she removes her storytelling and strips down the production that her over-reliance on detail becomes too obvious and annoying. If she wants to make enjoyable music while still playing with detail, she can do so by ensuring the songs can stand up for themselves through sonic excellence. In fact, this is one solution Aristotle suggested to avoid corniness, writing that “[Made-up sayings] are most useful for dithyrambic poets, since they are full of noisy sound” ². Maybe Taylor should get a little dithyrambic with it.

But maybe I’m wrong and this new Taylor Swift music is actually really great. Somehow she keeps topping the charts and attracting new fans. And Gracie Abrams likes “Maroon” enough to cover it at a show. For me, though, I’m happier listening to the classics. ■