Taylor Swift is all anyone can talk about this week, dropping her new long-awaited studio album The Tortured Poets Department last Friday. And in a surprise move, the 34-year-old released an additional 15 songs two hours later, revealing that it was a secret double album.
“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift announced on social media. “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.”
Her message continued: “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.”
Among the 31 new Taylor Swift songs was ‘Clara Bow’, a brand new track that Swiftie sleuths have been trying to decode, looking for Easter eggs and hidden references.
Thankfully Swift herself has broken her silence on the track, revealing to Amazon Music that the song was “a commentary on what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time.”
“I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid,” Swift recalled. “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,” she continued. “As like you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you.
“I picked women who have done great things in the past and have been these archetypes of greatness in the entertainment industry,” she went on to explain. “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.”
Well, that’s that.
We will continue to update this story.
