The Tortured Poets Department, Part I

Like the album, this review / recap is a marathon not a sprint.

If there is one line from my book that I return to often it is: Taylor Swift is nothing if not an artist deeply committed to subverting expectations. 

Spotify's Taylor Swift Pop-Up At The Grove in Los Angeles. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth via Getty Images

Outside a hub of hardcore ‘Swiftie Scholars’ this sentiment is a hard sell for most to believe. On her surface, Taylor fits the norms we as a society most value. Her blondeness, her whiteness, her thinness all insulate her with privilege. Yet at every turn in her career I have witnessed her choose The Other Path - creating art in response to critique. Rather than take the easy way out, she’s sought to defiantly construct music as clapback to the commentary she’s self-aware enough to know is being constructed around her stardom. Over the years, the labels have creatively evolved in name, but never in intent, to make her work (and by extension those who enjoy it) seem frivolous, meaningless, or airless when it comes to truly impacting and shaping culture. Her rewritten fairy tale endings to Shakespearean tragedies, entirely self-authored LPs, undiluted watershed pop albums centering friends over romance, love letters at the bottom of a snakepit - all created with a mission to get the last word. 

But does her privilege also inadvertently position herself advantageously to be able to claim the last word and to make sure hers is the one heard most and loudest? Yes. Lindsay Zoladz for the New York Times asked, “Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?”. But Taylor’s opening parry when introducing this album to the world got to the heart of that immediately when she said, “All’s fair in love and poetry.” 

And I think this is the gristle that makes consuming Poets so difficult for so many. Especially when that final, often cutting, word is aimed at themselves. 

The complication with Poets is the friction of each of Taylor’s selves battling for supremacy. The artist, the person, the lover, the celebrity - all tortured in their own respects. As the most famous woman in the world, how do you respond to those who have wronged you when any direction you put your arm out is seen as a ‘punch down’? How do you address the survival instincts that kicked in amidst scrutiny? How do you retain the identity of the Vulnerable Everygirl? How do you discuss the lethal impact of fame and not also take shots at those who made you famous? How do you write honestly when your persona has eclipsed your art? How do you contend with a litany of men expressly telling you that you are really not very funny and all you can summon up in response is a series of very bad dad jokes? How do you look Charlie Puth in the eye ever again? 

In order to brush off the effects of “soliloquies [she’ll] never see” Taylor has to acknowledge their existence and, in turn, its impact on her psyche. In order to seem removed from the cages that constrained her, she has to attack the jailer. In many ways this album becomes a brutal fist fight across 31 tracks. Her lyrical punches land in equal measure on former paramours, critical detractors, and her own face. Having always carefully balanced Taylor Swift™ The Brand with Taylor Swift The Person, this album finally feels like an exploration of what it was like to constantly default to the former and the consequences of that on the latter. And to absolutely zero people’s surprise the  consequences are Pretty Fucked Up. Who knew a lifetime of packaging your defiance into as palatable a package as possible could create an emotional ulcer the size of a cantaloupe on your insides? 

Perhaps more people would like this album if it came with the fictional veil she pulled over her pandemic albums in order to shield her personal life from online sleuthing and relentless paternity testing. Many, including Jonathan Keefe of Slant, feel that way. He described her writing on Poets as a “regression” from the standard set by folkmore that “expanded her narrative voice beyond an insular Main Character Syndrome.” Other common criticisms touch on the album’s expansive quality which, to some, veered on self-indulgent and insulary. Olivia Horn for Pitchfork noted, “Its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.” Likewise, Zoladz said, “Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit.” In both cases, I’m glad she didn’t. 

For me, Taylor is at her best when she is making the personal feel communal. Her music is the richest (and pettiest) when it’s rife with details mined from her life, proffering her most private experiences for the masses to parasocially latch onto and then reapply to our own lives. It’s the life’s blood of her work that has fed both her own therapeutic process and a deep fan connection. And so what if I’m nosy and like to intermittently fill the vacuum of my life with the gossipy intricacies of my favourite celebrity. God forbid a girl have hobbies! 

So for those only familiar with Taylor for her most culturally ubiquitous moments (can sing most of “Blank Space”, gathers there was a feud with the most famous Kardashian, watches football now), for even a passing casual fan (the reformed mean girls of your high school nightmares who happily attended the Eras Tour, the contrarian “Wonderwall” strummer who only likes folklore and evermore [see also: fuck you Ryan Adams]), or the genuinely earnest new fan (who can’t help being unable to cite the deep magic to us scholars) it may feel disconcerting to be held hostage by an album over two hours deep that spends much of it languishing in a deeply saddened, colour leached world that feels at odds with the sparkling veneered pop star they’re most familiar as seen from stadium stages or NFL private boxes. The fever pitch of Taylor’s penetration into the cultural zeitgeist the last 18 months has led to a “Rubicon with regard to our collective sanity”, per Amanda Petrusich of The New Yorker. 

I also suspect many critics proffered up their sour reviews so soon after the album’s release because they felt miffed this album wasn’t manufactured for (or even gives a fuck about) their approval. Both in length and in density of the inner sanctum of lore required to even understand the album, Poets was designed to weed out the weak. And that means first to go are the class of critics who “[stay] up until dawn to finish listening to an album as if it’s a college paper we’re cramming to complete by the morning” as remarked upon by Bloomberg’s Jessica Karl the Tuesday following Poets release. On its languishing length, Oliver Darcy for CNN retracted in his seven day follow up review of the album, “It takes more than a day to get one’s arms around a 31-track album like Tortured Poets. Swift’s album demands time to be fully appreciated. It cannot be devoured at the speed of TikTok.” Adding, “One week later … I am ready to declare that it is one of Swift’s best works yet.” Others were also smart enough to acknowledge they weren’t Swiftie Smart enough to understand the album’s parasocially parochial themes with Keefe noting, “Whether any particular listener will find a point of entry, then, depends wholly on how interesting they find Swift’s unfiltered and unedited versions of these same few stories, told and re-told many times over.” Keefe obviously does not identify with those of us who feel a happy panic in their chests when personnel credits leak before an album’s release and we all collectively rush to quickly claim any track flaunting a solo writing credit or an airtime soaring past the five minute mark.

As Ben Sisario for the New York Times asked, “[viewing] Taylor Swift’s work through the eyes of her fans [is] crucial for understanding … The question is not just what is Swift saying, but what is she telling her fans, and how will they respond to it?”. 

This essay is my response. 

Photo by Neilson Barnard via Getty Images

Fortnight: A self-contained, pulsing introduction to this album’s themes and her descent into insanity courtesy of a trip down her worst nightmares. A part of me likes that the opening couplet sets up the entire album as the outpouring of an unintended mental outpatient. But as an opener and palette setter, it falls short of some of her more ear-catching hooks. Where “State of Grace”, “...Ready For It?”, and even “the 1” command attention with their album thesis-setting, “Fortnight” feels dozier and less earnest to get to the point. I also can’t believe I’m saying this but this song grossly underutilised Post Malone’s talents. Granted, the extent of my knowledge of this is his feature on Beyoncé’s superior Cowboy Carter collab “LEVII’S JEANS” but frankly I don’t think I need to know anything more than that. Source: Trust me. 

Favourite Lyric: “I took the miracle move-on drug / The effects were temporary” // “I hope you’re okay but you’re the reason / And no one’s here to blame / But what about your quiet treason?”

The Tortured Poets Department: I feel like the singular reason Jack and Taylor get along so well is because they both have their own version of the “fuckass filter.” Taylor’s is one built into an Olympus camera that gives a Simpsons-esque skintone to each person it captures in still images. Jack’s is an emotional support drum loop and sparkle glitter machine that go into full prism effect all over this song. I in fact assume he overindulged on the twinkles in an attempt to make up for how embarrassing the second verse is. 

To that, I truly feel like we are setting ourselves up for this next stage in Taylor’s career where her art becomes infinitely more fascinating. As she becomes more comfortable with being less palatable she slowly but surely unplugs from the lie that we deserve to be liked. And that makes her work more uncomfy and thus more interesting to listen to. 

One of the most entertaining things about this album as a listener is discerning where Taylor’s cringe humour ends and her cringe self-indulgence begins. There’s many moments over the course of this album where I think she ardently, earnestly believes in the mystical hype she’s cast over her own life and I believe this is one such song.  

The title track feels like she was thinking about that movie that she’s (allegedly) still writing and thought, “I should make a song about my absolutely insane and completely toxic love life and turn it into a romcom soundtrack.” And Jack (because he is a stronger person than I because my instinctual response would have been, “Babe what the fuck”) simply said, “You got it 🫡” and got to work on his little synthesiser. 

While not quite up to scratch of the outright bangers that I typically expect of a Track 2, this one has been growing on me purely for the way it really does bottle a certain cinematic, sweeping feeling through it. Emotionally it’s a great example of how vividly Taylor can paint a portrait because it almost convinces me of just what she saw in this relationship to begin with. And that’s a talent. 

Favourite Lyric: “I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show” 

My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys: This song is a sleeper that’s going to hit full fandom actualization (and subsequently adoration) when it’s blasted out of stadium speakers and we see the delusional lyrics on display for how truly fucked up they are. This song falls neatly into my favoured “sad bop” sub-genre of Taylor’s music. The twisted lyrics are camouflaged in a toy soldier drumline that comes so close to making you gloss over the disturbing truth that one of the most admired and successful artists of our time can’t use her rolling list of professional accomplishments as leverage in an emotionally abusive relationship. When it comes to Taylor, there is no amount of money, privilege, or Grammys that can counteract the low self-esteem a childhood of lonely lunch tables gave her that makes her not only willing to accept such shitty treatment from a partner but in fact arms her with the belief that it’s the best that she deserves. 

Favourite Lyric: “There was a litany of reasons why we could have played for keeps this time” // “There was danger in the heat of my touch / He saw forever so he smashed it up”

Down Bad: If I could time travel I would go back to 2008 Taylor mid-Shakespearean rewrite (I imagine her penning “Love Story” on her bedroom floor with one of those whimsical fluffy, bobbling pom pom pens) to inform her that her future self was going to write a love song about being abducted by horny aliens just to see the response. 

When I’m done being obsessed with this song I’ll be able to circle back to the sad, suicidal desperation of being so infected by loving such a toxic person you can’t make it through a donkey kick at the gym without just wanting to dig a hole to the center of the earth, made that much worse by how cavalierly she says it. Casually admitting that being unalive wouldn’t be any different than the comatose state you’re existing in on a song that has no right being this vibey is enough to drive me to the brink - but again we’re not there yet. 

Favourite Lyric: “How dare you say that it's-” 

So Long London: It’s my belief that Taylor gave us “You’re Losing Me” so that we wouldn’t have to suffer as much when raw dogging “So Long London” almost a year later. It’s nice(?) to see many of the former’s motifs repeated here. Perhaps that’s also by design. As seen later on “London”s Track 5 Anthology mirror, “How Did It End?” - the other easily identifiable Alwyn-tinged track - Taylor seems to be either gracefully protective of, or still confused by, the dissolution of this relationship and there isn’t much more to the story she can share because she can’t name any more details beyond how one man ruined an entire country for her. But at least we got a lovely sonic reference to Big Ben out of it. 

Favourite Lyric: “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof” // “How much sad did you think I had in me?” 

But Daddy I Love Him: There’s a certain satisfaction I just know the pettiest version of Taylor felt in packaging a song in production that would be catnip to the very people the song’s venomous lyrics are directed at. Having been an ardent supporter of women’s wrongs since last May, I’m theoretically excluded from that group. But never fear! Taylor got the last laugh in as I also now get to join the ranks of those namechecked in the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. I’ve never been so delighted to be insulted in my life! 

This song has a certain “Timeless” feel to it in its sweeping and hilariously earnest if naive romanticization of what sounds like yet another 19th century pioneering town of yore. Which is a long way of saying I want this song playing on a screen in my brain on an endless loop. 

Favourite Lyric: “I'll tell you something about my good name / It's mine alone to disgrace”

Fresh Out the Slammer: Callie Ahlgrim’s Business Insider said of this song, “I don't know the intimate details of Swift's love life, but I do know one thing. If you ever compare your relationship to jail time, my hope is that you'll run — as fast and as far away as possible.” Additionally if your violent sprint away from one British prison towards another one includes a red flag baton and a conjugal visit with a rock star then, sorry, no parole for you! 

I do find a lot of satisfaction in the structural set up of this song between the rolling internal rhymes (<3) bouncing over the verses that feel paced like a runner escaping from a jail on foot and the blissful, dreamy, delusional choruses that intercept once she’s successfully made the call to her get out of jail free cad. *ba dum tss*

Favourite Lyric: “My friends tried but I wouldn't hear it / Watched me daily disappearing / For just one glimpse of his smile.” 

Florida!!!: In ranking the album prior to release it almost felt like cheating to slot “Florida!!!” into a top placement simply because there was no way this song couldn’t not be a slam dunk. And thankfully it lives up to its expectations. It’s another mini film in a song that could fill the lane left wide open by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s epic 2010 collaboration “Telephone” whose Tarantino-inspired music video ended on an as-yet-unfulfilled “To be continued…” slide. From a production standpoint, it’s one of the most fun and experimental moments on the album and a bloodrush adrenaline standout. How could a song that sets Taylor’s lyrics to Florence’s Dance Fever production be any less? 

Favourite Lyric: “Tell me I'm despicable, say it's unforgivable / At least the dolls are beautiful” 

Guilty As Sin?: I’ve certainly candidly admitted some embarrassing stories from the more frenzied parts of my life that could have been kept in the vault. But never have I ever felt, nor been tempted to put, “I masturbate to Matty Healy” on main. She’s a braver (read: crazier) woman than I. That said: This song fucks. 

Favourite Lyric: “If long-suffering propriety is what they want from me / They don't know how you've haunted me so stunningly / I choose you and me religiously”

Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?: As a melodrama, this is a teetering and hilarious commentary on the fucked up fame funhouse that thrives on cyclically celebrating and then subsequently ruining a person. Additional Instructions: Reanimate as many times as needed until entertainment quota is fulfilled. 

If Taylor is in on the joke of the heavy handed spooky imagery then I believe this song creates a cinematic world Tim Burton would be proud of. Unfortunately, I think that she intended this to be read as seriously as she screamed it. Which is a little awkward. Apologies in advance for all the memes. Although I do think there is a certain amount of cheek in the inner lizard voice that answers her when she asks “So tell me everything is not about me / (But what if it is?)” because how could it not. I also get a slight Grey’s Anatomy “You don’t get to call me a whore” in her defiance as she protects her peace, rightfully snarling at those who threaten it. 

There’s a part of me that baulks at a song like this. But perhaps that is its (and TTPD’s) objective: authentically conveying the emotions Taylor is trying to mainline from her brain to the largest and most captivated audience she’s had in her career yet and at last relishing in how uncomfortable it might make its listeners. Maybe it’s a symptom of her lifelong battle with the Good Girl Persona but I feel like even when Taylor has permitted the adult realities of her life to become reflected in her work she still constructs it in a way that tries to retain the stepford stamp of approval. 

Even at her most sexual on the Eras Tour, dragging a palm down the front of her own body, it’s accessorised with a, “Can you believe I’m doing this?!” open-mouthed smile of shock and bashfulness. Of the emotional cards she’s dealt in her discography, her most unladylike attributes are often honed at the edges or handed out in ways that still feel passably ~dramatique~ and never entirely, sincerely, serious and uncomfortable. With this in mind I suppose my discomfort is the goal. Nowhere more fully on this album does she wield honesty like a blunt force instrument as brazenly as she does here. In part I also think that this song contains if not the ‘thesis statement’ of the album, then at least its origin story: “The scandal was contained / The bullet had just grazed / At all costs, keep your good name …I want to snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me.” To most of the public eye, their most recent images of Taylor are of triumph: Being kissed under a cloud of confetti at the Super Bowl, surrounded by 70,000 fans on the Eras Tour in a glittering bodysuit, accepting her fourth record-breaking Album of the Year trophy for Midnights. Much of the public discourse had moved past the Matty of it all and even amongst fans we’d chalked that whole Situation up to a classic rebound lapse in judgement and moved on to swoon over our current favourite power couple. For Taylor to choose to dredge the scandal back up and hold its rotting carcass up to the light, even if it meant deflating the shining public image she’d recovered in its wake, says a lot about just how badly she needed this narrative out. 

Photo by Ezra Shaw via Getty Images

While Taylor has always been known for putting the truth into her lyrics she’s never made it as ugly as it is now on Poets. And this song sees her finally at last baring her bloody, toothless, psychotic grin and asking if we think she’s still pretty - not giving a fuck what the answer is and daring you to acknowledge that you’re part of what made her that way to begin with. Even in past instances when Taylor has gone for 'edge' it never felt quite believable. Here, she is finally at peace with pissing people off in order to service the sanctity of her sickest emotions. 

Favourite Lyric: “If you wanted me dead, you should've just said / Nothing makes me feel more alive”

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can): The twangy, smoke-filled saloon vibes present throughout this album really work for Taylor and her lower register especially. In addition to servicing the religious themes she explores on other songs (worth an entire essay on its own), it’s very satisfying when we as a fandom can put our singular brain cell together and accurately guess what a song might be about - right down to this song’s comical plot twist ending that many of us predicted based on the song length alone. The comedy of it only taking 2.5 minutes to realise, “Well. I suppose I can’t!” is genius pacing. Incidentally, this starts a three song track run for me where my song predictions were bang on. 

Favourite Lyric: “Your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger / I can fix him, no really I can”

loml: Ah, my beloved claim track from pre-release that I had pegged as my top seed. And oh, is it. Prior to release I, along with many others, had suspected that this song would be deceptively abbreviated and would feature a classic Taylor Swift third verse word switch of the understood abbreviation most know as ‘love of my life’. And it does! 

This song feels like it gets at the essence of what makes Taylor’s work so resonant and contains all the best ‘tricks’ in her songwriting toolkit. All accompanied by a very beautiful twinkling piano (that also seems to reference “White Horse”). 

I also think this song comes closest in the entire album to dovetailing the mirrored breakdowns of the album’s two significant relationships, demonstrating exactly why this hurt as much as it did because of how their paralleled dissolutions traced over and reopened the same wounds. 

Favourite Lyric: “I thought I was better safe than starry-eyed”

I Can Do It With A Broken Heart: The sequencing of this track following the breakdown of “loml” is pure cinema and also rounds out the glorious trifecta of songs that fans accurately predicted. I think many of us suspected based on the title that this song would be about Taylor getting up on stage every weekend with a valiant, pasted-on smile as she was simultaneously harbouring the pain of not one but two breakups. 

Photo by Kevin Winter / TAS23 via Getty Images

What I don’t think many of us anticipated, however, is a supercharged giddy-sounding club song that puts Taylor’s pop writing hooks back up to par and Jack’s sparkling production at the forefront. It’s a wonder that Jack managed to capture the percolating, glittering, echoing chambers of the Eras Tour live experience into song (down to what I assume is Taylor’s in-ear metronome count-in). Not just the sound but also the feeling of what it’s like to be in those venues, buzzing with a singular hive mind and commiserating our joy, our pain, our freedom as a unified crowd. Mikael Wood for The Los Angeles Times noted it as an album high point and how its inherent sonic and lyrical disparate elements belie the red herring of the entire album as a whole. “Pay close enough attention, the thinking goes, and her art will always tell you the truth … [despite] the makings of a very sad song … ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic. The point isn’t that she suffered through this experience — it’s that she soldiered through it.”

But even amongst the shattered facets of Taylor’s heart, there lay pieces of some former emotional ephemera she’s explored on other songs - proof that Taylor is going to Taylor even when she’s plastering on a brave, false face. The first verse in particular hints at some of the performative, Good Girl themes from folklore’s “mirrorball” and the feisty, sparkling defiance of Midnights’ “Bejeweled”. Even the connection she makes between physical vestiges of a relationship being rediscovered in drawers is an old hat trick of Red’s “All Too Well” iconology. 

As someone (happily married) who often has to mine decades-old experiences from past relationships (or get creative with emotional transference when lifting her lyrics out of Taylor’s life to bring it into my own world), it can be a bit more ‘work’ to personally relate to some of Taylor’s love (and breakup) songs. This means the songs that usually most resonate with me fall into the introverted, introspective, and often self-loathing category. Which is to say there’s never been a better time to be a Taylor fan than the last few years! /laughs until I cry. 

As expected (I’m fully bracing myself for what will surely be many a viral video of my fellow corporate girlies crying into their keyboards over the line “I cry a lot but I am so productive”), this song really is such a personal comfort. It’s the sonic narration and companion to every time over the last few years when I’ve sat in my shower to cry after a long day. Or have woken from a dead sleep, rocked awake by an imagined deadline that I missed or a creeping anxiety that my to do list will never end. Or, worse, the times when the brief, but unignorable, intrusive thoughts have slipped through the bars of my brain’s cell and quietly asked in a slithering whisper if I should even be alive. 

It’s horrifying to wonder if I might be in this busy hamster wheel for the rest of my life. 

It’s terrifying to not know how to get out. 

It’s scary to wonder if I’ll even know what my identity is if I ever do escape it. 

It’s shameful to admit that maybe that’s part of why I stay inside it. 

Favourite Lyric: “I cry a lot, but I am so productive / It's an art”

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived: To be entered into the hallowed halls of Taylor Swift’s breakup catalogue is a heavy curse to bear. I picture it like a portrait gallery as per the “Blank Space” music video but instead of butcher knives in oil painted canvases, it’s trophy style with dismembered heads of past paramours propped onto the walls. 

I don’t think there’s any song in her discography that is quite as eviscerating as this. Perhaps, per The Ringer’s Nathan Hubbard interpretation of the line “you didn’t measure up in any measure of a man”, it’s even her first sonic castration. Which is saying a lot because one time she wrote a ten minute monologue set to music about what a giant piece of shit Jake Gyllenhaal is. 

This song’s final, pounding ascension is a blood chilling example of how finely she’s sharpened her pen over the last two decades of her career. Despite being so densely packed with some of the most vitriolic lines, I think this is the first song that was downloaded in almost its entirety into my brain. There’s something about a woman screaming “YOU DESERVE PRISON” that my brain really leapt at notating for all time on the insides of my skull. 

Favourite Lyric: “You kicked out the stage lights, but you're still performing”

The Alchemy: Listen, even my husband who was only half-listening to this song said, “The football metaphors are a little heavy handed, don’t you think?”. Despite the glacier-thick wall of ice that rings around my heart, I find myself begrudgingly infatuated with the pure, ridiculous camp of this song. 

And I guess I’m just glad that her Travvy did finally make it to the big game. 

Favourite Lyric: “Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?”

Clara Bow: I needed to sit with this song the longest of any of them in order to fully appreciate it and understand it (not unlike the myriad of critics commenting on this album prematurely). For once this feels like Taylor doing more with less and giving people the space with the final breaths she has on this album’s standard tracklisting to let her listener’s wrung-out imaginations fill in all the blanks of what she’s trying to communicate about the passage of time and the fickleness of fame. And beautifully I think she really succeeds as there’s even more that I can parse through and interpret with each new listen. The beauty in fewer words! 

Though this song joins others that address her worries about growing up in this business, thinking not only of her predecessors who inspired her but the successors who will inevitably replace her. Typically, she’s framed those pop girls set to follow in her footsteps as hungry young waifs setting out to push her into irrelevance and to threaten her legacy. The pictures of pastures filled with “geriatric pop stars” have been in her nightmares since she was still one of those young starlets, as seen in “Castles Crumbling” then “The Lucky One”, and “Nothing New”. 

Taylor has often talked about how she writes in order to understand her own feelings. Her discography is littered with the little girl worries of someone afraid the world may swing her off its axis - that she’ll either no longer be tethered to something greater than herself. That she’ll no longer be able to touch tangible examples of things that affirm her memories even if she forgets or, worse, someone else tries to erase her. But I also think she writes so that she won’t be forgotten and so that she can author her own story into the history books. 

For the first time though, it almost feels like acceptance has replaced the fear. Perhaps because although it never really will be enough but she finally at last feels secure enough in her legacy that can’t be undone to, for just a moment, breathe a little and to look around and really feel the brightness of the world she’s created and the impact she’s had. 

Being in her world has been a privilege. Being inspired by her open heart and sharp pen and vivid truths has made each of my own, in turn, dazzling.  

Favourite Lyric: “It's hell on earth to be heavenly / Them's the breaks, they don't come gently.”

And here I leave you with my TTPD (1-16) ranking.

But not before I ask …

I’d so love to hear your favourite tracks off the album and any other thoughts you might have had about this first half of the album.