A few months have passed since Taylor Swift dropped her double album, The Tortured Poets Department, and I am still processing the 31 profoundly spoken songs. Taylor has long been known for her lyrical genius and genuine recollection of her feelings, but this album reached a different level in the psyche of Taylor Swift. We as listeners get two and a half hours of the raw emotions that come with being the largest star on the planet and having to tour the world fresh off a breakup.
More than any of her albums, many of the lyrics struck me and I wanted to share my thoughts here. From “So Long London”, which is supposed to be about her six-year relationship with Joe,
“The spirit was gone, we would never come to / And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free”
Taylor Swift | So Long London
To give all of yourself for six years to come up with nothing in the end, stings. It hurts deeply to our core, because it isn’t meant to be that way. We were made for an eternal relationship, foreshadowed in marriage, the place we are bound to the other. I believe Taylor desired marriage in return and, of course, was furious when a future turned out not to be.
“So how much sad did you think I had, / Did you think I had in me? / How much tragedy? / Just how low did you think I’d go? / Before I’d self-implode / Before I’d have to go be free”
To be in a relationship for that long, sitting and waiting for something, anything to resemble a greater commitment—I would self-implode as well.
Another song I want to touch on is “loml”.
“It was legendary / It was momentary / It was unnecessary / Should’ve let it stay buried / Oh, what a valiant roar / What a bland goodbye / The coward claimed he was a lion / I’m combing through the braids of lies / ‘I’ll never leave’… / ‘Never mind’ / Our field of dreams, engulfed in fire / Your arson’s match your somber eyes / And I’ll still see it until I die / You’re the loss of my life”
THESE LYRICS—what else is there to say! To be able to express the deepest feelings of the heart this way, with this much clarity takes someone who knows themselves well. It takes emotional intelligence, something many of us may not possess.
To be able to go to that place in the depths of our heart and feel the terrible ache, takes great courage. This is the place where healing occurs. It is in the depths of our soul that Jesus dwells and wants to be with us. He desires to meet us in our deepest sorrows and pull us out. But if we never go there, no healing can take place. Props to Taylor for being able to enter that space.
And this is why I think people become “Swifties”. Taylor puts into words the feelings we have but don’t know how to express. Listening to her songs begins that process of entering the depths of our feelings in order to be healed. And without our feelings, are we even human at all?
Taylor Swift talks about the importance of expressing these feelings and for her, writing is what starts the healing process. “I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me,” Swift, 34, said during her Friday, February 16, concert in Melbourne, Australia, per social media footage. “It sort of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through life and I’ve never had an album where I’ve needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.”
As St. Thomas Aquinas states, “A hurtful thing hurts yet more if we keep it shut up, because the soul is more intent on it: whereas if it be allowed to escape, the soul’s intention is dispersed as it were on outward things, so that the inward sorrow is lessened.” Entering into our sorrow is good and necessary, and without it, in the words of Taylor, “we will self-implode.”
In closing, I wanted to reflect on my experience of going to see the Eras Tour this past week in Paris with The Tortured Poets Department featured as one of the Eras. As a whole, the Eras Tour is unlike any concert you will ever attend, but adding the TTPD Era to the set puts the concert on another level, if even possible. The theatrics brought the feelings expressed in this latest album to life. It made visible the invisible blueprint of both her album and, in a way, her soul. This tour is a work of art and it is worth the hype.
This article originally appeared HERE.
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Taylor_Swift_%286966830273%29.jpg
