Tortured Fans Department
Poetry vs Songwriting, Sondheim's "Crystal Clarity," and the Perils of Exhaustion
“Do you call yourself a poet?,” British journalist Bernard Levin asked Stephen Sondheim, one of the greatest songwriters of all-time, in a 1980 BBC interview. Sondheim shook his head fervently. “It’s not poetry, it’s poetic lyrics,” he replied. “Poetry exists in terms of its conciseness, how much can be packed in. Lyric writing has to exist in time. The listener cannot go at his own speed. He cannot go back over a sentence. Therefore it must be crystal clear as it goes on. That means you have to underwrite, you have to lay the sentences out so that there’s enough air for the ear to take them in.”
Sondheim was referring specifically to songwriting for musical theater, which involves a live audience that needs to understand the lyrics well enough in real time to follow the plot of the show, despite the distracting actors, costumes, sets, lighting, and choreography. The ears need lots of air in that environment. They might need a little less air if you’re songwriting for a recorded album, which a listener can rewind and listen to repeatedly if they want to. This is one reason1 why The Beatles’ first albums of relatively straightforward love songs sound so different from their dense, experimental, often seemingly nonsensical later works. The songs on Help and Please Please Me were written to be performed in stadiums packed with thousands of shrieking fans. The songs on Sergeant Pepper and The White Album were meant to exist only in their recorded form, as part of sonically cohesive “concept albums”, which the group knew they would never play live. This is also one reason that Hamilton is so dense, because Lin Manuel Miranda wrote it in an era of Spotify, knowing that his audience was not just the people live in the Broadway theater that night, but the millions of fans across the country who wanted to hear dope rhymes about monetary policy, and had the ability to do so over and over until they had picked up all the hidden references to nineties rappers and 19th Century British operettas. In the 1970s, when cast album sales were not a significant part of a musical’s commercial and financial success, Sondheim had to focus only on the people in the room live that night. For as witty, speedy, profound, and complex as his lyrics might have been, they also had to be “crystal clear,” and make sense to the audience in real time.
On the continuum from songwriting to poetry, somewhere between Sondheim and Emily Dickinson lies the work of Dickinson’s sixth cousin, Taylor Alison Swift. On one hand, she writes songs for recorded albums, and these songs frequently feature complicated, interlocking storylines, richly ambiguous uses of metaphor and symbolism, bridges that make your brain explode, and hidden “easter egg” references to friends, lovers, ex-boyfriends, other artists, or other characters in the lore of her extended celebrity universe. On the other hand, Taylor’s songs have also been fodder for the most successful tours in the history of music, where Sondheim’s rules of live performance, and the need for overcoming distracting stage elements, all apply. If lyrics have to be crystal clear to be understood in real time when they are sung by a homicidal barber or a man in a wolf costume, they definitely have to be crystal clear when performed on a stage made out of neon screens, with twenty dancers acting out a pagan witch ritual while giant fireballs shoot out the floor.
And for most of her career, Taylor Swift’s songs have also had to succeed in another medium: radio. A radio listener cannot pause or rewind, and cannot even guarantee that they will turn on or off the radio in time to hear the entire song. They certainly cannot be expected to know who is singing, in what context, and whether they have recently gone through some sort of high profile breakup. A successful radio song must convert a listener who did not choose it, and they only have the duration of the song, in real time, to convince them to pay attention, engage, and connect enough to want to buy a physical copy, or at least Shazam it for future streaming. This is an incredibly tall order, one that requires the highest level of Sondheim-esque crystal clarity in its poetic lyric writing. Historically, it is a task that Taylor Swift does better than almost anyone else in the history of the world. Many brilliant artists never write a single song that can succeed in this cutthroat format, most others have one or two that beat the odds and found a mass audience on the radio. Taylor Swift has written 138 songs that have cracked the Billboard Top 40. She knows how to write lyrics that work in real time.
But look. Today, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote the most generous review of the Tortured Poets Department I’ve seen so far, entitled “This Might Be Taylor Swift’s Most Personal Album Yet.” Sheffield is a legendary music critic, but at this point he’s in the tank for Taylor. He writes and maintains the Rolling Stone article “All 243 Taylor Swift Songs Ranked,” which might be their most trafficked article of all time, he recently recorded a podcast called “The Case for Taylor Swift,” and he’s currently building hype for his upcoming book Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music about how amazing she is. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Nevertheless, he’s an excellent writer with as much knowledge and expertise on what makes pop music great as anyone. Here’s one excerpt from his affirmative case for this album:
“Even by Swiftian standards, she gets wildly ambitious with her songwriting here. This is an album that begins with an introductory poem by Stevie Nicks. The title song’s chorus goes, “You’re not Dylan Thomas/I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/We’re modern idiots.” In other words, it’s the small-town teen romance of “White Horse” updated for the big old city. Until you remember that the tortured poet Dylan Thomas famously died at his favorite Greenwich Village bar — which happened to be the White Horse Tavern. That’s the level she’s working on here.”
This level is dazzling. It’s also the kind of thing that one simply could never figure out in real time. Outside of Sheffield, the rest of the critical consensus seems to be that this album is a bit ungainly, lacking in the musical innovation that you normally expect from a Taylor Swift release, and in need of an editor2. I’m not sure I agree with any of this. My immediate feeling from listening last night and this morning was “I’m going to have to listen to this a bunch more times.”
Listening to Taylor Swift songs a bunch more times is a joy, and I’m so grateful for it. But this isn’t how this normally works, because Taylor Swift songs in the past have worked both in real time and on repeat. Midnights had a lot of dense stuff, but I fell in love with “Anti-Hero” and “Mastermind” immediately, no re-listening required (I re-listened hundreds of times anyway for fun). After my first listen through folklore, I knew that I had just heard four of my favorite songs ever (“the last great american dynasty,” “exile,” “invisible string,” “betty”). No one had to hear “22,” “We are Never Getting Back Together,” “Blank Space,” or any of the other Max Martin era smash hits more than once in order to get it.
But critics who believe this represents a lapse in judgment or a sign of waning talent are, in my view, mistaken. The relative lyrical opacity, the shift towards poetry (as augured from the album’s title) and away from traditional songwriting, is an intentional choice that is reflective of changes in both industry and distribution structures, and the shifting priorities of the artist. Taylor has established such a massive and devoted following that she hasn’t needed the radio to promote her music for a few years now. Under the traditional rules of the modern music industry, a lead single is supposed to chart, build mass appeal, and drive sales for the album. “Anti-Hero,” the lead single off of Midnights, eventually did just that, becoming one of the most successful singles of 2023. But this was overkill, because all thirteen songs on Midnights had already debuted at spots 1-13 on the Billboard chart in October of 2022. This solidified a lesson Taylor probably already should have learned, which is that you don’t need radio promotion if the entire world is going to crash Spotify listening to your album the second it comes out. Taylor seems to believe, quite reasonably, that she doesn’t need to write songs that convert the unconvinced radio listener in real time. She’s basically converted everyone already.
And as I wrote in February, she can afford to instead focus her attention on the devoted superfans, the hyperventilating Level-10 Swifties with an insatiable hunger for songs, shaky cam footage of tour shows, gossip, paparazzi pictures, private plane location updates, and feature-length tumblr-esque speculation about her sexuality in prestige media. She can serve whoever she wants, she will surely make tons of money with whatever strategy she pursues, and she will probably even continue to create some awesome stuff along the way. I think I do really like a bunch of these songs. But as someone wise once told me “it must be exhausting always rooting for the antihero.” One day into the Tortured Poets Department era, I’ve listened to sixteen of the most intriguing, exciting, and deeply confusing songs I’ve ever heard from her, and have another FIFTEEN MORE TO GO that I haven’t gotten to yet, and I have to admit something: I’m a little bit exhausted.
Other factors include changes in the band’s age, artistic maturity, relationship to the changing political environment, access to new instruments and recording technology, their various religious awakenings, and the lots and lots of drugs.
Side note: If you are a writer at a newspaper or magazine, it is unbelievably cringe to talk about the need for editors like this. There are better, less humiliatingly public ways to suck up to your boss.
Another awesome ghost runner. Do you have anything to say about the absence of an apostrophe in the title? I am uncomfortable without one.