Taylor Swift fans have been scrambling to decode her new songs — and now the pop star herself is finally giving answers through Amazon‘s Alexa!
With The Tortured Poets Department sending fans into a spiral trying to figure out who and what each song is about, the 34-year-old gave a little taste about her inspiration with a new Alexa feature! If you’ve got one of the Amazon devices, all you have to do is say “Alexa, I’m a member of The Tortured Poets Department” to get the inside scoop for Mz. Swift’s tracks Florida!!!, Fortnight, Clara Bow, Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?, and My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.
Related: Magazine Publishes SCATHING Review Of TTPD & Hides Writer’s Name!
If not, well, just read ahead — we’ve got ya covered!
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Fortnight
While speaking about Fortnight, the haunting collab with Post Malone, Tay Tay revealed her first single from the album had to set the tone AND make a bold thematic statement:
“Fortnight is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
We love how Tay is so in tune with her craft. There are definitely songwriters who aren’t self-aware enough to know they’re being melodramatic! LOLz!
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
This one is pretty clear — but no less devastating for it! Taylor says My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys is about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore.” But it’s also about the delusion they’ll want to play with you again! She went on to explain:
“Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind. We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.'”
Heartbreaking! The “they’ll come back to that” narrative seems to be super common in TTPD. So sad. And the use of the toy as a metaphor is really striking.
No wonder that imagery hit just as hard in the ’20s in The Velveteen Rabbit as it did nearly a century later in the Toy Story movies. Easier to decipher, but truly crushing.
Clara Bow
As fans quickly figured out when the tracklist debuted weeks ago, Clara Bow was named after the iconic silent film actress of the 1920s. Taylor used the “first it girl” as a jumping off point deep metaphor for how society teaches “women to see themselves”:
“I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid. 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, 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. 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.”
Wow! Definitely makes you sit down and think…
Florida!!!
Florida!!! featuring Florence and The Machine isn’t about an ex or a past icon, though. Funnily enough, T-Swizzle said the song came straight from the fact Taylor is a true crime junkie with a habit of “always watching Dateline.” But it isn’t a joke about the “Florida man.” There’s something really romantic at play here:
“People have these crimes that they commit; where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name. I want a new life. I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ And so that was the jumping off point. Where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida!”
We kind of love that! Florida as the new frontier, not unlike the Old West how you can just lose yourself. Also, of course, not unlike the Old West in your chances of being the victim of gun violence increasing… Hey, not everything romantic is safe!
Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?
Taylor has a much more somber explanation for Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?. She revealed she wrote the track “alone, sitting at the piano in one of those moments when I felt bitter about just all the things we do to our artists as a society and as a culture”. Ouch! In fact, she calls out society for wanting to “provoke” that kind of pain in artists:
“There’s a lot about this particular concept on ‘The Tortured Poets Department. What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell. We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens.”
It’s a really interesting interrogation of our treatment of art and artists! It’s certainly true lots of musicians and comedians tend to have less to say about universal plights once they live in mansions, get showered with adulation, and want for nothing. Is tall poppy syndrome, where the masses poke at those who rise above, at least somewhat in response to losing our heroes to the heavens? Hmm…
Were U surprised about any of the songs’ meanings, Perezcious readers? Sound OFF (below).
[Image via MEGA/WENN]
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