Taylor Swift treated fans to a little extra information about her 11th studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” over the weekend. In a video she tweeted on Sunday, Swift told a 96,000-strong Melbourne, Australia crowd on Friday the hot goss on why her new album means so much to her. “‘Tortured Poets’ is an album — I think more than any of my albums that I’ve ever made — I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me.”
“Just the things I was going through and the things I was writing about,” she continued. “It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life, and I never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on ‘Tortured Poets.’”
Swift then shared an alternate cover to the upcoming record. “I wanted to show you something tonight because we’ve got an alternate cover to ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ that nobody has seen and there’s an exclusive song on this vinyl called ‘The Bolter.’”
“This is called ‘The Bolter Edition.’ Look at that cover, it’s so tortured [and] so poetic. I wanted to show that to you here in Melbourne because you’ve just been the best that you could possibly be.”
Swift originally announced the upcoming album at the Grammys. During her speech accepting an award for Best Pop Vocal Album for “Midnights,” she told the audience, “[The way I can celebrate] is by telling you a secret that I’ve been keeping from you for the past two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19th.”
There has been plenty of speculation that the record will be primarily about her breakup with ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The pair dated for six years before they broke up in March 2023. On Friday, Elle reported that fans have put together several clues that support the theory.
The first is that a 2022 interview with Alwyn and Paul Mescal revealed the pair are part of a WhatsApp group chat with Andrew Scott called “The Tortured Man Club,” though both men said they weren’t using the group chat as frequently. Swift was also photographed with Mescal’s ex, Phoebe Bridgers, at the Grammys.
April 19, 2023, a year before the album’s release, is also the day that several of Swift’s high-profile friends got attention for unfollowing Alwyn on social media.
On Feb. 7, 2024, Swift told a Tokyo, Japan audience that she began working on the album two years ago. She said, “I’ve been working on ‘Tortured Poets’ since right after I turned in ‘Midnights.’ So you turn in an album months in advance so you can make finals, make sure it’s the best. So I started working on it immediately after that, and I’ve been working on it for about two years.”
Clarifying early speculation that she’d long been finished with the album, Swift added, “I kept working on it throughout the U.S. tour, and when it was perfect in my opinion, when it was good enough for you, I finished it. And I am so, so excited. Soon you’ll get to hear it. Soon we’ll get to experience that together.”
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