Critic’s Notebook: Two Timely Takes On Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales

For most of The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift puts the focus on her breakups with longtime partner Joe Alwyn and short-term boyfriend Matty Healy. But on “The Alchemy,” one of the (first part of the) double album’s final tracks, she seems ready to get back in the dating game.

When it was announced, in early February, that one of the songs on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department would be called “Clara Bow,” entertainment writers and Swift fans sprang to action with the alacrity of roaring-twenties newshounds leaping to their typewriters. The simplest assumption to make was that Bow, one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s, had inspired Swift because she too was a radically independent and ambitious woman, as well as a hugely successful star whose private life had received undue scrutiny.

A bonus track on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has listeners theorizing that the singer is talking Kim Kardashian. The track “thanK you aIMee” is stylized so that the capital letters spell out the name “Kim” and the track “Cassandra” seems to reference the night that she got “the call” from Kardashian and Kanye West. Swift begins the song singing, “When I picture my hometown, there’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you,” which can be interpreted as a pointed reference to Kardashian’s deep tan.

We’ve heard Taylor Swift sing about her romantic relationships and spin stories out of history. In her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift explores another topic: fame. Swift is undoubtedly the most famous person in the world. She’s jumpstarting whole economies, was named as TIME’s Person of the Year, and has a particularly rabid fan base.

Are you ready for it? Taylor Swift’s 11th studio record, The Tortured Poets Department, is finally here, and it’s clear she has a lot to say about her recent bouts of heartbreak. On the (surprise!) double album’s title track, she’s specifically focused on a breakup with someone who isn’t her longtime love Joe Alwyn.

One thing is always for sure with Taylor Swift: her most devastating songs will always be the fifth track on her albums. It’s a pattern that fans have noticed since 2012’s Red. The fifth song on that album, widely regarded as her magnum opus, is “All Too Well.” But even looking at the albums before Red, the pattern was already there.