All 31 Songs in TTPD, Ranked
All 31 Songs in TTPD, Ranked
Thoughts from a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy
AP Photo/George Walker IV
In case you haven’t heard, Taylor Swift released a new album last month. Because it is Taylor Swift (about whom I will not add a subordinate clause because that would feel almost condescending at this point? I know who she is, you know who she is, let’s save our energy for the very serious and important discussion that’s to follow here), this spawned a lot of takes and hefty discourse, and takes about the discourse, and when and why and how we should be engaging in it, all of which were overly thorough and meta and ended up with me very thankful for my Twitter screen time limits because I otherwise would have gone insane.
All of this is to say, it’s gotten to the point where now, it seems people* have all but forgotten that there are new songs that she released in this album. Quite a lot of them, in fact! 31 songs is the kind of volume matched only by prime Joe Johnson, and it also makes this the perfect culmination of the past three years of Taylor Swift, where we’ve seen her output and popularity grow in lockstep with one another as she’s kept releasing her re-recorded albums amidst a record-setting tour, finally resulting in each of these maxing out with a record over two hours long that also got her, at one point, the top fourteen spots on the Billboard Hot 100.
* Attendees of the Europe leg of the Eras Tour excluded. Spend that cash, everyone! Help Europe keep pace!
So let’s actually dig into this a little bit, and create some tiers of songs from this album, to help us better understand the music side of modern Taylor Swift. Yes, this may be a month overdue, but (a) I thought it was necessary to give such a lengthy album the proper period of digestion, and (b) by doing this five weeks late I can avoid the most pointed and targeted wrath of the Swifties. (Which I say with great love and affection.)
And to clarify before we start, these tiers are on a Taylor-adjusted scale. For example, Midnights is probably a C-tier Taylor album at best, but it also garnered an uncontroversial Album of the Year nod earlier this year. So what for most would be an A-tier production gets knocked down a few pegs, just because her baseline quality is so high. (For the record, “Beautiful Ghosts” is the only song of hers that is a non-adjusted F-tier production, but I echo the stance of the entire fandom when I say that the best thing to do is just pretend Cats doesn’t exist.)
F Tier: My life would be no different having never heard these songs, apart from saving me twenty minutes
thanK you aIMee
I actively do not like this song. I thought we were done with the whole Kim thing! Taylor won! That’s not a debate! The whole thing just feels like punching down. Which, granted, is difficult when it’s billionaire vs. billionaire, but it’s just a bit too vicious and hostile to come across good for Taylor, I think. Plus, it’s very overt and in-your-face — the “And so I changed your name and any real defining clues” line is too direct to make it tongue-in-cheek, given how you can figure out from literally the song title who this is about.
loml
Me hearing the phrase “field of dreams”:
The Alchemy
This might be the lyrical low point on the album for me. Which I think is funny for the greatest singer-songwriter of the 21st century: she can write modern poetry about John Mayer and Jake Gyllenhaal, but when it comes to crafting something about Travis Kelce, she immediately reverts to high school-level puns and creativity. Honestly endearing.
Robin
imgonnagetyouback
What is up with the song title choices in this tier? Did she get trapped inside a 2011 Tumblr page during post-production?
Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
Wayyyy too heavy on the “cowboy like me” vibes on this one. Much too similar sonically.
D Tier: Fine songs that I will nevertheless skip 1/3 of the time
Peter
So High School
When I was seventeen, I watched American Pie for the first time. While crass and juvenile, I found it mostly entertaining, particularly having watched The Graduate around the same time and thus finding the Jennifer Coolidge bits similarly amusing.
I watched it again five years later with my Covid-era roommates. I quickly realized that it held up about as well as Billy Madison, which is to say not very, and we ended up turning it off after thirty minutes. (This did mean they missed out on Alyson Hannigan’s star turn, but her line is ingrained enough in the modern lexicon that the origin story is less important.)
Relatedly, Taylor Swift is 34 years old.
(On a different note, I will admit that my initial interpretation of the “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” was a reference to Shaquille O’Neal and the early-aughts Lakers, which I found very impressive and a necessary reminder that the 2001 team had one of the more stunning postseason performances in modern NBA history. It would have been much funnier if she’d somehow shoehorned in a Jason Williams/“White Chocolate” reference, which would’ve had the added benefit of another Matty Healy/The 1975 callback, but I very much doubt she knows who that is, although that probability has jumped to 0.001% from a flat zero given there’s a chance Travis has at some point made her watch some of his favorite YouTube mixtapes. Anyways, here’s John Wall.)
The Albatross
This song is very weird, because I can’t pretend to have actually internalized any of the lyrics, but on the other hand there are several moments that stick in my brain:
Having to refrain myself from blurting out “Liquor? I hardly know her!” each chorus;
Whenever she says, “She is here to destroy you”, for some reason always thinking of the end of The Lego Movie when the Duplo aliens land in Bricksburg and use the exact same line;
Easily the most vigor with which anyone has said persona non grata, ever.
Otherwise this song is just a collection of words and phrases that sound nice on their own but lack any sort of cohesion. But it’s fun, so here it is at #23.
Cassandra
My mom didn’t listen all the way through folklore and evermore until a year ago because her first impression was, to quote, “snoresville.” Same kind of feeling here to be honest, mostly reminiscent of “mad woman” so it doesn’t really seem as if she’s saying anything new here to be frank, though she is saying it with passion I guess.
That’s also a common theme of some of these lower-tier songs, and something I don’t begrudge haters of this album for having carry their opinions writ large: if you’re going to be putting out this sort of volume in an album, it makes it all the more important to come from a novel place sonically or lyrically. Otherwise, it’s much easier for content to get lost in the shuffle 75 minutes in. Not saying this song would’ve been a standout were this a shorter record, but it definitely didn’t add a ton to the album*, beyond reiterating the broader “why the hell is everyone jumping all over me, let me live” throughline here.
* Side note: I’m using “album” and “record” interchangeably here. I know there are actual differences, but I haven’t been bothered to learn what they are yet and will not unless forced or necessary.
Fresh Out The Slammer
My original joke for this song was going to be ranking Taylor’s exes by median jail time spent for the felony they’re each most likely to commit, but then in the process I remembered she dated Conor Kennedy for a hot sec. Can we just acknowledge how batshit crazy this was? She was 23, he was 18 and still in high school! His mom had just died tragically! What the fuck! I would like to think that she has matured and if asked to be frank about this one would express some serious regrets as to how she handled it.
But a lot of weirdness here, particularly buying her house near the Kennedy compound during the relationship. Would be interested to hear Conor’s perspective a decade later as I’m sure it’s a complicated one in hindsight. I do think that this specific age dynamic is uniquely strange and unnerving, as it’s fine on paper but there’s just so much lived experience you get in those five years that you need a very, very unique situation for it to make sense. Not here to throw anyone under the bus for what they did a decade ago, but I guess as a Swiftie I’ve done that to some of her exes so might as well recognize when the shoe’s on the other foot.
C Tier: I like these and could see some of them jumping a tier by the end of 2024
I Hate It Here
I was texted the “Quick, quick, tell me something awful / like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy” line a conservative two dozen times the weekend after this album was released. Still unsure how backhanded of a compliment that was.
My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
The Tortured Poets Department
Glad to see that Taylor is now engaging in my favorite game: “PHENOMENON DU JOUR: overrated, underrated, or properly rated?” I think Charlie Puth is properly rated. Some others:
Underrated: summers in Boston, milkshakes, Skylar Astin’s performance in Pitch Perfect, the veteran starters on the 2024 New York Yankees pitching staff, Ned Lamont
Overrated: summers in New York City, berries, the 4/5/6 line in Manhattan, Teslas, the level of difficulty for Jane Fraser in implementing Citigroup’s restructuring process
Properly rated: summers in Chicago, Jalen Brunson, the feeling you get when you find a quarter on the street, “Femininomenon”, frogs
I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
This one probably would’ve worked better in a more dedicated country-adjacent album. Or better yet, keep it in the album, but move it to the Anthology: definitely would’ve stuck out more there, and again if you have over thirty songs, sequencing is very important.
Florida!!! (ft. Florence + The Machine)
I love the energy of this song, I just don’t know where it’s going. Which I guess makes sense for Florida, to be fair. Personally, I think she should’ve used Dunedin here instead of Destin and made people really curious how much of the 2020 Toronto Blue Jays she watched.
The Bolter
I originally had this one at the bottom of this tier, and then I listened to it again, and then again, and each time it grew on me a little bit to where it’s now living at the top. The lyrical syncopation stands out, particularly the “all her fuckin’ lives / flash before her eyes” line, which gives it a nice undercurrent of energy that keeps the song clipping along.
The imagery of the woman jumping into frigid water is also notable, because Taylor and Emma Stone are very good friends, and the leap into the Seine is the imagery of the intro to “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” from La La Land. And as someone who adores that movie*, if there is anything I can say with 100% conviction without knowing whether it’s actually true, it’s that La La Land is without a doubt one of Taylor Swift’s favorite movies. There is zero question in my mind.
* I saw this movie for the first time in theaters with one of my high school buddies a week after it came out. We were both big “Whiplash” fans so we made sure to get tickets for this one early, but all we knew about this one is that it had Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The movie finished, and we’re quiet walking out of the theater because neither of us wants to be the first one to offer hard opinions on the two-hour musical we just watched. He finally turns to me and goes, “Wait, so that was sick, right?” We then talked about the movie at a (since-closed) barbecue place nearby for 45 minutes. Whenever we hang out for more than an hour together, this story comes up, without fail. It’s one of my favorites.
B Tier: Songs that are really really close to teaching me something interesting about Taylor Swift but instead settle on just being good
I Look in People’s Windows
A very pretty two minutes. Particularly love the “I’m addicted to the ‘if only.’” Though I can’t think of looking through windows without the ending of the iconic SNL “Santa Baby” sketch coming to mind.
The Prophecy
I think this song sums up this tier pretty well: there’s an interesting trope throughout (comparing herself to greater/lesser women), but there’s an absence of specificity in the storytelling here. It’s missing an instance of the impact of her desperation, or the consequences should she not find someone, even some imagined vignette that carries more weight than the assorted metaphors and imagery sprinkled in throughout this song.
So Long, London
Echoing the above, but extending to the album as a whole, I think the lack of real storytelling throughout is what makes this a C-tier album for her overall. You can go through her entire career — “Tim McGraw” and “You Belong With Me” through to “invisible string” and “You’re On Your Own, Kid” — and even at her more abstract, the images and narrative are cohesive enough to put together the puzzle pieces of the song, and the album more broadly, into a larger context while revealing something new about either her or her artistry. There are pieces of that in TTPD (to be discussed), but it’s much less meaningful to do that for a third of the album instead of the entire thing. And if it sounds like your old stuff, it will just not hit different, pun intended.
Fortnight (ft. Post Malone)
Hand up, I listened to this album for the first time fully thinking it’d be a Joe breakup album, ignoring the fact that the first track is about as obvious as she could make it in saying “this is about a two-week relationship and not the guy I dated for over half a decade.” I guess we got “You’re Losing Me” as our official Joe breakup song, but if I was him I’d be salty about getting the short shrift in her discography. I think this is a good tl;dr at this point:
How Did It End?
A Tier: I’m hearing reports that being the most famous person on the planet may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Working to confirm.
Clara Bow
Another admission of mine is that I had never heard of Clara Bow. I have heard of Stevie Nicks though. Lots of theorizing about who this is about (Olivia Rodrigo the clubhouse favorite, obviously), but more than that I think this is a version of “Nothing New” that’s instead more focused on the celebrity/pop culture icon component than the young womanhood side of things. And I think a good way to conclude the core TTPD album, emphasizing how even if not cruel, modern celebrity can still be relentless, consistently asking the next and the next-next questions, without giving the subjects a chance to breathe or form their own spaces. Taylor sounds in this one like she’s almost accepted that, though, which is a little depressing if she spends most of the album with mostly valid complaints about how that meat grinder has treated her and then sort of throws her hands up saying “it is what it is.”
Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
Lots of great little lines here. “The ‘Who’s Who’ of ‘Who’s That?’”, “Don’t you worry folks / We took out all her teeth”, “So tell me everything is not about me / But what if it is?” Not to mention the scream in the initial chorus really sets this one off on the right foot. If we’re talking about acceptance of her role in modern pop culture, this is the side where she decides to use that power for her own benefit, but not necessarily in a vindictive way like #31 on this list. The circus animal metaphor works pretty well too, though if we’re talking about comparisons to caged critters I’ve always imagined her as more of a well-loved penguin at a medium- to large-sized national zoo. I don’t have any reason for this, it’s solely off vibes.
Guilty as Sin?
BUT IF HE’S WRITTEN “MINE” ON MY UPPER THIGHHHH
The Manuscript
This one pairs well with “Clara Bow” — similar themes of love, fame, and celebrity — but I like this one a bit better. Held back a bit because some of the lyrics are clunky (the first two verses had the right theme but subpar execution). But the closing verse is succinct and gorgeous, and another example of her acceptance of her lack of control over how she’s perceived. “New Year’s Day”-adjacent as an album coda, I’d say.
S Tier: These go hard.
The Black Dog
One of the few songs on this album where she’s returning to her Covid-era songwriting style — i.e., storytelling, but not necessarily borne of personal experience. (I think.) And it’s great! Originally had this a tier below, then I listened to it again and said, verbatim, “this goes hard”, so I had to move it up a notch after hearing the blasting beat that comes after “Old habits die screaming” at the end of the chorus.
I love the first verse here, too. Breakups can be sudden and surprising, but they’re almost never all at once: after a few days you start inadvertently avoiding a given coffee shop, a month later you find a leftover sweater in your closet, realize after half a year that you haven’t listened to a certain artist in a while and then shut off the song after five seconds because you realized why you hadn’t. The “we shared locations with each other, then we broke up, but I realized that we were still sharing locations two weeks later and you’re going out and well fuck now I feel like shit” example is a relatively new instance of this phenomenon, but it’s just as crushing. Maybe even more so.
But Daddy I Love Him
I’d previously been a seller of Tayvis conspiracy theories. Two very famous people, one very goofy who brings out the lightheartedness in their exceptionally successful and powerful partner, ending up together seemed, and still mostly seems, like a perfectly realistic scenario.
But after listening to this album, I think you have to doubt that juuuust a little bit, right? So much of this record is about how Taylor was in an intense and passionate fling with Matty Healy, with breadcrumbs laid out well in advance (did you know her first live performance of “Anti-Hero” was at a The 1975 concert? I didn’t!), but how she got such massive pushback from her fanbase that the fling ended relatively suddenly, with Tree Paine scrambling to defuse all the fallout at a pace that even for her must’ve been a complete pain. (Good one.)
And then you hear this song, the first 2/3 of which are Taylor saying “look, I know Matty is crazy, but I’m in love, and I absolutely hate that you all are telling me how to live my life, just leave me the fuck alone.” Look at these lyrics!
I'll tell you something right now
I'd rather burn my whole life down
Than listen to one more second of all this griping and moaning
I'll tell you something about my good name
It's mine alone to disgrace
I don't cater to all these vipers dressed in empath's clothing
It’s difficult to get much more explicit than that. Which is why I think the final chorus fits the “Love Story” mold, where she changes the end to the story to give it a more hopeful and less depressing conclusion, at least from the perspective of whomever’s consuming the song. But that’s not how the story actually ends, it just sounds better this way. Which makes me think, for the first time, that she might be trying to force this happy ending onto her own life as well.
Down Bad
I am finding it a little bit amusing thinking of the idea of Taylor going through an intensely rigorous Eras Tour prep workout and tearing up during “The Man” or something. Celebrities, they’re just like us!
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
Now THIS is a Taylor Swift song. All-timer of a bridge too. I complained about her storytelling earlier, but this one I think is made a bit better by its collection of individual images of her relationship with Matty: it was such a public fling that adding a lot of specifics would almost be overkill, and by tossing in his small anecdotes — buying pills from a friend of a friend, saying “normal girls are boring” — we still get a very clear idea of what the relationship was like, while she still retains a bit of ownership and privacy over some of its elements.
There’s also a clear evolution here in her thoughts on agency and responsibility from post-Kanye: “Innocent” famously has the line “Who you are is not what you did”, and now she closes out this one saying “But you are what you did / And I’ll forget you, but I’ll never forgive.” She’s less willing to lend her own energy to publicly forgive people, or at least has pivoted from internal attempts to lend grace to those who’ve wronged her or destroyed her inner peace. Which is a pretty massive shift for her, and leads us to…
I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
A pure pop banger, a perfect distillation of the album into a single-ready production, and an instant inductee into the “lyrics vs. music divergence” Hall of Fame (#1 ranking still held by “Born in the U.S.A.”).
The dynamic between any superstar and their fans is naturally an odd one. This has manifested particularly strongly in the post-Covid NBA, where every season there are spectators who cross beyond the entertainment threshold, forgetting that the people involved are indeed real people.
And Taylor Swift is a particularly unique example of this. It’s exceptionally rare to have an instance where someone is so successful and famous at such a young age, remains so throughout their career, and still not appear to be a total mess. LeBron James might fit this bill*, but unlike Taylor, his career has goals and objectives that people can feasibly separate from the product — e.g., winning championships or MVP awards — while musical artists’ output is purely for the consumption of others (that’s to say that nobody’s going out there explicitly trying to win Grammys), and unlike film stars, it’s routinely done live and with high stakes. So from her perspective, there’s less to hide behind.
* I did not intend for these rankings to have such a heavy NBA secondary bent, but maybe that’s just me coping with the anticlimactic end to the Knicks’ season and the Celtics’ inevitable title run. I can’t explain it but it’s a Mickey Mouse ring if it happens.
All of this is to say that it is a near-miracle that she’s been able to reach this point, to have been walking the tightrope far enough to where she is now THE modern superstar of the modern age, the example of a once-in-a-generation level of fame. So naturally, our question is how someone handles it. What do they really think about their situation? What do they think they actually think about those people who’ve been following their every step for nearly twenty years?
Taylor Swift tells us she thinks they kinda suck! Or at least don’t care about her. You hear a line like “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘MORE!’”, and you ask yourself whether you as a fan have ever really ever cared about her at all. “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday”? “I’m miserable / And nobody even knows!”? This is as close as a cry for help as you can get.
And since TTPD has been released, what’s been the reaction? The Eras Tour is back on in Europe, with fans spending thousands of dollars to travel to see her (myself included), with the same level of passion as last year, if not more. Why is this? Why are we basically acting in complete opposition to what she’s written an entire album about?
Because at the end of the day, we know this is somewhat transactional. We know that Taylor Swift is writing and performing songs — to be clear, songs that have reached the pinnacle of the form insofar as describing shared experiences and emotions — for us to consume, which we do avariciously, and in return she becomes the most famous woman on Earth. She knows this, too: the song ends with her cockily tossing a challenge, “Try and come for my job.” She knows how good she is, and in a welcome change she’s finally embracing it.
The problem here is that because so much of what she writes about is intertwined with her own experiences, this means that that we also consume her personal life with the same intensity. Which was not part of that initial tradeoff. At the end of the day, though, we are consuming the entirety of Taylor Swift. At this point in her life (and given the aggressive rise of social media and short-form content consumption), she can’t redraw a boundary that was erased fifteen years ago. And that’s not fair to anyone. We know, though, that Taylor is more comfortable with this in general. “peace” is one of her best songs, and it’s entirely about this exact dynamic. And her Travis relationship indicates that she’s progressively more comfortable with living the entirety of her life in the spotlight, and not just her professional career.
But it’s now more of a question of what she’s able to tolerate within that structure. And judging from this song, it seems like an awful lot — she’s still putting out a whole two hours of new content! Which as consumers of 21st century celebrity is great for us. I’m just not sure how good it is for Taylor, nor whether we care enough to do anything about it.