Lore has it that when Taylor Swift releases a new album, her exes quake. But Travis Kelce has nothing to fear, say Jessica Barrett
1 Taylor’s heartbreak album delivers a twist
1 IT WOULD HAVE been almost impossible to miss the fact that Taylor Swift has dropped a new album. Her highly anticipated release, The Tortured Poets Department, was also accompanied by a surprise second album of bonus tracks, meaning that Swifties had 15 extra songs to plough through – and joyfully plough through them they did. The record became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day on its first day of release, sparked column inches from music critics and exploded on social media, trending on every platform.
That’s perhaps not a surprise. Being a fan of Swift, or even an observer on the sidelines of her panoptic pop-culture presence, means being aware of the folklore attached to each album (one of her 11 albums is even called Folklore). Every word, pause and metaphor is analysed in real time, with Swifties gleefully uncovering the 34-year-old’s so-called ‘Easter eggs’ (little mysteries that are initially concealed from listeners until they can figure out their double meaning) via forums and social media. Scrutinising their findings is a beloved pastime of her fans. The unique thing about Swift is that she is documenting her own life through her music so rapidly, it is almost instantaneous. Fans can predict what subject matter her new material will cover, so well-documented is every aspect of her life as it happens. And so, fans were expecting TTPD to be a heartbreak album – and it is, just not entirely in the way they were expecting.
Although Swift is currently very happily, very publicly, dating NFL player Travis Kelce – and has been since last summer – the timing of her lyric writing coincided with the end of her six-year relationship with The Favourite actor Joe Alwyn in April last year, with whom she had been living in his native London for many years. At Alwyn’s request, they kept their relationship further out of the public eye than any Swift has ever been in. (No ‘I ♥ TS’ singlet for Alwyn, for example, as another of the singer’s exes, actor Tom Hiddleston, once wore.) And yet we saw it through her lyrics: the beginning of their romance had been documented in the Reputation album (Gorgeous is thought to be about the spark she felt when the pair first met at the Met Gala in 2016), the 2019 album Lover references their happy times. Now, the break-up songs have arrived on TTPD. Tracks So Long, London and loml are thought to be most specifically about Alwyn, with another song, called The Black Dog, thought to be about seeing Alwyn at the Vauxhall pub of the same name after their break-up (‘And so I watch as you walk into some bar called The Black Dog and pierce new holes in my heart’). Alwyn has never spoken publicly about their break-up and, after
