Four new studio albums. Four rerecorded albums, too. A $1 billion oxygen-sucking world tour with a concert movie to match. And, of course, one very high-profile relationship that spilled over into the Super Bowl.
For some, the constant deluge that has peaked in the past year is starting to add up to a new (and previously unthinkable) feeling: Taylor Swift fatigue.
And it is a feeling that has only solidified online in the days following the release of “The Tortured Poets Society,” which morphed from a 16-song album into a 31-song, two-hour epic just hours after its release.
Many critics (including The New York Times’s own) have suggested that the album was overstuffed — simply not her best. And critiques of the music have now opened a sliver of space for a wider round of complaint unlike any Swift has faced over her prolific and world-conquering recent run.
“It’s almost like if you produce too much… too fast… in a brazen attempt to completely saturate and dominate a market rather than having something important or even halfway interesting to say… the art suffers!” Chris Murphy, a staff writer at Vanity Fair, posted on X.
Which is not to say nobody listened to the album; far from it. Spotify said “Poets,” which was released on Friday, became the most-streamed album in a single day with more than 300 million streams.
And of course, many of Swift’s most ardent fans, known as “Swifties,” loved her 11th album or, at least, have decided to air any reservations in private conservations. The first days of the album’s release have been greeted with the usual lyrical dissections for key allusions hidden within the songs, attention to every word that few other artists receive.
Some admonished Swift for selling so many versions of “Poets” only to double its size after those orders were in, part of a cynically corporate rollout. (Care for the CD, vinyl or the Phantom Clear vinyl?) The Daily Mail cobbled together what it deemed “The 10 WORST lyrics in Taylor Swift’s new album — ranked!”
For its part, Reductress, the satirical women’s magazine, offered a post titled “Woman Doing Her Best to Like New Taylor Swift Album Lest She Face the Consequences.”
Weird, complicated times in Taylor land.
“It might be a tough few days for the fanbase,” Nathan Hubbard, a co-host of the Ringer podcast, “Every Single Album, wrote in a social media thread about “Poets” on Friday. “They’ll hear some valid criticism they aren’t used to (if the critics dare), and for many they’ll have to reconcile their own truth that this isn’t their favorite, while still rightly celebrating it and supporting her.”
Indeed, grinding through the 31-song double album after midnight had felt like “a hostage situation,” Hubbard wrote.
On a new podcast episode, which was released over the weekend, Hubbard and his co-host, Nora Princiotti, were among those who pointed out that while the album may be imperfect, Swift simply may have needed to purge herself of the songs on “Poets” to process a turbulent time in her life.
Princiotti said she enjoyed much of the album and was careful to stipulate that “Poets” did contain several “special songs.”
But she also allowed for some “tough love.”
“Musically, I do not really hear anything new,” she said, adding that Swift “could have done a little bit more self editing.”
“I don’t think the fact that this is a double-album that is more than two hours in length serves what’s good about it,” Princiotti said. “And I think that for the second album in a row, I’m still sort of left going, ‘OK, where do we go from here?’”
Princiotti ultimately graded “Poets” a “B.” And in the world of her podcast and universe of Taylor Swift, Princiotti acknowledged — that might have been an all-time low.
