Taylor Swift Explains Meaning Behind ‘Tortured Poets’ Songs Including “Fortnight”, “Florida!!!” & More
23.04.2024 - 09:55
/ deadline.com
Taylor Swift is opening up about the inspiration behind several of her tracks on her 11th studio album Tortured Poets Department.
In an Amazon Music commentary, Swift said the album’s opening song “Fortnight”, a team-up with Post Malone, “exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album, one of which being fatalism, longing, pining away, lost dreams.”
“I think it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death and I love you, it’s ruining my life. These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say,” she noted. “But it’s that kind of album – it’s about a dramatic, artistic, tragic kind of take on love and loss.”
She said she “always imagined” that “Fortnight” occurred in an “American town where the American Dream you thought would happen to you didn’t.”
“You ended up not with the person you loved and now you have to just live with that every day, wondering what would’ve been, maybe seeing them out,” she explained. “And that’s a pretty tragic concept, really. So I was just writing from that perspective.”
She also talked about the song “Clara Bow”. Named after the silent film actress, Swift said “Clara Bow” is “a commentary on what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time.”
“I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid. And they’d say, ‘you know, you remind us of’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her, ‘but you’re this, you’re so much better in this way or that way.’ And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, as like you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you. I picked women who have done great things in the