“Come one, come all, it’s happening again.” Taylor Swift‘s sad lyrics invade The Tortured Poets Department in a way that will have listeners down bad, crying in the gym (or wherever they are), right alongside the poet herself.
Swift asks “Am I allowed to cry?” nine songs into the album. What does it say about you if you only make it to track four and your eyes are already welling up?
On The Tortured Poets Department, Swift opens with a line about her stint as a “functional alcoholic,” goes mad over her typewriter-toting tragic hero, and declares her name is hers and hers alone to disgrace as she pleases, damn it! Melodrama aside, her sad lyrics are most striking when her pen plummets into the illusions of love and the heartbreak she’s needed to write about over the past couple years. Themes of escapism and longing bring on the misty-eyed moments.
“This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page,” Swift wrote as she set free The Tortured Poets Department and its sad lyrics on April 19. “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
The album was originally announced as a 16-song set, plus four bonus tracks across different physical editions. But two hours after its release, there was much more material to unravel. As Swift explained, “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
It’s time to grab some tissues and — if it’s your thing — a bottle of wine and have “a hell of a time,” as Swift’s duet partner Florence Welch sings on the cathartic album track “Florida!!!” Here are 10 of the saddest lyrics from the Swift’s album, out of all 31 tracks from the prolific singer-songwriter’s full The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology edition.
The saddest lyric in “Down Bad”: “I’ll build you a fort on some planet/ Where they can all understand it/ How dare you think it’s romantic/ Leaving me safe and stranded/ ‘Cause f— it, I was in love/ So f— you if I can’t have us/ ‘Cause f— it, I was in love”
Swift’s sadness over a misunderstood, cosmic love that did not survive its time on this earth swells up into great anger as she sings “f— it” in the most depressingly pleasing way.
The saddest lyric in “I Hate It Here”: “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind/ People need a key to get to, the only one is mine/ I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child/ No mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears/ I’m there most of the year ’cause I hate it here/ I hate it here”
Swift’s sad, poignant lyrics in “I Hate It Here” should hit home for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t belong where they are. She sings of getting lost in daydreams and delusions of other worlds since childhood, and the comfort that fantasy brings to her when she is unhappy with her reality.
The saddest lyric in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”: “So if you wanna break my cold, cold heart/ Say you loved me/ And if you wanna tear my world apart/ Say you’ll always wonder/ ‘Cause I wonder/ Will I always/ Will I always wonder?”
The lyrics on this Tortured Poets Department track are simple, but full of heartfelt longing and what ifs. Swift’s sad words and vocal tone have her confessing to hallucinations of who her muse could be spending his life with, if not her. The name isn’t important, if it’s not hers.
The saddest lyric in “loml”: “It was legendary/ It was momentary/ It was unnecessary/ Should’ve let it stay buried”
“Love of my life” transitioning to “loss of my life” is a sad enough ending in this piano ballad, but the way Swift delivers her feelings here — where she realizes this greatly romanticized idea, with the highest of highs and lowest of lows, was inessential in the end — pulls at the heart.
The saddest lyrics in “So Long, London”: “And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free” & “Every breath feels like rarest air/ When you’re not sure if he wants to be there”
Swift’s bitterness over wasting time in a longterm relationship that in the end was not meant to be is apparent in these sad lyrics, and in the underlying rage heard in her vocals. She’s known for saving the track 5 slot on an album for a song that she feels especially vulnerable over.
The saddest lyric in “Peter”: “Forgive me, Peter, please know that I tried/ To hold on to the days when you were mine/ But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light”
All the best intentions from “Peter” didn’t matter in this ballad full of hurt that has Swift giving up any hope held for her muse. The song is seemingly a callback to the “Peter losing Wendy” idea in Folklore‘s “Cardigan.” Here, Swift sings sadly about coming to terms with an old flame’s inability to ever grow up or keep promises: “The shelf life of those fantasies has expired.”
The saddest lyric in “How Did It End?”: “My beloved ghost and me/ Sitting in a tree/ D-Y-I-N-G”
“How Did It End?” has a spelling lesson, but it’s a far cry from “ME!” Swift swaps the children’s rhyme of “Sitting in a tree/ K-I-S-S-I-N-G” for a nauseatingly tragic scene within the sad lyrics of a song that has no real answer for how the relationship came to a close.
The saddest lyric in “The Tortured Poets Department” (the song): “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger/ And put it on the one people put wedding rings on/ And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding”
The tragedy in this lyric is knowing the ending, which is that a wedding was not to be. The idea of Swift’s sweet heart beating in such a falsely beautiful moment — a romantic gesture straight out of a romantic comedy — turns what should be happy lyrics sad. No one wants to know the heroine’s heart will break!
The saddest lyrics in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”: “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day” & “I’m miserable, and nobody even knows!”
Swift appeared to have the time of her life on The Eras Tour stage, despite heartbreak in her personal life, but with these lyrics she reveals that she masked her melancholia to keep the show going. And as the show goes on, people are screaming for more, more, more from her — an unsettling image.
The saddest lyric in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”: “And in plain sight you hid/ But you are what you did/ And I’ll forget you, but I’ll never forgive/ The smallest man who ever lived”
This song’s full of pain from Swift, but it’s the understated outro directed at the lover who ghosted her that has the saddest lyrics of all. Her voice rattles as she memorializes and belittles her tortured muse down to one action: “You are what you did.”
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