wildfloweronwheels

[wildfloweronwheels]

I truly just see Taylor and Travis as endgame.

the way she’s glowing is something I’ve never seen before (fan since debut)

he wanted her from day one with pure intentions. He supports her and shows up for her. He’s proud of her but doesn’t name drop for money, he lets her shine.

While I don't really agree with assigning labels like 'endgame' to real-life couples because I think it detracts from their humanity and exists best as a term used for fictional characters, I 110% agree about the lightness aspect. To be fair to Taylor, some of that lightness was starting to exist before Travis came into the picture (we could see it on the eras tour for example) BUT it was absolutely acclerated by his warmth, openness and their mutual willingness to build strong foundations and face all their Stuff together, never alone, as a team, always equals. I'm going to quote Taylor herself here and say, "Are you gonna marry, kiss or kill me? It's just a game but really, I'm betting on all three for us two."

#taylor and travis #curious cat

[wildfloweronwheels]

i just heard the phrase “if you wouldn’t trust their advice, don’t trust their criticism” for the first time and i don’t think i’ve ever needed to hear anything more

[wildfloweronwheels]

Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me

[wildfloweronwheels]

The chief Swiftian scholar Rob Sheffield has updated his by now iconic ranking of Taylor’s songs (all 274 of them) to include everything from TTPD:

#262: thanK you aIMee

#243: I Hate It Here

#228: imgonnagetyouback

#224: Robin

#209: The Alchemy

#192: The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

#187: Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus

#172: Clara Bow

#169: How Did It End?

#163: Cassandra

#153: Fresh Out The Slammer

#145: I Look In People’s Windows

#140: The Albatross

#130: I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

#126: Peter

#123: Guilty As Sin?

#117: Down Bad

#113: I Can Fix Him (No, Really I Can)

#104: The Manuscript

#96: The Black Dog

#91: But Daddy I Love Him

#80: My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys

#73: So High School

#68: So Long, London

#62: Florida!!!

#60: The Bolter

#52: Fortnight

#40: Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?

#33: loml

#20: The Tortured Poets Department

#13: The Prophecy

#taylor swift #ts ttpd #ttpd #the tortured poets department #rob sheffield #songwriting

[wildfloweronwheels]

Do yourself a favour and start believing you deserve everything good in life and that nothing is out of reach for you.

[wildfloweronwheels]

the more I sit with the tortured poets department, the more it makes perfect sense as a body of work taylor would create/release especially when you consider the fact she operates much more closely to an indie artist artistically than a lot of her contemporaries.

so honest it's catching people off guard? she's been doing that her whole career from the minute she put people's real names in her songs. lyrically sharp and slightly alarming? may I present "and you come away with a great little story about a mess of a dreamer to adore you" or "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter." bold and sonically strange? she's been blurring the lines of genre since her earliest albums, regularly blending country, pop, folk and even rock. 1989 has been her only traditionally dare I say 'sonically cohesive' album and the only reason its palate is so clean is because of the risk a pure pop album posed to her successful country career. if she hadn't nailed the landing then, she wouldn't be where she is now. *it also feels worth noting her most adventurous 'weird' but music has come AFTER she thought she'd had her last chance at mainstream success (lover) and as a result, thrown away the checklist because she thought she had nothing to lose. she was just making music for herself with no expectation of success*

'there's too many metaphors and characters/the muses are murky and I can't tell what's real. does she have to write so much fiction now?' this is the girl who immortalised her neighbours love story, who rewrote romeo and juliet, dreamed about crashing a wedding and was inspired by bob + ethel kennedy for god's sake. she's always written stories and imagined.

'I just can't understand why she'd make this and take this risk when we all liked her so much?' my friend, have we been paying attention to the same artist all these years? taylor swift not taking creative and honestly quite punk career risks would be like christopher nolan films without cillian murphy. she walked away from a development deal at age 14, took a chance on an independent label she built from the ground up and then bet on her future when they held her past hostage. took a genre they said wasn't for teenage girls and transformed it. wrote an album on her own after her songwriting was questioned. took a 10 minute song to #1, directed music videos and a short film worthy of oscar buzz, stretched her muscles and is directing a feature film AND re-recorded all her old work in arguably the biggest potential interruption to her career not for any perceived gain but for the statement of an artist's worth. but the world doesn't view them as risks because they worked

tldr; the tortured poets department is the most taylor swift thing taylor swift has ever made.

#taylor swift #hannah post™️ #the tortured poets department #ttpd #ts ttpd

[wildfloweronwheels]

Theory re: The Smallest Man Who Ever Lives

- ''can someone give a message to the smallest man who ever lived' -> Taylor is the messenger, not the subject of the song.

- Think Small as in 'petty'

- people are being swept up in Joe vs Matt as if they're the only two she would write songs about. She also writes songs about her friends.

- 'Jehovah witness suit, who the f*ck was that guy' -> meaning a guy who wore a suit and preached religion/purity and is no longer that guy

- Showed me off and said normal girls were boring -> really into the 'cool girl' and public displays of affection

- 'They just ghosted you now you know what it feels like' -> the guy ghosted his girl

There was a lot going on last summer, and one of those things was Taylor close friend Sophie getting divorced from a man who dragged her through the media and ruined her summer that was supposed to be a return to her acting career ('rusting my sparkling summer').

Sophie went to dinner with Taylor just after the news and she walked out ready to spill the tea. She's the messenger.

The smallest man who ever lived is the petty Joe Jonas.

So while I personally don't connect with this theory and see MH as the clearest 'muse' if I have to pick, just based on lyrics/other songs and the timing of his explosive impact on her life and psyche as she presents it, I do love the idea that there's so much room for different reads of Taylor's work among people depending on how we both view and read her life + our own. I'd actually never really considered that this phenomenon might not only exist among fans but that there are people in Taylor's direct circle who are also probably applying it to their own lives as much as they might actively directly know who and what she was writing about.

It's probably not outside the realm of possibility that Sophie could've felt seen emotionally by the song and connected it back to what we perceive might be her feelings about her divorce from Joe Jonas. Of course, us drawing those parallels does feed into a huge concept on the album around fame, projection, 'the correct' emotional response to things and the separation of public identity vs. the actual humanity of a person. Ultimately, I think every song on this album (except for perhaps Robin) is inspired by the untangling of Taylor's own emotional state. It seems like she was working through entirely too much of her own Stuff this time around to have space for the need to be inspired by other people's stories.

But I think 'The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived' will be relatable to anyone who has been kicked when they're down, taken advantage of, treated terribly seemingly for no other reason than they could be or had someone completely blow up their life (and this is broad) only to cut and run. Hell, there's people I could relate it to...

#taylor swift #ttpd #the tortured poets department #the smallest man who ever lived #curious cat

[wildfloweronwheels]

The analogy of Matty as a “forget him” pill in the Fortnight video and “I took the miracle move on drug, the effects were temporary” is the heart of it I feel. If you had to have an extremely painful surgery and could choose to go medicated or not, what would you pick? She had to end things with Joe but she couldn’t bring herself to do it for years because she knew the pain of actually losing him would be too much to bear, and along comes this person peddling that he can take away all the pain. He sells her a story about how he is the great love of her life, that he’s never forgotten her all this time, that it was supposed to be them all along. He can give her everything she can’t bear to let go of. And who wouldn’t want to believe that, when the alternative is … the love that you thought was forever just ends and there’s nothing and no one? So she does it, she takes the pill, she has the surgery, only to find he was selling not just snake oil but poison that leaves her far worse off than she was in the beginning. She feels all the pain of the surgery and the side effects of the drug in one fell swoop.

[wildfloweronwheels]

"the big thing that changed for me re: joever. just not awake yet to articulate it" Bestie are you awake yet I'm itching to hear thissss

okay, so here goes. this is completely subject to change so no one hold me accountable for this take if i decide something different in two hours or tomorrow or next week, but here goes (also putting this below a cut because it's long and i feel a little nervous to post it):

obviously what happened with joe in the end was really bad, and we were right about a lot of it. the way things fell apart was ugly. they were engaged in the depression olympics and daring each other to go lower. it was cold and there wasn't a lot of talking anymore. they were living in a pit of sadness. he made her feel small. she changed everything about herself and her life to accommodate him, his needs, his insecurities, his moods. there was (maybe?) cheating. there wasn't a lot of real forward momentum. they both seemingly sort of knew it was over, but there was so much love, so many dreams, so many stories they'd written about themselves that neither of them could pull the trigger because they didn't want to believe they weren't true. i think she's really upset and hurt about that.

but with that said! the grace she gave him really surprised me. all of the songs about him are laced with this underlying tenderness. and i was thinking a lot about why yesterday, and i think at least some of her anger at matty is because she feels like he lured her out of that relationship before she was ready. it was going to end - that's undeniable. and ending it was her choice, not his. but it's like when he reappeared in her life in 2021 or 2022, he became the devil on her shoulder. he let her write a story of pining for him for a decade and craft a narrative that made leaving feel more palatable. he fed her fantasies (look up the lyrics to the downtown lights). he quickly became aware of the sore spots between her and joe because he showed up at the right time and in the right spaces, like the studio. i also think jack feels some blame for this.

and i think it's that that forced her to pull the trigger when she did and how she did. i think his voice in her ear, about it being their time, about seizing the moment, combined with the tour, is what made her decide to do it by email, from afar, kind of coldly. he wanted her to capitalize on may. so she did. and this is not me blaming him. it was her decision, and she knows that! and she needed out! but i wonder if she feels like she did it too soon and incorrectly - that after what they shared, he deserved a better goodbye and more closure. and this is another thing that makes her searingly mad at matty, too, because he took the end of that from her. i still think she hates joe, too, in a way. but i wonder if she wishes she could hate him without feeling like she may done him badly or herself badly. idk.

[wildfloweronwheels]

I just want to make sure everyone understands the implications of 'So High School' being the clearest song on the album like the sudden glow a room gets when a warm ray of sunlight comes through the window - could it be a hint at what comes next??? And yes it's the first one for Travis but more than that, it's also Taylor's FIRST ever love song without anxiety underneath. like do we all understand what that means? are we all picking up what she's putting down? like this is little miss 'I'm a hopeless romantic but I also have a fatalistic streak a mile wide' we're talking about... the tortured poets department may have been as dark as death itself and fragile glass but where she is now? that's solid as fuck and full of life.

#taylor swift #so high school #the tortured poets department #travis kelce #taylor and travis

[wildfloweronwheels]

I think it's so wild that Swifties think they can sit here talking about Taylor's life and decisions 24/7 and she can have no say in it? She isn't allowed to have thoughts and opinions about us talking about her all the time? She isn't allowed to make art about how that makes her feel? We deserve to be called out by her, it's completely fair and valid. To think otherwise is naive. And I personally find it refreshing that she isn't acting like having rabid fans is all roses and sunshine all the time, for once.

[wildfloweronwheels]

Taylor has time to write a 31 song masterpiece, write and direct a music video (and more potentially?), shoot visuals and promo for her album, go around the world on the biggest tour she’s ever done, and you mean to tell me she’s also got time to sew, bake, play pickle ball? GIRL HOW DO YOU DO IT

[wildfloweronwheels]

feeling sooooo soft bc taylor is sharing tidbits of her personal life with us again this feels so special🥹🥹🥹🥰🥰🥰

[wildfloweronwheels]

The Tortured Poets Department Prologue

At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding

As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck by a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y

You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things

Lovers spent years denying what's ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created

Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan

Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align.

And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky.

Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new

And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips

He never even scratched the surface of me.

None of them did.

"In summation, it was not a love affair!" I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest.

A smirk creeps onto this poet's face Because it's the worst men that I write best.

And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink

All’s fair in love and poetry

Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

[wildfloweronwheels]

these thoughts are still developing so be gentle but I think the shock of ttpd paying attention to taylor’s rebound with matty at least partly stems from the fact that most of the discourse failed to recognise the emotional context at the time. Our focus (including mine) was on criticising and critiquing her for being associated with him. That is of course (still) extremely valid and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that taylor herself is dripping with self loathing over it. BUT if you look beyond that for just a second, what you see is a woman whose future and forever had just been blown up (in part by her to save herself) and then this guy who she already has existing intimacy with swoops in to rescue her from the pain because that’s her primary focus; making it stop.

He says all the right things and makes all these promises she’s desperate to believe in. Remember, for every time Taylor has appeared jaded and wary, she is still almost impossibly at her core a hopeless romantic. Of course she wants to relish in his love bombing because by all accounts for a while she’s been starved of it. But then he leaves because it was never about saving, only about taking.

We were all so busy being mad at taylor at the time while also desperately trying to understand and give her grace for her behaviour that most of us forgot to consider how fucked up matty’s was. He took advantage of a completely broken woman and built her an escape route ringing with identical false promises (heavier to make at 34 so assumed to be meant) and then shattered it. Maybe he really did mean them but she wasn’t in a position to truly, and anyone worth their salt would have seen that. Would have focused on her healing. So of course that’s almost going to hurt more and be darker. She was already smashed and then he broke her just for fun. And then after all of that, she glued herself back together piece by piece and in a fateful moment got someone who met her where she was at finally and meant it

#sorry this got long #taylor swift #taylor and joe #joe alwyn #matty healy #taylor and travis #travis kelce #ttpd #the tortured poets department

[wildfloweronwheels]

having so many thoughts about the nature of storytelling right now. about how the story of a girl driven to insanity is more compelling and less palatable than a story of someone scorned and heartbroken. about how public perception of art bleeds into the life of the artist. about living for the record instead of recording about the life. about what makes a good album and how that intersects and conflicts with what makes a happy human. about the toll that takes on a woman who, at the end of the day, just wants to be heard and understood, but feels terrified to let anyone down with the truth. IDK YOU GUYS

[wildfloweronwheels]

A Poem By Stevie Nicks

(found on the back of the The Tortured Poets Department vinyl)

He was in love with her or at least she thought so. She was broken-hearted maybe he was too - neither of them knew; She was way too hot to handle, he was way too high to try. He couldn't even see her, he wouldn't open his eyes. She was on her way to the stars. He didn't say goodbye.

She looked back from her future and shed a few tears. He looked into his past and actually felt fear. For both of them, the answers would never be ever clear. Don't ask questions, do that later. She brings joy, he brings Shakespeare. It's almost a tragedy says she. Don't endanger me. Don't endanger me.

He really can't answer her. He's afraid of her. He's hiding from her. And he knows - that' he's hurting her. She tells the truth, she writes about it. She's an informer, he's an x-lover. There's nothing there for her. She's already gone. There's nothing that can stop her.

She was just flying through the clouds where he saw her. She was just making her way to the stars when he lost her...

For T - and me!!!

#taylor swift #stevie nicks #poetry #the tortured poets department #ttpd #for anyone who struggles to read the vinyl images