Taylor Swift says writing new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was a “lifeline”

Taylor Swift has admitted that writing her forthcoming album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was “really a lifeline for me”.

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The singer said during an  ‘Eras’ show in Melbourne that she was reminded during the album’s creation process just how much writing lyrics gets her “through” difficult periods in life.

“‘Tortured Poets’ is an album — I think more than any of my albums that I’ve ever made — I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me,” she explained. “Just the things I was going through and the things I was writing about.

“It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life, and I never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on ‘Tortured Poets.’”

Displaying a different album cover on the screen behind her, she explained: “I wanted to show you something tonight because we’ve got an alternate cover to ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ that nobody has seen and there’s an exclusive song on this vinyl called ‘The Bolter.’”

“This is called ‘The Bolter Edition.’ Look at that cover, it’s so tortured [and] so poetic. I wanted to show that to you here in Melbourne because you’ve just been the best that you could possibly be.”

Swift announced ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ while accepting an award for Best Pop Vocal Album for ‘Midnights’ at the 2024 Grammys.

It will mark Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album. It follows her 2022 record ‘Midnights’, and more recently the singer’s re-recordings of ‘Speak Now’ and ‘1989’. The album has been confirmed to feature Post Malone and Florence + The Machine.

Meanwhile, Swift has also scrapped the “no repeats” rule for the ‘surprise song’ segment of the ‘Eras’ tour.

She announced the change at the same Melbourne show, sharing: “I’ve been thinking, I want to be as creative as possible with the acoustic set moving forward. I don’t wanna limit anything and I don’t wanna just say, ‘Oh, if I’ve played a song before I can’t play it again.’ So from now on, I don’t wanna take any paint colours out of the paint box of colours.

“I want to be able to play songs more than once if I feel like it, and I wanna be able to make changes to songs.”