Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is dropping in two days, technically three, but probably every Swiftie on the planet will be listening to it at exactly midnight when Thursday becomes Friday. Which is why, with just over 48 hours to go, it’s getting to the frenzy point with Easter egg hunts and full-blown forensics on all the clues she may or may not be dropping. 

 

On Apple Music there’s a secret word that’s being revealed every day that points to something or other and so far the words that have been uncovered are “I Hereby Conduct This Post….”

 

There’s also a Tortured Poets Department installation that’s gone up in LA – a library: 

 

Every detail in the library might be some kind of clue. I haven’t done a deep dive on any of it to the level of some Swifties but I do like this one: 

Back in 2022, when Taylor received the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award by the Nashville Songwriters Association, she said in her remarks that: 

“…I’ve never talked about this publicly before, because, well, it’s dorky. But I also have, in my mind, secretly, established genres categories for lyrics I write. Three of them, to be exact. They are affectionately titled Quill Lyrics, Fountain Pen Lyrics, and Glitter Gel Pen Lyrics.”

 

I’ve always been partial to Taylor’s Fountain Pen and Glitter Gel songs. But of course an album called The Tortured POETS Department (emphasis mine) would not involve any glitter. Curious then to see if I’ll respond to this album the way I usually respond to her fountain pen work. A lyric from one of the songs has also been revealed at the installation: 

As you may know, the speculation about Tortured Poets is that this is her Joe Alwyn breakup album. So we might be getting some insight into what she was made to wait for that precipitated her cutting him loose. 

That’s about all the bandwidth I have for this current round of TS Easter egging. We’ll know soon enough when the album comes out and she’ll get my attention, for sure, right away because of course I’ll be hitting play on it as soon as I can. 

 

Here’s something that isn’t Easter eggy though – the song credits: 

Half the songs on the album are co-written with Jack Antonoff so, as I mentioned yesterday in my post about Taylor at Coachella, if she’s showing up on anyone’s stage next weekend, it’ll be Bleachers, right? This way there wouldn’t be that much criticism about cockblocking another artist’s shine since, well, any success for Tortured Poets is a bonus to Jack, professionally, financially, all of it.