I forgot what I depressing song Medication is, so those lyrics yesterday were tough to read!! But ultimately, “you can’t make dirt clean so we’ll just lemon scent it” win for favorite lyric. Today’s song is Workin’ On Leavin’ The Livin’. Let’s see what you’ve got!
❗️❗️❗️REMEMBER❗️❗️❗️ Check the comments for your lyric BEFORE commenting yourself and upvote if someone already posted it. I will NOT be compiling votes for the same lyric on different comments.
Alright y’all - we are going verse by verse, song by song, album by album picking our favorite lyrics off of every song from every album in order.
Previously I did not specify when I asked for favorite “lyrics.” Some folks have submitted verses, and some folks have submitted whole stanzas. The purpose of this is to get single verses (maaaaaaybe two lines), but not a whole stanza/paragraph worth of lyrics.
Quick reminder that a VERSE is “a single line in a poem” (in our case songs) and a STANZA is “a distinct set of lines in a poem” (in our case songs).
Example:
Stanza: “Well we scheme, and we scheme, but we always blow it We've yet to crash, but we still might as well enjoy it Standing at a light switch to each east and west horizon Every dawn you're surprising And the evening was consoling saying ‘See it wasn't quite as, bad as’”
Verse: “we’ve yet to crash but we still might as well enjoy it.”
So with that cleared up, drop your favorite line below and others will upvote their favorites!
Rules:

1. Don’t be a dick! Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and your opinion does not invalidate theirs.
   
2. Read the comments to look for your lyric before you post and upvote accordingly. I will NOT be compiling different comments with the same lyrics and adding upvotes together.
   
3. This is supposed to be FUN! Engage with your community, share your stories or experiences, and spend some time appreciating the lyricism.
   
4. At the end, we will have a vote-off of the favorite lyrics from every album, then those lyrics will face off against all the other albums, and we will find out what the ultimate fan favorite Modest Mouse lyric is.
   

People say languages like Greek, Serbian, Albanian (or Bulgarian) for example are classed as "difficult" but they still comply with an alphabetical system along with gender cases or gendered nouns (excluding Turkish as they don't have gender cases at all), you read the letter as you see it just like in most European languages in general, I won't be discussing that here.
Instead, how difficult are both Mandarin & Japanese for speakers of the following languages within the Balkans such as: Greek, Albanian, Turkish, Serbian, Romanian, Macedonian or Bulgarian to name a few. (AS BOTH MANDARIN & JAPANESE ARE ALIEN TO THEM.) They share nothing in common, since they use characters (logographic), meaning they are "hieroglyphs" rather than "alphabetical".

Also from both ZH (TW) & JP: 1 漢字 equates to a SINGLE word in which multiple letters are needed in European languages to spell out. Both Kanji & Hanzi are drawn from visual concepts on how they interpret a word based on semantic meaning. (Characters are fun for caligraphy practice, it's also a work of art.) For reference, take the Kanji & Hanzi: 山 & 川
This often gets lost in translation (like all the time!), as ONE character can imply so many definitions depending on the context you associate it with, in a literal or figurative sense. As opposed to Balkan (& European) languages in general, they are phonetic since you need multiple letters to create an actual word that can be understood.

For instance: 「兵」
As you can see, a single kanji & hanzi already equates to 1 word as it is logographic, which will require multiple letters in Balkan languages to spell.
Even Kanji from Japanese has multiple readings for ONE character, for example: 「後」
I have an example of a Kanji, but as indicated their phonologies change depending on how it used within a word, or placed in a sentence.

Kunyomi: Native Japanese Reading of a kanji.
Onyomi: Reading of a kanji derivative of Mandarin phonology.
Nanori: These readings only apply when a kanji is used within a persons name.

That is also another "complex" part of Japanese, as kanji has multiple pronunciations alone. (Yep, this applies to most of the 2,136+ characters having their own assigned phonologies that differ.)

Mandarin & Japanese	Euro (Balkan) languages (Letter count)
They have a large amount of characters, getting the feeling like it's 'limitless' but they contrast around 2,000 - 10,000+ in their total amount.	Greek (24), Albanian (36), Turkish (29), Serbian (30), Romanian (31), Bulgarian (30), Macedonian (31) They are still alphabetical and phonetic.
Both languages have zero concept of gender cases as it's not a thing in Japanese & Mandarin.	Languages like Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian (excl. Turkish) for instance have gender cases.

Both languages have word particles within their sentences, as they do not use word spacing. (as opposed to European languages.) Japanese has 188 word particles in total, Mandarin also have word particles within their language too. (I won't list all of them.)
Some word particles present in Mandarin. (Although there are perhaps more.)
I can only think of 54 word particles that are used in Japanese sentences. (Although there are quite a lot, with specific uses.)
On the other hand, they both have idioms and proverbs you can create out of 4 characters, conveying a proverb and idiomatic phrase (both in a literal & figurative sense) using only 4 characters:

• In Japanese - 四字熟語
• In Mandarin - 成語

As mentioned, they only use 4 characters to construct a proverb & idiom.

I mean, can you also do this in European languages: only using 4 short words alone? (To create a proverb that still conveys an idiomatic meaning with only 4 words.)

To add, both Mandarin and Japanese have radicals (on both hanzi & kanji) which are building blocks of their characters, that radical has a meaning on its own as it's derivative of an existing word, but when associated with another kanji & hanzi. (Hence why some characters look similar to one another.)
The connotation of its meaning can change, but the theme surrounding the vocabulary involving the radical still conveys a message despite it being a different word entirely, even though the radical is present in an unrelated word that does not relate to the meaning of the radical.
As shown, pay close attention to the radical present in these words. (Despite some of them having the same one, they connotate a different word entirely.)

The Kanji in Green: Unreleated words surrounding the radical present.
The Kanji in Blue: Related words surrounding the radical present.
Be careful not to get these mixed up, you need a good eye to distiguish them apart.

Japanese

They have 45 ひらがな & 45 カタカナ but that is only scratching the surface, not forgetting to include over 2,136+ 漢字 with readings such as: 訓読み, 音読み & 名乗り for each character, imagine doing that 2k times, knowing all the phonologies for most or all of them.
The grammar too is alien to all European languages, as what is stated last in a [EU lang] sentence is positioned at the beginning in Japanese. On top of kanji implying more than one definition as it is dependent on context, also the reading can change if its paired with kana or another kanji.

For example, take the sentence「教室には学生が二十八人座っていた」(You can clearly see as indicated by the word positionings: Japanese word order is SOV while the translations below it are complicit with the SVO order, with the exception of Turkish.)
As shown, the positoning of the words from Japanese is very different to the translations in Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian and Romanian. (Except for Turkish.)

The kanji 人 here is used as a counting word referring to the number of people at a setting or in an event, suffixes for counting are a thing in Japanese. (Classifiers in Mandarin.)

Mandarin (TW)

7,000 - 80,000+ 漢字 (There are dictionaries that state the existence of around 106,230 漢字 in Mandarin.) However a modern dictionary only features 20,000 hanzi while an educated native speaker memorizes 8,000 hanzi but reading a newspaper only requires knowing 3,000 hanzi.
The grammar is different from Japanese, although their wordings can imply more than one definition, as it is also dependent on how you associate it within a sentence, keep in mind too that they also have tones embedded within their phonology.

For example, take the sentence「在一家便利商店裡造成騷動的酒鬼被警察帶走了」(You can clearly see the differences, as indicated by the word positionings - shown in color.)
As shown, the positioning of the words from Mandarin are different despite the word order being SVO, the translations are still different regardless.
I'll start off with Japanese, there are words that bare the same phoneme, but keep in mind of numerous kanji variations that also possess the same phonology, with each having their own separate meanings. For example, take the onyomi reading for テイ -
I only listed about 64 kanji that are pronounced the same, but there are 152 more with the same sound: テイ (By the way, each kanji has their own definition.)

How difficult is this concept for speakers of European languages to remember and fully grasp? (Some of the kanji are used for people's names.)

From Mandarin - there are words that sound the "same" to the untrained musical ear, as it is a tonal language, so you need to keep that in mind, for example from pinyin: 'he' consists of multiple hanzi depending on the tone you use, based on pronuncation.
From this example: I can only think of 42 hanzi (there are perhaps more) that sound 'similar' but their tones connotate a different word. (Also, pay attention to the radicals.)

How difficult is this concept for speakers of European languages to remember and fully grasp? (Some of the hanzi are used for people's names.)

The honorific system in Japanese is often "lost in translation" as evident in both manga or anime (what I hate about translation is that they transliterate it instead of coming up with an equivalent), as there are many levels of politeness and formality within their language, for example:

日本語	Roughly equivalent to:
博士 (はかせ)	Dr. / PhD
後輩 (こうはい)	Junior
先輩 (せんぱい)	Senior
先生 (せんせい)	Teach / Mr / Mrs
様 (さま)	Mr / Mrs (Formal variant, eg. clients, judges)
さん	Mr / Mrs (Addressed towards grown ups)
たん	(Refers to babies)
ちゃん	(Refers to young children - boys / girls)
殿 (どの)	(Formal / archanic ver: of you)
君 (くん)	(Semi-formal title referring to men)
氏 (し)	(Used for family names or important stuff alike)
陛下 (へいか)	Your Majesty
殿下 (でんか)	Your Highness
閣下 (かっか)	Your excelency
坊 (ぼう)	(A term for endearment regarding young boys)
被告 (ひこく)	(Addresses the accused - legal / court)
容疑者 (ようぎしゃ)	(Addresses the suspect - police / legal)
受刑者 (じゅけいしゃ)	(Addresses the one convicted - legal / court)

Of course this also gets lost in translation, in European languages as they OFTEN just romanize the term, which is not how you are not meant to translate it. (If there is no actual equivalent in European languages, just omit it instead of transliterating it.)

There's also 丁寧語、尊敬語、謙遜語 which are all part of 敬語 in Japanese, especially in verbs as to express a level of politeness (in corporate or formal setting) to empathize respect to the other party to not be connotated as rude (you can use the 'normal' variant but that will come off as impolite - in let's say a business meeting or any formal event / setting.), between a "dictionary" form including teineigo, sonkeigo & kensongo. For example:
As you can see, all 4 variations of 1 verb exist in Japanese, keeping in mind with the level of formality on which variant you'll use. (They all mean 1 verb, but connotate different levels of politeness, empathizing the level of respect or decorum.)

For example, you would not use 知る in an formal setting when talking to people within either a business or special occassion where decorum is required, you would instead use ご存知です or something amongst the lines of 拝見する depending on the situation and setting or formality.
Is there anything like this in European languages to this extent? If not, then this will be difficult for you all to fully understand as there's verbs in Japanese that do this based on the level of decorum incuding the setting you are in, the people you are talking to.

Subject omission is a thing in Japanese, as they don't always need to include words like (I am, me, we, us, etc.) as opposed to European languages where it's needed, since you are already inferring to the speaker in question, so it is a lot more straight forward. For instance:
From this sentence (私は) is omitted in Japanese since it is not necessary, as you are already referring to the speaker. (Translations conveyed in brackets and grey text.)

To Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian & Macedonian speakers, can you omit "I am" or words alike and still be understood by the other party?
For example, in Romanian: instead of saying "Eu sunt Andrei" > just put it as "En sunt Andrei" (in Japanese that is connotated as アンドレイです - without 私は)
An example from an European language: German - Mein Magen tut weh. [お腹が痛い] If using the Japanese structure in German: it's Mein Magen tut weh. (as there's no 私は in Japanese.)
From German, the Japanese way of saying that implies it as: "(Ich habe) Magenschmerzen."

In terms of Mandarin (in its spoken form) they have 4-5 tones within their phonology, despite it sounding the "same" to speakers of languages that don't have tones in them, how difficult are tones for speakers of Euro languages to learn as in telling apart the right word simply by listening to the "same" sound 4-5 times noting the differences in volume for each one?
All of the may sound the \"same\" to the untrained musical ear, but they are completely different words altogether. That is the difficult part of Mandarin for \"Euro\" language speakers as it's not a thing in their languages.
Pitch accent is another part of Japanese phonology, as the word can change based on the volume of each phoneme depending on your pronunciation, it connotates a different word altogether affecting the overall meaning, on what you actually want to say. For example, take かみ -
Accent 1 is noted as High Low & Accent 2 is noted as Low High. The pitch accent connotates a different word despite them both sounding similar to one another, as in adjusting the volume of one phoneme upon your pronunciation.
Mandarin has 漢語量詞 while Japanese has 助数詞, which are counting / measure words or classifiers used to count the number of things, actions, events, items, and etc. to make it clear on what you are exactly counting, that classifier is tied to a specific category and usage.
For example, the counting word ヵ国 is present in Japanese (regardless if it is singular or plural), as it is needed to be specific on the indicator within a numerical unit of [something / someone / event / action, etc.] to clarify what you're referring to.
As highlighted, the presenCe of the counting word is needed. Secondly (in brackets) the pronoun is omitted in Japanese as mentioned before.
For example, the classifier 把 is present in Mandarin (regardless if it is singular or plural), as it is needed to be specific on the indicator within a numerical unit of [something / someone / event / action, etc.] to clarify what you're referring to.
As indicated, the classifer is required to be within the sentence in Mandarin. (As you can see from the translations, an equivalent word for that classifier doesn't exist.)
A list of Japanese 助数詞 - (There's about 350 of them, but I won't list them all.)

There is so many counter words in Japanese, that even native speakers don't even use ALL of them, as their uses are situational or only applicable in some instances.

Counting suffix (within a number / qty.)	A rough summary
つ	A counter for [things] in general, as it is also commonly used in Japanese.
個	Counter for [no. of pieces] or some things, you see this word in relation to let's say: food.
本	Counts books, pens, pencils, nail clippers, etc. (This one is quite versatile in its usage.)
枚	Equiv. to no. of reams of paper, no. of pics, also counts bath mats, credit cards, clothing, etc.
匹	Used for counting [small / medium] animals (eg. household pets.)
頭	Counter for [no. of livestock] or large animals such as elephants, whales, camels, etc.
冊	Primarily a counting suffix used for documents or books (equiv. to: Nikolas read 3 books.)
台	Counting word in relation to the no. of vehicles (such as trucks or cars) for example.
羽	Counter word for birds (specifically) but can be used to count rabbits too.
階	Used to refer to no. of storeys or floors within a building. (eg this apartment has 20 floors.)
缶	Refers to the no. of [cans] such as soda cans, tins, paint cans, etc. (When empty, use: 個)
巻	Refers to no. of [books / comics] in a series. (equiv to: Sabrina read all 7 harry potter novels.)
切れ	Refers to no. of [sliced food] (equiv. to: Penelope sliced 4 loaves of bread for her sibilings.)
口	As a counter, it refers to [times] bitten in food. (equiv. to: Sergei took one bite from the banitsa)
件	Refers to the no. of [cases / incidents] but this counter has versatility in its usage.

A list of Mandarin 漢語量詞 - (There's quite a few, but I won't list them all.)

Although these classifers can imply multiple meanings and uses, it's context specific though if you want to know what that classifer is referring to.

Classifier (no. / qty. of something / action)	A rough explanation
發	Refers to no. of [rounds / bullets] (equiv. to: Ryan fired 30 rounds from his AR-15.)
封	Refers to [letters - mail] (equiv. to: Amir opened 2 letters coming from the taxation office.)
根	Refers to [long thin] objects, eg. needles. (equiv. to: Anna only found 1 needle in a haystack.)
棵	No. of trees (equiv. to: Adelina planted 10 trees around the park not far from Tirana.)
輛	No. of vehicles (eg. Theodore spotted 4 cars in front of him during a traffic jam in Athens.)
列	Refers to [rows / columns] (eg. Adrian had to wait within a queue stetching 3 rows.)
首	Refers to [poems] (equiv. to: Luković wrote 6 poems within the first month or so.)
水	No of. [rinses / times washed] (eg. Constantin washed his laundry for the second time.)
堂	No of. [periods within a class] (eg. Maria skipped 2 study periods for her English exam.)
班	No of [students] (eg. Ivan knew there were 25 other pupils in his Math class.)

In European languages, do you also have counter words or classifers in relation to numerical units when referring to specific nouns? If not, than this concept from both Japanese & Mandarin might be a struggle to wrap your head around. (As there's one for EVERYTHING, quite a lot!)

[Apologies for the long post: since there's a LOT of detail to uncover.]

If you have a background in playing an instrument or in music or in visual arts, then both languages are advantageous as the concept of a "musical ear" crosses over from playing an instrument, in regards to Mandarin tones as that idea is akin to the "sound and pitch of an musical instrument." or Japanese pitch accent.
Both Kanji & Hanzi are "easier" for artists as the characters are pictorial, meaning that an "image conveys more than 1000 words" kind of response, as they can condense the (letter) count from European languages (sometimes resulting in long words!), since a singular 漢字 like mentioned is equivalent of a word, which is much shorter.

In hindight:

• Since Japanese & Mandarin are logographic and heavily draw on visual concepts for their vocabulary having thousands of characters, how difficult is it for Euro language speakers?
• Japanese has different word order to most [Euro] langauges, how hard is this grammatical difference for European language speakers to wrap their head around?
• Tones from Mandarin: How difficult are those for people from the Balkans to determine the "right" word simply by listening to the "same" phoneme 4-5 times at different volume & tone?
• How difficult is the Japanese counting system for speakers of European languages to grasp, since there are 350 of these counting suffixes and specific words integral to numerical units?
• In terms of the honorific system and levels of politeness in speech: Does that really exist in European languages to the extent of Japanese, even for the slightest ones?
• How common is subject omission in European languages? I mean is it to the extent of Japanese in terms of it being common throughout Euro languages. (omitting words like: I'm, We, etc.)?

Taylor Swift’s music has long been branded “confessional.” When people call Taylor’s work “confessional,” they might mean that her music is emotionally confessional. But when it comes to Taylor Swift, this belief that her music is emotionally confessional is closely tied to the belief that she is delivering an autobiographical accounting of her life through her lyrics. Her music is perceived as grounded in real events and real people, peppered with “clues” that, if followed, will lead you to the True Story she is telling.
Interesting to consider in light of TTPD, the term “confessional” as applied to art actually has its roots in poetry. The confessional poets were a small group in the late 1950s-1960s who changed the face of American poetry, shifting towards a much more personal, autobiographical style. They included Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and most well-known today, Sylvia Plath - amongst others. The central breakthrough of their work was in “removing the mask” that had previously hidden the poet from view in their work. The confessional poets grounded their work in their own personal experiences and laid bare the most intimate details of their inner lives, delving into “taboo” subjects like mental illness and childhood trauma. This was seen as a major change for poetry to be so grounded in the poet’s interior life and personal history as the explicit subject. These poets became literary celebrities with much attention paid to the details of their personal lives - or in Plath’s case, her death.
After falling down a rabbit hole learning about the confessional poets, I believe that Taylor drew inspiration from this group on TTPD and crafted the album, at least in part, as a meditation on the concept of “confession.” I think her treatment of confession on TTPD is multi-layered - simultaneously pulling back the curtain towards a sincere unveiling of inner truth, while also, on a more meta level, examining what it means to create confessional art and, more broadly, what it means to confess. I’d argue that TTPD is all at once a personal act of confession, a performance of confession complete with a clue package so on-the-nose People Magazine only needed a day to crack it, and - if you’re keeping an ear out for those red herrings - a subversion of the expectations for confessional art. Which, as it turns out, is not so different from what the confessional poets themselves did.
After examining TTPD through this lens, I also revisited Midnights - and I hear the beginnings of this confessional journey stirring on that album, laying the groundwork for TTPD. Within the 321 “exile ends” countdown theory, this means that she began this confessional journey at 3 (Midnights) and ramped it up at 2 (TTPD). Where do we go from here? She just might be on the road to confessing her truth in swooping, sloping, cursive letters.
So, my fellow Gaylors, if you’d like to join me down this rabbit hole - I stand before you with a summary of long-ass dissertation on my findings!
Disclaimers:

• I was inspired to do this research based on initial connections between TTPD and Sylvia Plath I've seen percolating (i.e., these posts), plus the Ted Hughes poem, Red, that Florence posted as "recommended by Taylor.”
• I am not an expert on the confessional poetry movement. I learned a lot through my research for this post, and I'm sure I've still barely scratched the surface of this rabbit hole, so I'd welcome anyone with more expertise who can build on these connections!
• My main goal in this post is to analyze Midnights and TTPD through this confessional lens. When drawing connections to the confessional poetry movement, I’m going to deal with the movement broadly and focus on how this work was collectively understood, perceived, and talked about - both by the literary establishment and by these poets themselves. Dealing in broad strokes means I’ll be missing nuance in the specifics of each poet, and it is not my intention to mischaracterize any of their work. It’s just the only way to keep the post manageable.

What is confessional poetry?

The term "confessional" was first used to describe Robert Lowell's Life Studies, which was considered a "tell-all" on his troubled youth and ongoing mental health struggles. In his review of Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal defined confession as an act of “removing the mask.” He wrote, “[Lowell’s] speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” (Source)
Robert Lowell became the top literary celebrity of his time, and the confessional genre the most popular genre of poetry. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were Lowell’s students at Boston University and this group all drew inspiration from one another. While the trope of the tortured artist certainly predates this group, it’s notable that, for these poets, “tortured” was and is a central part of how the public understood their identities as artists. Interestingly, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton were all hospitalized (repeatedly) at the same psychiatric hospital, McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, and wrote about their experiences. Plath wrote of her experiences there in her famous novel The Bell Jar. One of Lowell’s most famous poems, Waking in the Blue, was written based on his experience at McLean. McLean was described as “America’s most literary hospital” in this article from The Atlantic titled "The Mad Poets Society."
There is a complicated legacy to the term “confessional” in art, beginning with these poets. Most of them absolutely hated the term. There was a sense that it reduced their art to a mere regurgitation of feelings without craft. There was a tendency to treat their work as very literal autobiography, to reduce it to a reporting of facts, though these poets themselves repeatedly said that, while their work was grounded in personal truths, it was not necessarily always literally factual. There came to be a mythos around these artists - not on the same scale as the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, but the parallels are there.
At the same time as artists resisted the word, the public is undoubtedly hungry for these personal confessions. Today, we need only look at Taylor Swift’s massive star power to see the draw of so-called confessional art.
Note before we move on: I’m going to use the word “confessional” throughout this post because, right or wrong, it’s the word that is commonly used to describe this type of art, and I also think Taylor is specifically playing with different meanings of the word. I don’t mean any disrespect towards the poets who didn’t like the term.

What Makes Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department Confessional Works

MIDNIGHTS: "Meet Me At Midnight"
A return to autobiographical writing was a central part of the sales pitch for Midnights. She wove this message into promotional appearances, for example the Jimmy Fallon interview where she describes Midnights as her “first directly autobiographical work in a while.” The album announcement branded Midnights “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.” She closes the announcement with “Meet me at midnight.” This return to direct, explicit autobiography, combined with the promise of personal revelations implied in “Meet me at midnight,” places us squarely within the confessional mode.
This messaging is especially interesting when we consider that Taylor’s previous work, with the exception of folklore/evermore, is widely considered to be a faithful autobiographical recounting of events from her life. Fans receiving this invitation to meet her at midnight might ask themselves: But haven’t we already met you? Haven’t you already revealed your innermost feelings and the private details of your life in your songwriting for years? The implication seems to be: no, you haven’t met me yet, but you will. The implication is that she is on the road to revealing herself in some new way that will invite us to truly meet her. This calls to mind the imagery of “removing the mask” from Rosenthal’s review of Life Studies, pulling back the veneer to reveal what is underneath. Pulling back the curtain, perhaps?
https://preview.redd.it/r0r6jwo3nv2d1.png?width=1018&format=png&auto=webp&s=56932d70204cb7f85bf9ecb964736595fd44c007
Importantly, it’s not just us, the public, who are implied to have not met Taylor. It’s also implied that she is estranged from herself: “For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve, we’ll meet ourselves.” Midnights represents her first step down the road towards meeting herself - and an invitation for us to join her.
While we did not meet her on Midnights, the songs on this album did begin to pull back the curtain. The entire concept of this album, exploring things that keep her up in the middle of the night, suggests a new kind of vulnerability. Taylor herself said of Anti-Hero: “I don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before…this song is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myself…I like Anti-Hero a lot because I think it’s really honest.” (Source) We also have Maroon and Hits Different - the two most obviously sapphic songs she’s released that she herself classified as “autobiography.” We have Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, a searing exploration of lost girlhood.
Towards the end of the album and into the 3AM edition, she starts to explicitly grapple with the concept of confession. Interestingly, Taylor has not used the word “confess” that often in her discography. Midnights contains two mentions of the word, the most of any TS album at the time of release.
The first mention comes in Mastermind when she says: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it seem effortless / This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess.”
Mastermind closes the standard edition of Midnights on this note - that this is the first time she’s felt the need to confess, signaling a new type of revelation. In this context, she is playing with legal imagery. She’s been scheming like a criminal, and now she is confessing to the “crime” of masterminding her career to make everyone love her.
Then we transition into the 3AM edition, which contains even more themes of confession. We get our second use of the word on Paris, where she longs to confess her truth: “I want to transport you to somewhere the culture’s clever / Confess my truth in swooping, sloping cursive letters.”
Finally, the 3AM edition closes on Dear Reader. While she does not explicitly use the word “confess” here, she is very much operating in the confessional mode. The bridge, in particular, recontextualizes the entire album as an act of confession. She describes the songs on Midnights (“these nights” that she wanders through) as the “desperate prayers of a cursed man spilling out to you for free.” She is spilling confessions out to us on this album in the form of desperate prayers. And then she makes a further confession - “you wouldn’t take my word for it if you knew who was talking.” She begs her audience not to take her at her word, to instead hear her “desperate prayers” and see what she is “hiding in plain sight.” Dear Reader is arguably the most confessional song on the album - and it tees us up perfectly for TTPD, where she will take these confessions even further.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT
“Confession” is a word with several meanings. I believe that Taylor is exploring all these different meanings of the word on TTPD:

• Most broadly, a personal intimate revelation
• A religious sacrament: the confession of sins
• A legal statement: confessing to a crime

It’s apt, then, that the term “confessional” was first applied to Lowell because he existed at the intersection of all definitions of the word. His struggles with mental illness were well-known in the literary community. He was a Catholic convert. And he was well-known for having served time as a conscientious objector to WWII. The other poets who came to be dubbed “confessional” tended to share some of these traits with him - a lengthy public struggle with mental illness, a preoccupation with religion, and/or brushes with the law. These subjects were explored in the confessional poets’ work.
I’m going to focus below mainly on how TTPD is exploring these different facets of confession. There are layers to the treatment of confession on this album. I would argue that TTPD is all at once a sincere act of confession; a performance of confession, targeted to the public; and a subversion of that performance in the form of “red herrings.”
She is so productive, it’s an art! Let’s dive in.
CONFESSION AS “REMOVING THE MASK”
The confessional poets pushed the boundaries of what you could say in a poem. Particularly at the time, the topics they were known for writing about were considered quite taboo and improper - and this was part of what made this “breakthrough” new and exciting. Consider this quote from Sylvia Plath, then an up-and-coming poet, and how she describes Lowell and Sexton’s work:

I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects…I think particularly the poetess Anne Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsmanlike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting. (Source)

On TTPD, Taylor is similarly pushing the boundaries of what you can say in a song - and she is certainly pushing the boundaries past what she has previously said in a song. She is delving deeper into the most intimate and painful elements of her interior life, evoking imagery and subject matters the confessional poets are known for with lyrics like:

• “I was supposed to be sent away / but they forgot to come and get me / I was a functioning alcoholic / til nobody noticed my new aesthetic”
• “If I can’t have him / I might just die, it would make no difference”
• “Stitches undone / two graves, one gun”
• “I want to snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me / you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”
• “The hospital was a drag / worst sleep that I ever had”

In addition, Taylor delivers some of her most explicit lyrics on Guilty as Sin. We have unbridled rage in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, even the way she calls out “the most judgmental creeps” on But Daddy I Love Him. We also have a healthy dose of homicidal ideation with lyrics like: “Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her” and “I did my best to lay to rest / all of the bodies that have ever been on my body / and in my mind, they sink into the swamp.” “Is that a bad thing to say in a song?” she asks. She says it anyway. The mask is off.
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CONFESSION AS A RELIGIOUS SACRAMENT
Art as a Sacred Catharsis: “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”
The word “confession” calls to mind the religious confessional, where one confesses their sins to be absolved of them. In the Catholic tradition, it’s only through confession that one can be free of their sins, achieve holiness, and re-establish communion with God. Sin constitutes a separation from God; confession allows for “wholeness.”
The above excerpt from Taylor’s post about TTPD evokes this religious imagery, where writing music is the act of confession. Our tears become holy when we shed them as ink on a page; when we confess our saddest story, we are free of it. TTPD is that act of confession - a sacred catharsis.
She spells this out on the album’s concluding track, The Manuscript, where she describes the catharsis of channeling agony into art. Once she’s confessed this story, she is free of it. It isn’t hers anymore.
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In this religious context, TTPD as an act of confession implies the existence of a sin to be confessed. She explores this theme heavily on the album - what it means to be guilty as sin and what it means to be holy.
Love as Holiness: “What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?”
The true nature of holiness and sin is a major theme on TTPD - contrasting traditional notions of holiness and sin against how the author defines these words for herself. While this theme is absolutely rampant on TTPD, it’s not the first time a TS album has asked these questions. This theme blossomed on Lover before reaching new heights on TTPD.
On Lover, her love is positioned as sacred. She sings on Cornelia Street: “Sacred new beginnings that became my religion.” False God expands on this theme by drawing a contrast between this sacred love and the concept of a “false god” - an act of idolatry, a sin. She seems to say: even if they consider this love to be a sin, WE will still worship this love. We will still make this love our religion. “Confession” on False God is the act of making amends with her lover, re-establishing communion between them. “Got the wine for you” calls to mind the act of receiving holy communion, the body and blood of Christ - which, according to Catholic tradition, you are not allowed to receive when in a state of mortal sin. You must first receive the sacrament of confession before you can partake in communion. On False God, this love is her God - and they make confessions to break down the separation between them and achieve oneness.
This contrast from False God - between how others perceive her love as sinful, while she considers it her true religion - carries forward onto TTPD. On Guilty as Sin, she contrasts the “long-suffering propriety” they want from her with “the way you hold me” - and she insists this is actually what’s holy. She takes it a step further on But Daddy I Love Him. Here, she points an accusing finger back at those who would accuse her of sinfulness. She casts the Sarahs and Hannahs as the guilty ones - guilty of hatred, raising you to cage you, “vipers in empaths’ clothing.” They don’t need to pray for her because she is not the sinner. They are. This condemnation carries forward onto Cassandra, where she castigates the pure greed of the “Christian chorus line” who “never spared a prayer for [her] soul.” On The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, this man wears a “Jehovah’s Witness suit” - a predator peddling a false idea of holiness.
What began on Lover as honoring the holiness of her love transforms on TTPD into a castigation of those who would say it’s a sin. Lover is reverence; TTPD is a righteous fire of judgment sent to engulf a fallen world, a la the End Times.
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So, we know what TTPD doesn’t consider to be her sin. The question remains - if she is confessing, then what is she confessing to? What sin is she seeking absolution for?
The Original Sin: “Forgive me, Peter.”
Peter is the only song on the album where we hear her ask for forgiveness: “Forgive me, Peter.” This evokes the words you would say in a confessional: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
What is her sin? Leaving Peter behind - her “lost fearless leader in closets like cedar.” Preserved in the closet where she left him. She asks Peter to forgive her because she didn’t truly want to leave him there: “I didn’t want to come down / I thought it was just goodbye for now.” She believed that Peter would grow up and come find her, that they would be reunited - but it hasn’t happened.
The second and final time she asks Peter for forgiveness comes at the end of the song. She asks his forgiveness for turning out the light: “Forgive me, Peter / Please know that I tried to hold on to the days when you were mine / But the woman who waits by the window has turned out the light.” Here, turning out the light symbolizes giving up hope for Peter’s return.
Her sin, then, is two-fold: leaving Peter behind and then giving up hope that they could be reunited. And I’d argue that this is no ordinary sin - this separation from Peter is the original sin of the TTPD universe, akin to the original sin of Adam and Eve that separates mankind from God - the root of all suffering. On Peter, she compares herself to Adam, missing a rib: “The goddess of timing once found us beguiling / She said she was trying / Peter, was she lying? / My ribs get the feeling she did.” The implication is that Peter is the Eve to her Adam, carved out from her rib - and, in their separation, she feels the hollowness of this missing part of her. The Prophecy evokes this same Adam and Eve imagery: “I got cursed like Eve got bitten. Was it punishment?” This is a direct reference to the concept of original sin and the punishment that followed. The punishment is exile - being cast out of the garden. She can only return there in her mind (“secret gardens in my mind”).
This all gets very interesting and poignant if we posit that she is singing to a lost part of herself on Peter - that she is in exile from herself. (There have been a number of great analyses of this song through that lens; i.e., this one.) Her original sin of denying herself created this rift within her, which caused her suffering. She confesses in order to return to communion with herself. To become whole again. “Forgive me, Peter.”
This calls back to the Midnights foreword, the sense of estrangement from herself and the search to find herself: “For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve, we’ll meet ourselves.”
Importantly, in the Christian tradition, the crucifixion/resurrection was God’s answer to original sin, building a bridge for humanity to once again be one with God. So, these lyrics from Guilty as Sin are quite relevant here: “What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway.” The willingness to be crucified in the name of rolling the stone away - revealing this reborn version of herself - is the answer to original sin. Rolling the stone away is how she meets herself. And, in this context, rolling the stone away is, in essence, confession. It’s removing the mask, revealing what lies underneath. It’s exiting her tomb of silence.
Is TTPD the act of confession that will bring her back to herself and allow her to return to the garden? God, I hope so.
CONFESSION AS A LEGAL STATEMENT
I said earlier that while I think TTPD is a sincere piece of confessional art, I also think that it is intentionally crafted as a performance of confession. By this I mean - TTPD is crafted to give the people what they want and expect from confessional art, particularly Taylor Swift’s confessional art. And what do the people want? They want the scoop. The gory details of her personal life. They want her to name names and tell them exactly what went down. In other words, they want to trace the evidence.
The performance of confession on TTPD hinges on the evidence she feeds the audience and how she directs us to use it. To understand this performance, we have to explore how TTPD navigates the third definition of the word “confession.” It’s time to go to court.
The Hearing: “At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings.”
Since announcing TTPD, Taylor has been teasing the concept of this album as a hearing. She spoke of “entering into evidence.” She presented the artifacts. And now here she is, standing before the public, making a “plea of temporary insanity.”
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This imagery introduces yet another layer to the concept of this album as “confessional.” Here, we are in a courtroom, and she is confessing to a crime. She is presenting us with the evidence to support her plea.
I think there are two layers to the courtroom imagery. The first is the defendant herself trying to make sense of the losses she has sustained, sorting through the evidence. Hits Different off Midnights introduces this language: “I trace the evidence, make it make some sense why the wound is still bleeding.” This language continues onto TTPD - i.e., in So Long London, she asks, “You swore that you loved me, but where was the proof?” This is in line with how Taylor has spoken about using music to make sense of her life.
But the second layer is that this isn’t just Taylor trying to make sense of things on her own. She is confessing directly to an audience - her fellow members of the tortured poets department, the public. She is again breaking the fourth wall, like on Dear Reader.
Importantly, this courtroom imagery bookends the listener’s experience of the album. It served as the audience’s first introduction to the album at the start of the promotional cycle. And she closes the album with this imagery via the epilogue poem. The whole album is framed as a court hearing.
This is fascinating within the context of the Taylor-verse because this framing directly parallels the way the public engages with her music. Her lyrics are treated as a factual, autobiographical accounting of her life (particularly her love life), which the public scours for evidence in an investigative mission to uncover the True Story she is telling vis-a-vis what we know of her personal life. And her music is, in fact, often reduced to an investigation into her love life. To most media outlets and fans, analysis of a Taylor Swift song seems to mean examining which man the song is about. The lyrics serve as evidence, rather than art.
So, when Taylor tells her audience that she is entering something into evidence, we are primed; we know what to do. Time to pull out the magnifying glass and every pap photo of Taylor taken in the last two years. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that she gave us so much “evidence” to work with over the course of the last year? So many public sightings of her to expertly match up with the lyrics on TTPD. Not to mention the Eras Tour as an opportunity for non-stop Easter egging. She presented her information-hungry audience with a veritable buffet of evidence to pick through and match up with the album.
And the album itself is chock-full of “clues” linking lyrics back to real-life figures in the TSCU. She already knows that her audience will follow those clues; it’s what happens every album cycle. But this time she doesn’t just lay the bait and wait for everyone to take it. She lays the bait and tells us to take it. She says that she is entering this evidence for us to review. She stands before us with a summary of her findings. She directs us to conduct the post-mortem.
When was the last time she so brazenly invited speculation? I’d argue that this brings us right back to the beginning of her career, hiding secret messages in the liner notes and directing her audience to decode the messages to find out who or what the song was about. She said she wanted people to read her lyrics. But the end result was that people read her lyrics without really reading them. Her lyrics that she was so proud of were not treated as art. They were reduced to clues, evidence linking the song to this man or that. And we need only read the Reputation prologue to know how she came to feel about that:
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So, it begs the question - Why is she directing her audience to follow the trail of evidence she laid out? Why evoke the language of the courtroom if she doesn’t want her music to be paternity tested in the court of public opinion? Why enact this performance of confession that seems to play directly into the public’s worst impulses?
Well, you know what they say: if it feels like a trap, you’re already in one.
Red Herrings: “And so I enter into evidence my tarnished coat of arms; my muses, acquired like bruises…”
Along with teasing the concept of TTPD as a court hearing from the very beginning, Taylor also introduced the suggestion of “red herrings” the same day she announced the album. This is no coincidence. A “red herring” is both a literary device AND a rhetorical device used in legal settings to distract or divert attention away from the main issues of the case. (Source) So, red herrings are a perfect fit for an album that centers on confession, playing in sandboxes both literary and legal.
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If you’re in this corner of the internet, you likely believe that Taylor has been using red herrings in her work for quite some time as a tool to obscure and distract from her real-life muses. Naming a song “Style” is a perfect example of how she might very overtly hint at a public-facing muse in order to distract from the true inspiration. But, importantly, no matter how obvious we think these past red herrings were, TTPD marks a first: the first time she has explicitly pointed to red herrings in an album as part of the promotional cycle. The Rep prologue took us halfway there with the assertion that everyone who tried to paternity test the songs would be wrong. But now she’s saying: I am entering this evidence for you to review, but the evidence itself contains red herrings. I am planting evidence that is going to lead you to the wrong conclusion. Again: If it feels like a trap, you’re already in one.
Why do this? Why intentionally misdirect and then TELL us that’s what she’s doing? I can only assume that she wants us to see it. If she directs her audience to trace the evidence and tells us there are red herrings - well, then we will look for the red herrings. Or at least some of us will. And if we look closely enough, we’ll find them.
thanK you aIMee is a perfect example. There are three layers here: First, we have the subject of the song identified as Aimee. Then we have an old-school Taylor “hidden clue” in the title of the song - capitalizing letters to spell out Kim. Everyone sees that very obvious “clue” and pats themselves on the back for “solving the case”: the song is about Kim Kardashian. But then we have this line in the song: “I changed your name and any real defining clues / and one day, your kid comes home singin’ / a song that only us two is gonna know is about you.” Seems a bit contradictory, huh? She says she changed any real defining clues, but surely capitalizing letters in the song title to spell out someone’s name is a pretty defining clue. I smell a red herring. It could be that the capitalized letters are a red herring. It could be that the line in the song about not leaving any defining clues is a cheeky misdirection meant to cast doubt on the “clue” she left. I’d argue it’s probably both. Either way, the obvious contradiction built into this particular song serves to cast doubt on the history of Easter egging song subjects in the TSCU. This song takes us right back to the early days of Easter egging, capitalizing letters in lyric books to spell out secret messages. If this is a misdirection, who's to say there weren't misdirections built into the Easter eggs from the beginning?
The Alchemy is another example. This song falls near the end of the album, the final “muse-coded” song of the standard edition of TTPD. And if you’ve been tracing the evidence through the songs up until now, you’ll find matching “clues” in this song that seem to point at Matty Healy: themes of returning to a lost love, drug references in “heroin but this time with an E.” But wait - now she’s using a bunch of football references? There’s beer sticking to the floor while your friends lift you up over their heads because you just won the big game? The football imagery is so heavy-handed that it took very little time for every entertainment media outlet in creation to post a carousel of TayloTravis images along with lyrics to the song. But if you can keep yourself from getting distracted by the “Tayvis” fanfare, you might ask yourself - what the heck is going on in this song? Is it about Matty or Travis? Is it about both of them? The inherent contradictions point to another red herring, “clues” planted to mislead. And, well, if there are misdirections about the identities of her romantic muses built into this song…then who’s to say there aren’t misdirections built into the others? Who’s to say that anything you think you “know” about the identities of her muses is true, even if she’s the one who planted the evidence? Who’s to say that she is telling you the truth?
This line of questioning cracks open the entire foundation of muse-driven Easter egging in the TSCU. Following the trail of evidence to the red herrings she planted about muse identities will lead you to question the entire enterprise of following the evidence in the first place. And I think that’s precisely the point. You’re in a trap, and she wants you to know it. Because this practice of attaching public-facing male muses to all of her work has Taylor in a trap, too. As she says in Mastermind, she’s spent her whole career “scheming like a criminal to make them love [her] and make it seem effortless.” This is the first time she’s felt the need to confess. She’s copping to the scheming, pointing us to the red herrings. She’s asking us to accept her plea of temporary insanity on account of her restricted humanity. Asking that we understand the plight of the caged beast, driven to do the most curious things.
And if we’re going to understand, then we must understand this: we’re all in a trap. If her fans are going to embrace her rolling the stone away, they have to first see that tomb of silence for what it was: a trap ensnaring us all, limiting her artistic expression, and preventing her audience from hearing the core truth in her music.
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Confessional Art: How much is confession? How much is art?

So, we’ve established these core precepts of the TTPD Universe: TTPD is a sincerely confessional album, representing a continuation of our anti-hero’s journey towards “meet me at midnight.” At the same time, TTPD is not necessarily based in literal, factual truths - and Dr. Swift has confessed that to us, too.
Is that a contradiction? Do the red herrings she planted exist in opposition to confessional art? I would argue, no, they do not.
The public’s foundational understanding of confessional art is that it is faithfully, literally autobiographical. It tells us the factual truth about the author. But just how true is that? For the confessional poets, when it came to truth in art, facts were besides the point. Consider this quote from Robert Lowell about his artistic process (emphasis mine):

“They're not always factually true. There's a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete flux. I've invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of the poem was something invented. So there's a lot of artistry, I hope, in the poems. Yet there's this thing: if a poem is autobiographical—and this is true of any kind of autobiographical writing and of historical writing, you want the reader to say, “This is true.” In something like Macaulay's History of England, you think you're really getting William III. That's as good as a good plot in a novel. And so there was always that standard of truth which you wouldn't ordinarily have in poetry—the reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert Lowell.” (Source)

Here, Lowell seems to say that a core part of his artistic mission was to write poetry that would be experienced as true. He crafted his poems to deliver the experience and impression of the “real Robert Lowell.” And this is separate and distinct from delivering factual truth. In fact, he “tinkered with fact” as part of this artistic choice - to create a poem that would be experienced as true, even if it technically was not in the strictest sense of the term.
Anne Sexton made similar comments about her poems - that she did not always adhere to literal facts. In one interview, she described these untruths as “little escape hatches” so she would “always have an out.” She goes on to say: “I can tell more truth than I have to admit to because I can tell the truth and say, after all, ‘This was a lie’ or ‘Of course not all of my poems are true.’” These escape hatches, then, opened up room for her to tell more truth. Perhaps not always the literal kind, but the sincere core truth that audiences recognize and respond to as “true.”
The use of “red herrings,” then, is not in opposition to the confessional mode. Red herrings can actually enhance confessional art when changing factual details allows room for the author to share pieces of themselves that they otherwise would not. And, further, the experience of truth for the audience does not hinge on strict adherence to literal facts. The audience needs to feel that they are getting the real Robert Lowell. The real Taylor Swift.
Maybe we haven't met the real Taylor Swift yet. But I think TTPD brought us several steps closer.