In case you haven’t noticed, Taylor Swift dropped a new album last week—a somewhat meandering yet genuinely surprising double album called The Tortured Poets Department. The first half of the album leaked on the internet before it could be officially released, a near-unprecedented breach in the Swift canon.
Although Swift needs no help from conventional modes of promotion at this point, fans noticed over the weekend that she had enlisted the aid of big tech to disseminate her new tunes. Specifically, if you yell at your Amazon Alexa about Swift-related things, Swift herself will answer.
According to Variety, if you tell your Alexa, cloyingly, “I’m a member of the tortured poets department,” Swift will reveal the inspiration behind the tracks “Fortnight,” “Clara Bow,” “Florida!!!,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.”
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“Fortnight,” her song with rapper-slash-pop-star Post Malone, dropped last week with an accompanying music video, and via Alexa, Swift says that it is “is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism—longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
Of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” which, like the rest of the album, is almost certainly about Matty Healy, her problematic ex-paramour, Swift says that the track is about “being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore.”
“Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind,” she continues. “We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no.’ You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.’”
