Two prominent faculty members of the Tortured Poets Department are toasting their chair.
On Friday, Taylor Swift‘s close collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner shared their excitement about the release of Swift’s new album, saying they were “forever grateful” and “overwhelmed” to work with Swift.
“Love this album more than I can say …. love you all very much,” Antonoff wrote in a short post on X (formerly Twitter). “More later very overwhelmed … love you taylor.”
Dessner, for his part, shared a photo of Swift in the recording studio while making the double album. In the caption, he thanked Swift for allowing him to record more than 60 songs with her since they first connected on Folklore back in 2020.
“I am forever grateful to Taylor for sharing her insane talents with and trusting me with her music,” he wrote. “I believe these songs are some of the most lyrically acute, intricate, vulnerable, and cathartic Taylor has ever written and I am continually astonished by her skills as a songwriter and performer.”
Dessner also thanked Antonoff for being an “open-hearted and open-door” collaborator, and expressed gratitude for the engineers, mixers, and the “village of friends” who supported the project.
“It’s not lost on me how lucky I am that this is my job and I feel so grateful to be a part of creating this vast, magically detailed, and symbolic world of songs Taylor has crafted that we all get to inhabit and enjoy,” Dessner wrote. “Keep searching and you’ll find some new detail, layer or sliver of meaning with each listen.”
Swift first released a 16-song version of Tortured Poets at midnight Friday, before following it up with the album’s extended Anthology edition two hours later. The full project features 31 songs, including “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” “The Alchemy,” The Black Dog,” and “The Albatross.” It also includes collaborations with Florence + the Machine and Post Malone, along with a poem written by Stevie Nicks. (There’ll be a video out Friday evening for “Fortnight,” the track with Malone.)
A review by Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield described the LP as her “most personal album yet,” lauding it for combining “the intimacy of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop gloss of Midnights to create music that’s wildly ambitious and gloriously chaotic.”
