Taylor Swift surprised her fans on Friday by revealing The Tortured Poets Department is actually a double album.
Hours after the singer released the original 16-track album, she surprised fans by dropping a new collection of 15 songs titled The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
“It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” she wrote on social media. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”
This means Taylor has dropped a total of 31 songs, clocking in at more than two hours. Instead of appearing as two separate albums on streaming services, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology is available as a single 31-track album.
Her 11th studio record, which Taylor wrote and produced with her usual collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, opens with Fortnight, her collaboration with Post Malone. The track serves as the album’s lead single and an accompanying music video will be released later on Friday.
The only other musical collaboration is a track titled Florida!!! featuring Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine.
However, fans who bought physical copies of the album were surprised to discover an introductory handwritten poem from Fleetwood Mac star Stevie Nicks in the CD and vinyl packages.
The poem, written on 13 August 2023 in Austin, Texas, is titled “For T and me…” and it details an ill-fated relationship between two lovers, one who was “way too hot to handle” and the other “way too high to try”.
“He was in love with her / Or at least she thought so / She was brokenhearted / Maybe he was too,” it begins.
The poem concludes, “She was just flying through the clouds / When he saw her… / She was just making her way to the stars / When he lost her.”
Taylor also wrote her own poem, which appears after the lyrics in the album booklet.
