Before Taylor Swift welcomes you to The Tortured Poets Department, she wants to help you get over a broken heart with some special Apple Music playlists.
Swift partnered with Apple ahead of the release of her 11th studio album to put out five exclusive playlists full of songs from her discography that touch upon the five stages of grief, or, in the case of Swift, heartbreak: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
In Swiftian language, that translates to playlists titled “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life Songs,” “You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad Songs,” “Am I Allowed to Cry? Songs,” “Old Habits Die Screaming Songs” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart Songs.” The playlists, which are named after tracks from her upcoming album, also include voice notes from Swift explaining the rationale behind her picks.
The first playlist contains songs like “Betty,” “Cruel Summer,” “Wildest Dreams,” and “Lavender Haze.” Swift said in a statement that “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life” is full of songs “about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion. Results may vary.”
In terms of “You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad Songs,” Swift says the songs she picked all have one thing in common. “I wrote them while feeling anger,” she said. “Over the years, I’ve learned that anger can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, but the healthiest way that it manifests itself in my life is when I can write a song about it, and then oftentimes, that helps me get past it.”
The songs on the playlist include the “Taylor’s Version” of songs like “Bad Blood,” “I Bet You Think About Me,” “Dear John, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” as well as cuts like “Mad Woman,” “High Infidelity,” and “Vigilante S—t.”
“Am I Allowed to Cry? Songs” includes the songs Swift wrote “when I was in the bargaining stage,” she says. Swift explains this stage as when “you’re trying to make deals with yourself or someone that you care about, you’re trying to make things better, you’re oftentimes feeling really desperate, because oftentimes we have a gut intuition that tells us things are not going to go the way that we hope, which makes us more desperate, which makes us bargain more.”
“Old Habits Die Screaming Songs” is all about depression. It includes the “Taylor’s Version” of “Forever Winter” and “We Were Happy,” along with “My Tears Ricochet” from Folklore, “Champagne Problems” from Evermore and “Dear Reader” from the 3 a.m. edition of Midnights.
This collection explores “the feelings of depression that often lace their way through my songs,” says Swift. “In times like these, I’ll write a song because I feel lonely or hopeless. And writing a song feels like the only way to process that intensity of an emotion. And while these things are really, really hard to go through, I often feel like when I’m either listening to songs or writing songs that deal with this intensity of loss and hopelessness, usually that’s in the phase where I’m close to getting past that feeling.”
The fifth and final playlist references track 13 on Swift’s upcoming TTPD album, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” includes “I Forgot You Existed,” “The 1,” “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and the “Taylor’s Version” of songs like “Now That We Don’t Talk,” “This Love,” and “Breathe.”
“Here we finally find acceptance and can start moving forward from loss or heartbreak,” said Swift. “These songs represent making room for more good in your life, making that choice because a lot of the time when we lose things, we gain things too.”
Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department arrives on April 19. The woman Forbes recently confirmed is worth over a billion dollars hasn’t released a single from the album yet. Some eager fans theorized that the first song on the tracklist, “Fortnight,” was a clue that she was going to share the first sample of this album two weeks (aka one “fortnight”) ahead of TTPD.
That particular theory was incorrect. Fans experiencing the five stages of heartbreak over the lack of a new single can either enjoy the provided playlists, re-listen to the voice note Swift gives when you pre-save the album or listen to the newly launched SiriusXM channel dedicated to Swift’s music.
