the alyssa-sis: tay75's version
an analysis by me (alyssa) on the whole taylor swift x matty healy thing
I think the most romantic, yet scary, thing in the world is to have a song written about you. To be the muse of an artist is to have a spotlight on every single one of your strengths and flaws. It means you are perceived on the deepest level and, as a person who does not like to be perceived, that is terrifying. The fact that we can go back through nearly a decade of music and find links between Taylor Swift and Matty Healy, swirling each other into all of their poems, is the most romantic, and tragic, story of this generation.
The majority of my life has been soundtracked by both Taylor Swift and The 1975. I can recall the exact place I was when Matty Healy wore a 1989 shirt on stage (at my desk, after tennis practice, scrolling on Tumblr to avoid doing my homework). As you can imagine, this whole TTPD album has been keeping me awake at night for the past few weeks. We received an influx of information that has made me re-evaluate a good portion of songs that I have been listening to for the past decade.
I have found myself diving head first (fearless) into the deepest rabbit holes. It’s been such a fun way to apply new meaning to these songs, about two people that I love and appreciate dearly (as a fan, not a weird parasocial “they’re my friend” way). At the end of the day, this is just a fun little thing I’m doing because this is the greatest thing to happen in my corner of the pop culture realm. None of this should be taken seriously. The only people who know the real story are Matty Healy and Taylor Swift and, unless we get an Evelyn Hugo-esque tell all, we’ll never know.
With that warning aside, I think it’s time we get into it! This post is going to be the home for all of my deep dives. I’ll update this with a link to every post and theory that I make about the saga of Taylor Swift and Matty Healy.
Before we even go into a deep dive on the songs, I think we need to examine the name of the album that sent me into my spiral. Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album is coined THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, with the second half of the album being named THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY. It’s important to establish early on that I believe EVERYTHING Taylor Swift does is extremely deliberate, including the capitalization of this album. In the song Guilty As Sin? on THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, there’s a lyric:
I keep these longings locked
In lowercase inside a vault
I keep these longings (for Matty Healy over the past decade) locked in lowercase (!!!!!) inside a vault. The following albums have titles that are in all lowercase, have no released vault, and have songs that Taylor Swift references back on in THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT:
reputation
folklore
evermore
The capitalization of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT is Taylor Swift officially proclaiming that her longings are no longer locked inside a vault. It’s in all caps because she wants us to know. She wants their story to be out in the world, so we all know just how cruel her “fans” were to both of them, and how that ultimately lead to their demise (But Daddy I Love Him). Further, I think the album name itself is a genius way of delivering multiple messages at once.
Before THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT album was released, the world (well, at least my corner of the internet) was freaking out because everyone thought the album title solidified the fact that this would be a “Joe” album. In a 2022 interview with Variety, Joe Alwyn shared that he had a group chat with Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott named The Tortured Man Club. The group chat name of Paul Mescal, ex-boyfriend of Phoebe Bridgers (who also opened for The Eras Tour and has a collaboration with Taylor Swift), and Joe Alwyn, ex-boyfriend of Taylor Swift, seemed to be the perfect inspiration for this album title.
But then, the album came out. And this is most definitely not a “Joe” album. It seems to be mostly about Taylor Swift’s decade long ideation of Matty Healy, and the aftermath of when they attempted to make it work.
If we take the album title at face value, this is the department of tortured poets. We have a chairman, we have a manuscript, we have all the inner workings we need to be a functioning department. Taylor Swift herself is the tortured poet leading our department. The title can also mean a departure from the tortured poets. It could mean she is leaving behind the brooding, gray, British poet of her past (Matty Healy) and moving on to the man who knows how to ball.
This is the genius of Taylor Swift. Her ability to simply combine four words, but have those words hold infinite meaning, is why she is the most revered songwriter of her time. And so, let’s dive into the rest of the album, some old albums, and some songs from the 1975 to try and piece together Taylor Swift and Matty Healy communicating to each other through their music over the past decade.
& obviously we have a playlist of the songs that I think they wrote about each other: