Ranking Every Song on TTPD...Part Two

Say it once again with feeling!

Mar 03, 2025

Jumping right in to Part Two; be sure to check out last week’s post with the first part of my Tortured Poets Department Ranking here before reading this one.

Part Two of my TTPD Ranking

The Black Dog, Vauxhall, London UK

14. The Black Dog

Disclaimer: I don’t actually know if this Black Dog is a metaphor like the earlier ranked song The Albatross, or it is a literal reference to the pub that she and ex Joe Alwyn possibly visited. Either way, this heartbreaking song about discovering your significant other is cheating on you with a younger person is good. The piano and synth mix really well to make a song that is both shatteringly sad and a bop, a special Taylor recipe. My favorite lyric is the one about trying to recover from the breakup: “Now I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes…And hire a priest and exorcise my demons, even if I die screaming”. Translation: sometimes a relationship ends so badly you want to get rid of everything that reminds you of them and go so far as to replace anything they’ve touched, including skin and hair. This song was almost titled Old Habits Die Screaming, which to my interpretation is the horrendous process of changing your lifestyle after a messy end to a relationship, even if you miss that person to the point of pain. Needless to say that as soon as this song came out, the Black Dog was added to my London itinerary immediately.

13. My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

This is a song on the album that I am 100% convinced is about Joe Alwyn. Let me speculate for a second: in her album Lover, she says she’ll marry him with Paper Rings, and now she’s singing about commitment issues and the fact that they could have had everything but he messed it up?? “He saw forever so he smashed it up”?? It sounded like she wanted to spend the rest of her life with this man, perhaps even gave him an ultimatum, and he bailed. For whatever reason (comfort? commitment issues?? jealousy??? cheating?????????) their longtime relationship crashed and burned at the start of the Eras Tour. Like a brand new doll once the novelty is gone, she is discarded and the boy picks up another toy (hence why I think Joe cheated. maybe. allegedly.) Honestly, when I open the Anthology on Spotify I frequently start with this one and let the album play from here.

12. Peter

This song (named after J.M. Barrie’s titular character) is a hark back to her album Evermore, more specifically the lyrics on the song Cardigan: “I knew you, Tried to change the ending Peter losing Wendy, I”. Cardigan is a poetic homage to young love and the loss of someone who left your relationship. She even says that she wishes she could change the ending and hopes he’ll someday come back, but just like in the story Peter comes back and finds Wendy much older and wiser, while he stayed the same. The song alludes to Wendy holding on to a girlish hope that her Peter would return; however, by the time he does, her adolescent dreams are gone, and “the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light.” For years Wende kept a candle in her bedroom window hoping for the boy she loved; she finally gave up and grew up. This actually follows Barrie’s later afterword where Wendy marries and has children of her own, moving on from the flying boy forever. I consider this song to be an expression of Taylor’s hopes that the “boy” she met (Joe, maybe) would see the light and eventually commit to her ever-waiting Wendy. After years (six…) of waiting, she finally has to end it. She wants commitment from a man, not a silly flying boy.

11. imgonnagetyouback

You ever wish someone would just tell you whether they want you or not? Yeah, so does Taylor. This song is about confronting an ex-lover (cough, Matty, cough) with strong feelings: she’s either going to get him back or get rid of him forever. She seems pretty convinced she can get him back, but seems flighty on whether or not she’ll be loyal or betray him the way he left her before: “Flip the script and leave you like a dumb house party, or I might just love you till the end”. This is a boppy, fun tune reminiscent of teen sensation Olivia Rodrigo and is just outside my top ten.

TOP TEN TTPD TRACKS

10 . loml

This heart wrencher describes the feeling of one moment being in incandescent love and in the next having your heart absolutely shattered. Planning your forever with someone who seemed to be 100% on board, then pulling the proverbial carpet out from under your shoes.

“When your impressionist paintings of Heaven turned out to be fakes?” He strings Taylor along, making her believe that they could have everything. She acknowledges that the love she felt was real but “legendary, for all time…momentary”. This song also has one of my favorite verses Taylor has ever written:

You talked me under the table

Talking rings and talking cradles

I wish I could un-recall, how we almost had it all

How many stories have we heard and read of women who heard I love you, let’s get married and start families together only to get dumped or cheated on right after? It happens too often to be a surprise anymore. It is so important to find earnest people that have the same goals that aren’t liars.

9. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?

How many times am I gonna hear a Reputation-esque track on this album?! And how many times am I going to speculate on the meaning of a song written by a billionaire? The answer is thirty-one times, and we have eight left after this.

I like this song because it expresses frustration over being told how to feel or what to do. This song is perfect for people-pleasing daughters described as “good-natured”, when in reality no one should be surprised when we finally snap. Tired of being told how to feel, tired of being told how to react, and especially tired of getting made fun of and having to react gracefully. Kendrick Lamar gets to lyrically kill a man, dig up his corpse, and dance all over it in front of the biggest sports television audience in the calendar year while I have to swallow, smile, and say What an odd thing to say out loud!. Sometimes being the “bigger person” sucks, and if someone in your life blows up after years of staying silent…just know it was a long time coming.

8. How Did It End?

This is one of those Taylor songs that I wasn’t really on board with until I heard it live. For one of her Eras Tour Stockholm shows she pulled this one out for the piano section of the acoustic set. Skip ahead to 2:28 in the video I’m linking and you will understand exactly why this song is so heart-wrenchingly sad. The way she transitions into the bridge:

Say it once again with feeling

How the death rattle breathing

Silenced as the soul was leaving

The deflation of our dreaming

Leaving me bereft and reeling

My beloved ghost and me

Sitting in a tree…D-Y-I-N-G

The album version doesn’t carry the emotion required to really hammer home the meaning of the song: her extremely public relationship has once again crashed and burned for all of her friends and the whole world to see. The question in the title implies that everyone (including me, dear reader!) is speculating on the end of her relationship. Swifties assumed Joe Alwyn was endgame, her husband, that they were already married…only to find out four stops into the largest tour of all time that it was very much not the case. Everyone was left wondering…how did it end? The title could be read as a question by an observer, or as a cry from Taylor herself.

** Skip to 2:20 in the video to get to the bridge!!

7. I Can Do It With a Broken Heart

People assume because I have a loud and vibrant personality that I am a bad secret keeper or that I leave everything on the table relationally. The truth is that I only let people know what I want them to: there are deeply private parts of me that I don’t let anyone into. I also am very good at pretending that everything is fine when everything is very much not. Most of the time, I’m pretty honest about my feelings and opinions, but there are times in my life where I have had to Do It With A Broken Heart and no one has ever noticed. Some of my friends may read this and laugh, but the truth is there have been times of deep struggle that no one has ever known or found out. As much as I wish I could spill everything to everyone in my circles, I’ve learned to be much more discerning, especially to certain people in my life. Like Taylor, I feel pressure to perform with a wide lip-glossed smile and show my teeth. Look! Everything is fine! Even though it is very much not! I Can Do It With A Broken Heart!

Instead of a song review I fear you got a too personal journal entry, dear reader. To sum up: this song is highly relatable to myself in particular; it’s fun to watch on tour; and it’s a Reputation style bop. “I cry a lot but I am so productive…it’s an art!!!”

Ajax and Cassandra by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1806

6. Cassandra

I love Greek mythology. It informs so much of Western culture and thought; so much so that we keep retelling folklore and it never gets old. Cassandra is a reference to the ill-fated Trojan prophetess who predicted the downfall of her hometown. Unfortunately, no one believed Cassandra and she suffered greatly at the hands of Greek warriors, eventually killed by Agamemon’s wife upon his return from Troy. Traditionally, much of the Greek fleet is lost as a consequence to Cassandra’s assault at the hands of the Greek warrior Ajax in Athena’s temple.

Here’s the looming question: why would Taylor reference her in particular? I think our blonde tortured poet sees herself as the prophetess that no one believes. My theory is that this song addresses the media industry and how no matter what Taylor says, she feels discredited. Her words are twisted, and “when the truth comes out, it’s quiet”. She makes a reference to snakes in cells; is this about when Kim Kardashian attempted to cancel her nearly ten years ago? Instead of listening to Taylor, the media and general populace called Taylor a snake, leaving the serpent emoji all over her social media pages. Again, this is a song that is Reputation coded but ends up on a much later album. I also don’t believe this song landing right after The Prophecy is not a coincidence; these songs are sisters, if not fraternal twins.

5. Down Bad

You ever think someone has feelings for you, then they go away and you realize you have feelings too? This song is for you! Remember that horrendous infatuation you had in middle school? This song is for you! Thinking about that fictional character you can’t have? This song is for YOU! Remember that childhood crush of years that never went anywhere? This song is for ME!!!

4 . Guilty as Sin?

Down Bad, but make it hornier. (Sorry, Mom.) Two songs in a row about desperately wanting someone you can’t have? Two songs about female yearning?? Two songs about imagining whole interactions with a person you’ve only talked to??? Two songs about a crush so bad it hurts???? These songs are high on the album and high in my heart; two bops that deserve top spots.

3 . I Look in People’s Windows

If you hear me humming songs from TTPD, you’re probably hearing this one. This song describes the nosiness after a breakup, and I’d argue that it can apply to a romantic or platonic relationship. It echoes Taylor’s sentiment in New Year’s Day on Reputation: “Please, don’t, ever become a stranger whose laugh, I, could recognize anywhere”. She never wants to live in the reality of a breakup, when everything you see and hear reminds you of them; the pain rushes back and suddenly you’re fighting tears on your run. You hope and dread running into them; what do you say? Do they feel the same as you or are they happy? Maybe you even change your normal routine to try to intersect them. She yearns for one last glimpse of their gaze, searching at every party and function to see if they notice her.

2 . The Prophecy

This song directly following I Look In People’s Windows has got to be one of the worst one-two double punches on any of Taylor’s many albums, and with Cassandra directly following you have a triple whammy of broken-hearted crying. This song is the bargaining stage of grief at its finest. Taylor is begging for someone to just love her for who she is. Another reason I think marriage was (allegedly. ALLEGEDLY!!) on the table with Joe is here in the lyrics:

A greater woman has faith

But even statues crumble when they’re

Made to wait

Wait for what? Just for love? Or for the legally binding declaration in front of the person you want to spend eternity with? My guess is the latter. However, the pleading isn’t just for marriage in particular. She wants to be loved, for someone to just love her for who she is. A common Swiftie theory is that Joe was private and much less famous than Taylor; trying to grow his fledgling acting career under her shadow proved too much and it strained their relationship to the breaking point. All hearsay, but it could be an underlying issue to the lack of legal commitment.

I guess a lesser woman would’ve lost hope

A greater woman wouldn’t beg

But I looked to the sky and said

Please

If you have a music service, listen to this song all the way through. The “please” gets more and more desperate until the very last one that finishes the song. She holds it longer, like a final skyward plea. Dear Reader, do you ever walk outside and scream as loudly as you can hoping God or anyone will hear you? Or perhaps it’s a whispered begging that’s more like a prayer? This song sounds like begging; raw, emotional begging. It’s like doomed Cassandra: cursed to see the future and have all her prophecies come true…but nobody believes her.

You really thought I would write and not have a Tolkien reference of some kind? Puh-lease.

1 . So Long, London

During the first listen of this song, I think my soul left my body. On the album’s release night, I distinctly remember lying on the living room floor as the first strains floated out my television and my husband perched on the couch. After seeing the setlist, I knew this one was gonna be a tough listen. The first verse is Taylor singing “So! Long! London!” but her voice is edited to sound like church bells. Reader, I had to pause the song in disbelief. Were they the famed bells of Westminster Abbey, or were they the echoes of wedding bells that would never ring? The song has echoes of loss; the kind of breakup that feels like a death.

She’s not only mourning the death of the relationship, though: she’s mourning all the effort she put into it, only for it to flounder and die. Look at the start:

I saw in my mind fairy lights through the mist

I kept calm and carried the weight of the rift

Call me crazy, but I think “kept calm and carried” is a reference to the World War II era slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”, a famous poster repopularized on the internet several years ago. Britain released posters in 1939 to try to boost public morale in anticipation of Hitler’s dreaded air attacks. It seems like an obvious reference to the song’s subject that I find pretty clever. “The weight” is the emotional burden of keeping the relationship alive. Consider these lyrics:

You swore that you loved me

But where were the clues?

I died on the altar waiting for the proof

You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days

“Altar” is a double entrende. The first refers to the lyric right after about sacrificing the relationship to poor choices on bad days, and the second is (and I could be wrong) the marriage altar. There is so much wedding imagery on this album I can’t help but think the use of this word is not an accident.

And you say I abandoned the ship

But I was going down with it

My white knuckle dying grip

Holding tight to your quiet resentment

She reiterates that she held on as long as she could, waiting for the ship to right itself. The other person in the relationship is seemingly accusing Taylor of destroying their relationship when in reality Taylor is trying to keep it afloat. She can’t accept that the ship is sinking; she runs around a la Will Turner trying to lighten the boat. She runs around her raft, tying herself to the mast and screaming bind yourself to me! (Rings of Power fans, I see you.) Another tragic element to this is that Taylor has been insecure about their relationship even before the pandemic. Many of her songs have an anxious element, but it ramped up in the duration of her relationship to Joe, which took place from Reputation to Midnights.

This song is my favorite because of all the ones on the album, it sounds the most like Taylor’s usual sound. Instead of too over-produced or a different genre, it echoes the sentiments of Lover’s London Boy and neatly closes the British chapter of her life. There are many songs on the album that I don’t think should have made it on to the finished product or should have been condensed into less songs, but this one is a true stand-alone. It’s a pillar of emotion on the album and would survive the editing process. Taylor really is the master of fast poppy beats with the most heart wrenchingly tragic lyrics about love and loss.

I’m very curious about you, Dear Reader: did you have a favorite song on the album? Maybe a favorite Era of hers? Let me know in the comments below, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this article with a Swiftie! ~ MM