I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone music now. So we have back. Brittany

Spanos and Rob Sheffield, welcome.

Welcome. Happy tortured poets. Happy new era.

A long day. The longest day. We are the tortured by poets department.

But yes, we thought we knew for quite some time that we were going to gather here today to discuss the Tortured Poets Department, the long

since announced new album by Taylor Swift.

What we did not know is yes we were going to be discussing Tortured Poets Department, but in fact it's Torture Poets Department, the anthology, and it's a double album, a fact that Taylor Swift so kindly revealed to us at 2 in the morning after Robert already written a review of part one and no one knew including you it was an insanely closely kept secret it foiled leakers it caused so much sleep deprivation I would bet across the country that it might actually have a demonstrable effect on the sort of worldwide economy today.

But yeah, there's so there's two albums. There's so much to talk about.

Most broadly, I would start by saying we did an anticipation episode.

Our guesses for the sound of this thing.

You know, I think we kind of settled on,

oh, it'll be kind of like a mix of

midnight with Folklore and Evermore and a little bit more introspective,

but essentially in that vein and we're like, that's it, right?

That's basically it with some.

And then so many of the theories about what the songs were about and everything else wildly wrong and some of it was just overthinking by fans overthinking by us from the title.

Many of these songs are not about the person that people thought this whole album would be about.

I will say, I don't think it was even overthinking.

Like I think we weren't overthinking enough, maybe.

We thought there was an obvious answer of who the songs would be about, which was fair because she

accidentally a six-year relationship. She had written many albums about this love, and I think maybe we just

weren't thinking hard enough

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