Taylor Swift’s new album – The Tortured Poets Department – has been released with to much much fanfare, with fans and critics hailing the surprise double album as her ‘best storytelling yet’, praising the ‘surreal, beautiful, and insane’ lyricism with ‘intimacy of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop gloss of Midnights’.
The lead track Fortnight – featuring Post Malone – opens with Taylor describing herself as a ‘functioning alcoholic’.
‘I was s’posed to be sent away / But they forgot to come and get me / I was a functioning alcoholic / ‘Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic,’ she sings.
While the 14-time Grammy winner often sings about fictional and imagined situations, her references to wine, other alcohol and drugs has increased significantly since her early days as a church-going, clean cut country girl.
This is perhaps unsurprising, given she was just 16 when her self-titled debut album was released.
Taylor Swift’s new bum – The Tortured Poets Department – has been released with to much much fanfare, with fans and critics hailing the surprise double album as her ‘ best storytelling yet ‘, praising the ‘ surreal, beautiful, and insane ‘ lyricism with ‘i ntimacy of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop gloss of Midnights. Taylor is pictured during her Eras tour
The lead track Fortnight – featuring Post Malone – opens with Taylor describing herself as a ‘functioning alcoholic’
But in the years following, she said she wasn’t a hard party girl.
‘Maybe I’ll have a glass of wine, but nothing too hard-core for me,’ she told Ladies Home Journal in 2010 about her 21st birthday celebrations.
‘I’ve never had the burning desire to drink,’ she told Ladies Home Journal.
‘I need to be in control of what I say, and if I drank, I’d stress out about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.’
‘It’ll be cool that I’ll be able to go to a lot of concerts that my friends always go to and I sit at home because it’s 21 and over,’ she said. ‘Other than that, I don’t think I’m going to all of a sudden start being in love with the idea of going to a club,’ she added to People.
In fact, her first four albums – Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now and Red – didn’t mention alcohol at all. Even 1989, written when she was 24, living in New York and certainly going out more she only made a thin reference to booze.
‘You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore,’ she sings in Clean, believed to be about ex-boyfriend Harry Styles.
The liquor- references really took off with her 2017 album Reputation, largely inspired by her move to London, her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West – as well as romance with Joe Alwyn.
Cheers: Taylor Swift shared a laid-back shot wearing minimal make-up, olive trousers and a sold-out knit sweater, featuring an allover daisy pattern on Thursday
Taylor, pictured on Graham Norton, often is seen enjoying wine
Taylor Swift officially dropped The Tortured Poets Department on Friday – her hotly-anticipated 11th studio album
Her five albums since have increasingly referenced alcohol, with the singer also mentioning drinking on social media, during interviews and on her Eras tour.
Speaking during her Eras Tour shows, Taylor explaining that writing Folklore – cowritten by her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, she explained: ‘[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine.
‘I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,’.
In her video for Anti-Hero, the lead track on 10th album Midnights, Taylor drinks shots, while she’s often discussed her love of wine in interviews.
Speaking to People magazine in 2020, she said: ‘I love spending a full evening cooking a meal while sipping a glass of wine and listening to old music,’.
She also shared pictures of herself and Joe drinking wine.
‘biiig isolation,’ she captioned the artful snap of herself raising a glass, with two snake and wine emojis, nodding to her track End Game.
In recent years, Taylor has enjoyed various nights out with friends.
Recently, the four-time Grammy AOTY winner enjoyed an epic girls night out with celebrity pals including Blake Lively, Sophie Turner and Brittany Mahomes, with the bill coming to a whooping $4,000 (£3,212).
I got a blank check baby! Taylor Swift enjoyed an epic girls night out with celebrity pals including Blake Lively, Sophie Turner and Brittany Mahomes in New York City last month amid her new romance with Travis Kelce — but who picked up the bill?
Sip: Taylor was seen sashaying off the stage and slowly raising her glass at screaming fans after the curtain came down and she headed off for a much-deserved break
However, the star seemingly has a work-hard play-hard attitude, completely going off alcohol while performing on her Eras Tour.
Speaking to Time Out about prepping for the record-breaking tour, the star said that she lived ‘like a frat guy’ on the road on previous tours, but ‘this time was different’.
‘I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,’ she told the publication, who has named her 2023’s Person of the Year.
While reflecting on the impressive length of her show, Taylor said that she wanted to give her fans something special since she knew how hard they had to work to get there.
However, Taylor was pictured drinking wine after the last date of the US leg of the tour.
Travis Kelce has lifted the lid on his busy weekend at Coachella with girlfriend Taylor Swift
They were were spotted watching her pal Jack Antonoff’s band, Bleachers, perform
Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift attend the Chicago Bulls vs New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on October 29, 2014
The move appeared to be inspired by a scandal from January’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony, when Taylor was glimpsed chatting with her longtime pal Selena Gomez
The songstress, – whose former BFF Karlie Kloss was in attendance at the final show, looked delighted as she sipped on white wine at Los Angeles ‘ SoFi Stadium on Wednesday.
The star wowed in a purple sequin dress teamed with flat leather boots as she marked 53 dates on the record-breaking tour.
Taylor was seen sashaying off the stage and slowly raising her glass at screaming fans after the curtain came down and she headed off for a much-deserved break.
She’s also been pictured partying with boyfriend Travis Kelce at Coachella. She also downed a beer while watching him play football, and she’s also been seen this
She sent the crowd at Super Bowl LVIII into hysterics after she was seen chugging a drink and slamming it down while on the jumbotron at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas in February.
She’s in the crowd watching as her man, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers.
Taylor Swift was seen knocking back a drink on the jumbotron at Super Bowl LVIII
They were were spotted watching her pal Jack Antonoff’s band, Bleachers, perform
Today, hours after Taylor Swift‘s fans shelled out for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, the star sparked a social media frenzy by dropping 15 more tracks.
Despite already splashing out for multiple versions of the record in a bid to get their hands on all four bonus tracks, fans will have to part with even more hard-earned cash when the super-sized record goes on sale.
After releasing her new album at midnight ET (2am UK time), Taylor took to Instagram to announce her latest record was actually a surprise ‘double album,’ after sparking a flurry of speculation by posting a countdown clock on social media.
Captioning the post, Taylor told her followers that she’d written ‘so much tortured poetry in the past two years’ that she wanted to share it with her fans.
Sharing the double album was called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, she wrote: ‘It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. ✌️
