come one, come all, it's happening again

How has it already been one year since TTPD was released and changed all our lives?

There’s something magical about the night before Taylor Swift releases a new album. To me, it’s always kind of felt like Christmas Eve — you know that in just a few hours, your new favorite song of all time is going to be out there in the world, and you haven’t even heard it yet. After days (and sometimes weeks) of Easter egg decoding and theorizing, it’s finally time to see if you put the puzzle pieces together in the right order.

But more than anything else, it’s knowing that all over the world, there are people you have never met who are holding their breaths for the same reason you are, doing exactly what you’re doing as it gets closer and closer to midnight. You don’t know they exist, and they don’t know you exist, but you have something in common. Invisible strings and all that.

When 11:59 p.m. became 12:00 a.m. on April 19, 2024, my whole house was silent and dark, and I pressed play.

And because this is Taylor Swift, when 1:59 a.m. became 2:00 a.m., I pressed play again, this time on The Anthology, this time in total disbelief. Did she really just do that?

It’s been a year since The Tortured Poets Department absolutely whipped my ass while forcing me to come to terms with the fact that Matty Healy, of all people, inspired some of the greatest art Taylor Swift has ever created, and to be honest, I think I’m still processing it.

But, to be fair, I didn’t exactly get to process TTPD in the moment quite the way I would have liked to. This album came during one of the most transformative periods of my life. I had just turned in the manuscript for Long Live — my first book and my dream come true — after spending most of my waking hours working to meet a six week deadline so that it could be in bookstores by the end of the year. (How did I do this? With a lot of encouragement from my agent and sometimes therapist, Amanda Bernardi. They said, “babe, you gotta fake it ‘til you make it,” and I did.)

Technically, the book was finished when TTPD came out, but I was lucky to partner up with an amazing editor at Running Press, Cindy Sipala, who trusted me with this project enough to let me add an extra section at the absolute last minute to be sure that it was represented.

So as soon as “The Manuscript” came to an end — still in the middle of the night — I sat down at my desk, opened up my manuscript and put my feelings about this incredible, complex, messy, beautiful album into words as well as I could after listening all the way through just one time.

TTPD ended up being the soundtrack of a year in my life that I will never forget, for better or for worse, an album of songs I still scream in the car with lyrics that make me feel like Taylor really knows me even if she doesn’t know me, songs with meanings that are still shifting and changing with me as I do. It’s a big album with big feelings. It’s a lot to absorb and digest. It’s Taylor spilling her guts onto the page, writing in blood when she can’t find it in herself to give us another glitter gel pen song.

I could write an entirely new book about how TTPD was robbed at the Grammys, about my deeply held opinion that this is her best writing ever, how this album serves as a litmus test that divides fans between those who listen and those who listen. But this is just the first post on my Substack, and there will be plenty of time for that later.

It wasn’t an album of radio friendly hits, and though many people have criticized TTPD for being an album that you can’t fully understand unless you’re already well versed in all the layers of Taylor’s lore when you listen to it for the first time, I think that’s okay. Maybe it wasn’t for casual fans — maybe it was for us, or maybe she just didn’t give a fuck and put her feelings out there like this because she’s earned the right not to give a fuck after taking over the world the way that she has. It’s brave in a way that so many other artists simply aren’t capable of, and it’s a gift.

Whatever comes next, I’m here for it, and I hope you’ll stick around and talk about it with me.

(As long as it’s Rep TV, because seriously, where the fuck is it?)