The Fact That Tortured Poets Department Comes Out On My 20th Birthday (april 20th) 😭😭😭😭

illicit affairs // Hits Different // All You Had To Do Was Stay // Dancing With Our Hands Tied (all lyric connections)

almost 3 months and I still can’t believe I was this close to him during robbers 💔

also, me and @maxverstappensflatbrim are permanently traumatized from him approaching those stairs

When I was 24 I sat in a backstage dressing room in London, buzzing with anticipation. My backup singers and bandmates gathered around me in a scattered circle.Scissors emerged and I watched in the mirror as my locks of long curly hair fell in piles on the floor. There I was in my plaid button down shirt, grinning sheepishly as my tour mates and friends cheered on my haircut. This simple thing that everyone does. But I had a secret. For me. It was more than a change of hairstyle. When I was 24. I decided to completely reinvent myself.

How does a person reinvent herself, you ask? In any way I could think of. Musically, geographically, aesthetically, behaviorally, motivationally. And I did so joyfully. The curiosity I had felt the first murmurs of while making red had amplified into a pulsing heartbeat of restlessness in my bars. The risks I took when I toyed with pop sounds and sensibilities on red? I wanted to push it further. The sense of freedom I felt when traveling to big bustling cities? I wanted to live in one. The voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman? I wanted to silence them.

You see, in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut shaming, the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.

It became clear to me that for me there was no such thing as casual dating, or even having a male friend who you platonically hang out with. If I was seen with him, it was assumed I was sleeping with him. And so I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era.

Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior. I swore off dating and decided to focus only on myself, my music, my growth. And my female friendships. If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn't sensationalize or sexualize that, right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.

But none of that mattered then because I had a plan and I had a demeanor as trusting as a basket of golden retriever puppies. I had the keys to my own apartment in New York and I had new melodies bursting from my imagination. I had Max Martin and Shellback who were happy to help me explore this new sonic landscape I was enamored with. I had a new friend named Jack Antonoff who had made some cool tracks in his apartment. I had the idea that the album would be called 1989. And we would reference big 80's synths and write sky high choruses. I had sublime, inexplicable faith and I ran right toward it, in high heels and a crop top.

There was so much that I didn't know then, and looking back I see what a good thing that was. This time of my life was marked by right kind of naïveté, a hunger for adventure. And a sense of freedom I hadn't tasted before. It turns out that the cocktail of naïveté, hunger for adventure and freedom can lead to some nasty hangovers, metaphorically speaking. Of course everyone had something to say. But they always will. I learned lessons, paid prices, and tried to… don't say it don't say it. I'm sorry, I have to say it. Shake it off.

I’ll always be so incredibly grateful for how you loved and embraced this album. You, who followed my zig zag creative choices and cheered on my risks and experiments. You, who heard the wink and humor in "blank space" and maybe even empathized with the pain behind the satire. You, who saw the seeds of allyship and advocating for equality in "Welcome to New York". You, who knew that maybe a girl who surrounds herself with female friends in adulthood is making up for a lack of them in childhood (not starting a tyrannical hot girl cult). You, who saw that I reinvent myself for a million reasons, and that one of them is to try my very best to entertain you. You, who have had the grace to allow me the freedom to change.

I was born in 1989. Reinvented for the first time in 2014, and a part of me was reclaimed in 2023 with the re-release of this album I love so dearly.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the magic you would sprinkle on my life for so long. This moment is a reflection of the woods we've wandered through and all this love between us still glowing in the darkest dark.

I present to you, with gratitude and wild wonder, my version of 1989.

It’s been waiting for you.

the post that inspired my "The Seven Husbands Of Taylor swift- A Comparative Essay" cause I'm obsessed and queer and a kaylor <3

“When Celia said she couldn’t have all of me, it was because I was selfish and because I was scared of losing everything I had. Not because I had two sides of me that one person could never fulfill. I broke Celia’s heart because I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her." (Evelyn Hugo)

Jack has never had a bad take

“Reputation, at this point, is fucking goated. It’s the fucking shit – I just love that album to the fucking moon and back. I remember making that [album] and loving it. I feel like that album was met with some amount of cynicism, then cut to a few years later, it’s like, nope, everyone loves it. Taylor and I do talk about that a lot: You make what you make, because you believe in it, and sometimes you get your flowers right away and sometimes it takes a minute.”

— Jack Antonoff to The Face on reputation (x)

My toxic trait is that i do actually fancy matty healy a wee bit

i need him so badly

I don’t mean to crop her but genuinely this outfit is so chic and cunty I loooooooveeeeee it

Taylor wrote Question…? to haunt me specifically forever

1989 vault tracks: a summary