As if 31 tracks and extra lyrical burns than an emergency room ready room on the Fourth of July wasn’t sufficient to work with, Taylor Swift’s new double album The Tortured Poets Division additionally options an unique poem penned by none apart from Stevie Nicks.
Bodily copies of the album characteristic a poem by the Fleetwood Mac icon, which lacks a title aside from “A Poem By Stevie Nicks” and bears a handwritten date (Sept. 13, 8:50 p.m.) and dedication: “For T — and me…”
The poem, aptly for the subject material of the album, is about heartbreak and the top of a relationship.
It reads:
Nicks and Swift are not any strangers: They’ve carried out collectively, have vocally been followers of each other, and have been in comparison with each other—the most recent comparability coming from Swift herself on the TTPD monitor “Clara Bow.”
The music is about that quintessential concept of “making it” and turning into the “It Lady.” (Bow, a silent movie star, is taken into account to have pioneered the archetype.) “You appear to be Stevie Nicks / In ‘75, the hair and the lips / Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, a full eclipse” one verse begins, with the ultimate traces invoking Swift’s identify, wanting right into a future the place she’s simply one other icon of the previous. “You appear to be Taylor Swift / On this mild / We’re loving it. / You’ve acquired an edge she by no means did, / The long run’s vivid / …Dazzling.”
Nicks has additionally praised Swift by means of the years, and in October 2023 thanked her onstage for writing the Midnights monitor “You’re On Your Personal, Child,” invoking the music for instance of how she felt about bandmate Christine McVie, who died in 2022, and why she couldn’t see Fleetwood Mac touring once more with out McVie.
“That was Christine and I. We had been on our personal in that band. We at all times had been. We protected one another,” she stated. “Who am I going to look over to on the appropriate and have them not be there behind that Hammond organ? When she died, I figured we actually can’t go any additional with this. There’s no cause to.”