Taylor Swift turns 'TTPD' into a surprise double album

Surprise: Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets Department’ is a double album, ‘The Anthology’

Taylor Swift in a bedazzled bodysuit flexing one arm and holding a mic in the other hand during a performance

By Christie D’ZurillaAssistant Editor, Fast Break Desk

April 19, 2024 9:17 AM PT

Seems Taylor Swift has been one busy girl. And overnight she dropped the entirety of that effort, turning “The Tortured Poets Department” into a double album release and tacking “The Anthology” onto the title.

“It’s a 2am surprise,” she wrote on Instagram at 11 p.m. “The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. ✌️ I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”

We’ve always known T-Swift was a writer — now we know she’s the kind of writer who doesn’t want anything cut from her story.

Swift has been teasing the release of her latest creative bundle since winning the Grammy for album of the year for “Midnights.” It was her fourth AOTY victory, notching hardware for “Midnights” doing the same with “Folklore” in 2021, “1989” in 2016 and “Fearless” in 2010.

She also surpassed Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon‘s Grammy honors with her fourth win in that category; she had been equal with the three male legends at three albums of the year since “Folklore.”

Back to the present: When the heavily promoted first part of “The Tortured Poets Department” dropped at 9 p.m. (Pacific), Team Swift posted another note to Instagram.

“The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time — one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure,” she said, likely referring to her six-year relationship with former boyfriend Joe Alwyn. (Swift is now with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, if by some chance the news skipped your part of the Antarctic.)

“This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”