With news that a Taylor Swift snippet of lyrics and/or clip of a track was uploaded by an unknown source from The Tortured Poets Department, Swifties are in a frenzy. And much of it not in a good way.
Is there a hidden message? Spotify pop-up event at The Grove in Los Angeles.
According to numerous online reports, a Google Drive link was circulating online which features 17 songs, the exact number of tracks on The Tortured Poets Department.
A snippet alleged to be from the song "loml" started popping up on X, where Swift appeared to be singing: "Don’t know you super well but I think that you might be the same as me, behaving normally."
And one suspect lyric – "You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/ We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist/ I scratch your head, you fall asleep like a tattoo golden retriever" – had the Swift army up in arms, even as someone claimed it was from the title track.
'The Manuscript' variant from Swift's TTPD release.
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One fan joked online: "You’ve still got two days… if you don’t change that damn Charlie Puth lyric." Another added: "I think you are the one torturing the poets Taylor Swift." Others just plain called out those who may have been the baddies in this whole fracas: "Stop f--king saying anything about TTPD, idc if you aren’t posting the song if you heard a leak or a 'leak,' don’t say anything on the TL, got it? It’s that easy," one fan wrote.
Swift has taken ultra-secure precautions with regard to her material getting out ahead of schedule.
All of this has to be taken with a pinch of salt obviously. While she dropped the bombshell announcement at the Grammys in February, hyperventilating followers of Swift have tried to discern, dissect and speculate about any information that was printed on all four variants of TTPD when it went up for presale. With the exception of a Spotify pop-up event on April 16 that resembled a library outside The Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles, nothing concrete has been revealed.
Swift has taken ultra-secure precautions with regard to her material getting out ahead of schedule. In 2014, she opened up about how she keeps her songs under wraps during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
"I have a lot of maybe-/maybe-not-irrational fears of security invasion, wiretaps, people eavesdropping," she explained and added that for months the only complete version of 1989 was on her phone.
Even Ed Sheeran revealed the top-secret level of security he encountered in an interview with Caprico in 2017.
"She wouldn’t ever send new songs, no," he told the outlet. "I hear them but it has to be with her. I remember when I did a song ["End Game"] with her for her album, I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it and they flew to San Francisco, and they played me the song I've done with her. And they were like, 'Do you like it?' I was like, 'Yeah.' And then they took it back. That's how you hear them."
Swifties decipher the code at the Spotify-sponsored TTPD on April 16 in Los Angeles.
The Tortured Poets Department is set to be released – officially – at midnight, April 19.
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