Old Habits Die Screaming

Unpacking the religious ties (and deconstruction?) in The Tortured Poets Department

Nice to meet you, where you been? Unless you’ve been listening to The Tortured Poets Department, or have at least heard about it, you’ve probably been squirreled away in a cave somewhere. (I’m not judging. A cave escape sounds lovely, actually.)

My fandom is partially for her wording/storytelling skills, and partially out of respect for Taylor’s power moves over people who try to silence her again and again. And that’s exactly the topic she confronts in this album. Specifically to do with religion, it seems.

Taylor often references religion in her songs. 

Some of the themes she keeps going back to are: prayer/talking to God; soteriology (the study of salvation), sanctification and holiness; miracles and the desperation for them that leads to seeking God; and alluding to relationships with lovers as religion–angels and devils, having faith in them, sin and temptation, heaven and hell, states of and falls from grace.

In TTPD she calls out the boundary lines of control, and how much power we do or don’t have on other people’s lives. She explores the sensationalism of scandal and slander. Through various songs, she challenges the hypocrisy of wanting to control aspects of other people’s lives, but also ignoring their cries for help. And surprisingly, she is not exempt from her treatise. She confronts her own duality of wanting to fix the men in her life, but realizing she can’t.

The goal of this is not to speculate about Taylor Swift’s beliefs–which sound conflicted, but isn’t that all of us?– or her behavior. Instead, we’re looking at the lyrics to unpack what she is pointing/calling/screaming out in our religious culture. I’m writing through a lens of nondenominational Christian faith, but my goal is to be objective here, and I’m hoping this will be helpful no matter where you stand with faith.

But Daddy I Love Him

Buckle up for this one. The gloves come off with words like,

“I just learned these people only raise you…to cage you” and “I just learned these people try and save you…'Cause they hate you.”

While you can’t ignore the satire of this song (Taylor trolls us with the words, “I’m havin’ his baby…no, I’m not, but you should see your faces”), she’s zeroing in on moral superiority and giving it names and faces like Sarah and Hannah, all in their “Sunday best,” “clutching their pearls”. She says their horse was too high for her to reach; their moral high ground demanded impossible expectations. 

Interestingly, Sarah and Hannah are two women in the Bible who waited a long time to have their first children. This feels significant–maybe that in their own unhappiness, they’ve set their sights on interfering with someone else’s life. Then again, maybe she feels they are pinning their own frustrations on her.

You see people protesting the protagonist’s choice of a romantic partner, and her protesting right back: “But, Daddy, I love him!” 

I'll tell you something right now

I'd rather burn my whole life down

Than listen to one more second of all this gripin’ and moanin'

I'll tell you something 'bout my good name

It's mine alone to disgrace

I don't cater to all these vipers dressed in empath's clothing

God save the most judgmental creeps

Who say they want what's best for me

Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see

It seems significant that she is directly confronting the religious in this song, especially Christians. Certainly religious people have not been the only ones to raise questions about her dating relationships, but she targets this group as claiming piety but ultimately grabbing for control over someone else’s life.

As she references, sometimes intervention is portrayed as caring but really comes down to control. Is there really a need to insert opinions in other people’s choices? What is the fear behind letting people live their lives, and potentially face their own consequences–or not? Are we seeking their good, or our own validation? Maybe a complicated mix of both? (Christians who are untangling former beliefs might feel these questions deeply.)

I think she also illustrates her own “good girl” reputation historically, and the satire of this song tells us she’s matured beyond that. “You ain’t gotta pray for me.” Praying for someone is asking God to intervene on someone else’s behalf, and it can almost sound like a threat in some circumstances because of the culture we’ve added to it. (Almost like “bless your heart” can take on its own meaning.)

While this isn’t a country song, she makes some specific choices to create a country accent. Something Taylor tends to go back to is the theme of home and hometowns, and you get that sense here. Being run out of town, unaccepted to the people who have known you the longest–this maybe unintentionally relates to Jesus’s words “no prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24).

Finally (clearly I could go on and on about this song), I think she addresses how we’re all drawn to the spectacle of a scandal, including professing Christians. We all want to have our say in the matter, and there’s an element of importance we feel when we do. 

Guilty As Sin?

I’m guilty of writing off this song too fast. It seemed NSFW to me, and I didn’t give it a good listen at first. On a repeat listen, it shook me up for a couple reasons. There’s a good deal of religious analogy here too, which we’ll get to. 

“Guilty as sin” is a colloquial (Southern? I couldn’t find the origin) term that means completely or unquestionably guilty. Sin is based on a Greek word that actually means “missing the mark,” as applied to God’s commands and will. So to sin would be to make a moral transgression against God. 

According to the Bible, our sins get in the way of our relationship with God and keep us separated from him (Isaiah 59:2). Jesus dying on the cross and resurrecting is what opens a path for us to be reunited with God. Christians believe that we receive forgiveness of sins after repenting of sins, turning toward God, and believing in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26, Acts 3:19)

The narrator describes the moral dilemma of whether or not she’s “guilty as sin” for being in one relationship but pining for someone else. Originally I thought she was addressing others in this song (like But Daddy I Love Him), but upon re-listening, I think she’s grappling with these questions on her own. “Am I allowed to cry?” “Am I bad or mad or wise?”

Sometimes we wonder if we’ve crossed moral boundary lines. What can equally affect this thinking is what people are saying about or around us. Sometimes we feel accused and convicted of a crime that never happened. 

What if I roll the stone away?

They're gonna crucify me anyway

What if the way you hold me is actually what's holy?

If long-suffering propriety is what they want from me

They don't know how you've haunted me so stunningly

I choose you and me religiously

In the gospels, Jesus is crucified by being nailed to a cross (one of the cruelest forms of torture and execution in history). He is buried in a tomb with a large round rock rolled across the entrance, and three days later, women who were close friends with him found the stone rolled away, along with an angel who announced that Jesus had risen from the dead. This is a tricky analogy Taylor makes here, and I think these are some of the lines people are criticizing. 

To me, it sounds like Taylor is asking what would happen if she brought back to life something that was dead. She feels like she will be convicted, sentenced and publicly executed if she makes this choice. She’s stuffed feelings down and kept them hidden in an attempt to do the right thing, and maybe making the choice to do something about it is better than suffering silently. And then back to a common question in her songs: can love save you? Is love the highest call? 

She has played with the idea of love as religion in the past. Here she seems to be asking if loving the person she wants to love is actually the freedom, actually the redemption, actually the healing she’s looking for. Given the whole theme of the album is feeling tortured, I’m guessing it wasn’t. But again, she’s grappling with this for herself, and we can step back and respect that. 

Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?

An honorable mention. This song has women all over standing up and screaming the chorus, representing every time we’ve ever felt belittled, cast out, falsely accused, or overlooked. 

In particular women in theology are empathizing with these words. The church has historically not always been a safe space for women, despite the fact that Jesus himself included, sent out, and elevated women in a time when they were basically seen as property. 

Crash the party like a record scratch as I scream

"Who's afraid of little old me?"

I was tame, I was gentle 'til the circus life made me mean

"Don't you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth"

Who's afraid of little old me?

Well, you should be

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

Another song in which she fights back against the people telling her to avoid the man in her life. In this one she’s bold enough to say: 

They shake their heads sayin', "God, help her"

When I tell 'em he's my man

But your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger

I can fix him, no, really, I can

And only I can

She takes a stance that she’s the only one who can help her bad boy change his ways. She challenges God–”only I can”. By the end she makes the admission, “Whoa, maybe I can’t.” (She also talks about fixing–herself–in My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys: “Once I fix me, he’s gonna miss me.”)

Maybe I’m the only one to see the conflict of Taylor calling out other people for interfering in her life, and then doing everything in her power, including attempting to fix each party, to make the relationship work. But I think she senses that conflict too. This is a big reason for her torment: should a relationship with “the love of your life” require so much fixing?

loml

I don’t know that I have much to add to these analogies. I’ll include them below:

“You Holy Ghost, you told me I’m the love of your life”: The Holy Ghost in the Bible refers to the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity, equal to God the Father and Jesus the Son. This seems like a play on words. Again, I think Taylor is questioning “holiness” or rightness of the relationship, and targeting the man for “ghosting” her in real life.

“When your impressionist paintings of heaven turned out to be fakes / Well you took me to hell too”: Heaven and hell are known as the two places people go after they die in Christian religion. Heaven is considered a paradise with God that people go to after death, while hell is considered by some to be a place of torture (although there’s a growing number of people who are finding that hell is a concept more aligned with people’s interpretation of the afterlife than actual biblical insight). Here it seems Taylor is taking the perspective of hell as torture and suffering.

Again, it sounds like she is relating her relationship to holiness or sanctification, and it ends up letting her down, leaving her tortured and hurting. Which takes us to…

The Black Dog

One of my favorite tracks on the album. I couldn’t tell you why, but the words “old habits die screaming” and the way they are performed have a chokehold on me. 

The only religious mention here is short but significant: 

Now I wanna sell my house

And set fire to all my clothes

And hire a priest to come and exorcize my demons

Even if I die screaming

WIth this and the last song (loml), she makes the realization that what she thought was heaven was actually hell, the experience leaving demons to exorcize. Demons are servants of the Devil, the adversary to God. Biblically, they were known to take possession of people and lead them to do destructive and self-destructive things they wouldn’t otherwise do. 

Basically it’s a full 180 from her concept of the relationship being heaven (or a beautiful, perfect place), and we can feel her despair.

The Albatross

Another quick mention, especially for “the devil that you know looks now more like an angel”. We’ll come back to this one in a minute.

The Prophecy

This song has a spiritual, supernatural feel, with a couple of religious references. 

And it was written

I got cursed like Eve got bitten

Oh, was it punishment?

She’s referring to Eve here, the first woman ever, who, according to Genesis, was manipulated by Satan into taking a bite of the only fruit God had told them not to eat. It’s interesting that she says, “Eve got bitten”–maybe talking more about her temptation (bitten by) than her trespass (the bite she took). 

That last question reminds me of a line from Taylor’s previous album, Midnights: “Did some force take you because I didn’t pray?” This whole song feels like pleading to God and/or spiritual forces to change their minds, to allow the protagonist to be loved and accepted. 

I feel she pulls out all the stops, looking at religion, witchcraft, fortune tellers to give some kind of answer as to why she is “cursed”. The combination of these doesn’t feel aggressive or spiritually disrespectful to me, only desperate. 

A greater woman has faith

But even statues crumble if they’re made to wait

Those slightly shaming words hit me. “A greater woman has faith.” Isn’t that what we’re told? If you have enough faith, you’ll get the answers. If you have enough faith, you’ll stick it out. I’ve found that to be the easy, slap-on-a-bandaid answer when really there is nothing simple about wrestling through heartbreak with God. As a woman of faith, I get this question of, “how long am I supposed to wait without falling apart?”

Cassandra

Another song that feels like it’s resonating especially with women of faith. It’s interesting because in Greek mythology, a priestess from Troy named Cassandra was cursed by Apollo (when she rejected him) to speak prophecies that no one would believe. (Back to the theme of prophecy.) The protagonist tells a story of being unbelieved and called crazy, and then left to tragedy. “Do you believe me now?” No one comes to her aide even after the truth is revealed. 

They knew, they knew, they knew the whole time

That I was onto somethin'

The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line

They all said nothin'

Blood's thick, but nothin' like a payroll

Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul

You can mark my words that I said it first

In a mourning warning, no one heard

The “Christian chorus line,” associated with family and pure greed–what a combination. We’ve had some revelations in the media lately about religious families on TV who rose to stardom only to have terrible secrets behind the scenes. These words make me think of that link. 

There is only speculation as to the target of this song. But here’s the main theme: historically people protect the powerful, whether out of loyalty or some other less altruistic reason (like a payroll). 

With a landslide of lawsuits being issued against pastors and churches, this feels significantly poignant in its timing. Will we listen to those who cry out? Will we be open to more than one side of the story? Will we tackle the issues head-on…or hope they disappear? Will we relentlessly pursue truth or discard it if it feels inconvenient?

What do we value most? Caring for the hurting or protecting the powerful?

Again, Taylor mentions prayer. Only this time she says people didn’t pray for her soul (instead of telling them not to pray for her, like in But Daddy I Love Him). It seems like once again she’s calling out the fakeness of intervening in someone’s life when it’s convenient, when it’s about control, but ignoring the pleas for help. 

And finally, I think this aligns with her words “the devil that you know looks more like an angel”. She tried to warn, and came across like a “devil,” when really she came to save the day. 

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Ultimately the meaning of the words and the heart behind them belong to Taylor, and again, I don’t know where she stands in her beliefs. She’s clearly grappling with a lot of wonder about what relationships are supposed to be, relating them to faith and being holy and saving, and finding devastation when they seem to be torture rather than paradise. She also raises questions about how we can help or harm others under the umbrella of religion. All in all, it’s a vulnerable and unwaveringly honest work of art. 

What are your thoughts on some of these songs? What religious ties did I miss? Feel free to continue the conversation in the comments. 

All lyrics from the Tortured Poets Department The Anthology album 2024 by Taylor Swift, Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash