Everything We Learned About Matty Healy from The Tortured Poets Department
From golden retrievers to “The Downtown Lights.”
Collectors of old-timey typewriters, rejoice: The Tortured Poets Department is here. After a week of teasers, pop-up libraries, and Tavi Gevinson fan fiction, Taylor Swift’s newest album finally came out, and with it, a slew of new info about her ex-boyfriends.
Though it’s hard to remember a time when Swift wasn’t dating Travis Kelce, it has only been a year since she and British actor Joe Alwyn reportedly broke up. After their nearly six-year relationship came to an end, Swift spent about a month hanging out with the problematic front man of the 1975, Matty Healy. TTPD is the first original material Swift has released since ending both relationships, and judging by the length of the 31-song double album, she has a lot to say. However brief her fling with Healy may have been, this album seems to be more about him than the six years she spent with Alwyn.
Alwyn and Healy are both British, making Swift’s Anglophilic puns even more opaque, but diligent Swifties are hard at work parsing everything out. Here’s what we’ve gleaned so far.
Swift and Healy were together for … a fortnight?
Overall, TTPD paints Taylor’s time with Healy as a fling that burned out ugly and fast. As you’ve probably guessed, it also portrays Healy as a huge asshole. In the opening track, “Fortnight,” she says, “I touched you for only a fortnight” and refers to a “fortnight lost in America.” Given how fixated she is on the English word for a two-week period, I’m going to venture that the bloke in question is Healy.
Beyond “Fortnight,” there are lots of lines about a super-short relationship. “Smallest Man” has jabs including “I just want to know if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal” and “You said normal girls were boring but you were gone by the morning.” “Loml” also talks about a “con man” who “sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme.”
Swift was well aware of Healy’s objectionable behavior.
With two hours’ worth of lyrics to unpack, we do not have time to get into all the reasons people dislike Healy, but just know he has a penchant for distasteful jokes, offensive social-media posts, and onstage antics that range from weird to blatantly offensive. When Swift was photographed hanging out with Healy last year, fans were so incensed that they launched a campaign demanding she issue an apology for some of Healy’s past behavior.
They’re still waiting on that, but a lot of TTPD’s lyrics do seem to reference Healy’s generally objectionable vibe. “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” opens with this description:
The smoke cloud billows out his mouth
Like a freight train through a small town
The jokes that he told across the bar
Were revolting and far too loud
They shake their heads saying, ‘God help her’
When I tell them he’s my man
Though “Down Bad” could honestly be about any ex, it also includes a nod to “indecent exposures,” which is one way to describe Healy’s brushes with controversy.
Healy is (maybe) the reason for all that typewriter imagery.
Many of us chalked up Swift’s sudden fixation on archaic writing machines to TTPD’s whole literary tilt, but it actually seems like we may have Healy to thank for that. In 2018, the musician said in a video that he “really” likes typewriters but doesn’t carry them around “because that is really impractical.” And yet, “The Tortured Poets Department” suggests he somehow transported one to Swift’s house and forgot it there:
You left your typewriter at my apartment
Straight from the Tortured Poets Department
I think some things I never say
Like, who uses typewriters anyway?
Do you think he left his quill and inkwell there too?
Swift claims her friends understood the relationship.
Usually when someone’s first name appears in a Taylor Swift song, it’s a fictional character and/or one of Blake Lively’s children. But this time, two name-checks seem to be more straightforward references. In “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift says, “You told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you so I felt seen / Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be / ’Cause we’re crazy.”
Listeners have identified these two as Lucy Dacus, the Boygenius member who was seen hanging out with Healy at Swift’s concert last May, and Jack Antonoff, Swift’s close friend and collaborator who also co-wrote and produced a lot of this album. Dacus also performed at a few of Swift’s concerts in May, joining Swift’s opening act, Phoebe Bridgers, onstage. (Since then, Dacus and Healy seem to have had a falling out — in September he wrote on X that he’d told Dacus he started a band called Girlretard and now doesn’t “really hear from her that often,” to which she responded, “You don’t hear from me at all.”) Anyway, please clap for these two for letting their most delusional friends ride this one out.
On the other hand, “But Daddy I Love Him” imagines Swift as a young good girl dating a rebellious “wild boy,” to the objection of the “elders at the city hall” and also, for some reason, “wine moms.” So maybe not everyone approved.
Something might have been going on before Alwyn was fully out of the picture.
Without throwing around too many accusations, some of the album’s lyrics seem to suggest Swift was pining over someone while still with Alwyn, and that someone could have been Healy. In “Guilty As Sin?” — the one that opens with a guy sending her the Blue Nile’s “Downtown Lights,” which, again, is a noted Healy favorite — she sings about “crackin’ locks,” “fatal fantasies,” and a “messy top-lip kiss.” Also: “Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?” Then there’s “Fresh Out the Slammer,” where she talks about “runnin’ back home” to “the one who says I’m the girl of his American dreams” after “years of labor.” Hmmm!
Swift and Healy talked about music a lot.
What do a pop-adjacent, indie-loving band guy and the world’s most prominent pop superstar talk about when they go on dates? Music, I guess — or at least that’s TTPD would have us think. The album is also sprinkled with references to bands Healy is known to like, including the Starting Line, whose song the 1975 performed a cover of while Healy and Swift were rumored to be dating. The band comes up twice in the album: first in “Fresh Out the Slammer,” where Swift says, “Now we’re at the starting line / I did my time.” Later, in “The Black Dog,” she imagines Healy in a bar: “When someone plays the Starting Line / And you jump up, but she’s too young to know this song / That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming / Old habits die screaming.”
Never one to pass up water symbolism, Swift also seems to have woven the Blue Nile, a group Healy once described to Vulture as “my favorite band of all time,” into her writing. In “Guilty As Sin?” she sings, “Drowning in the Blue Nile / He sent me ‘Downtown Lights’ / I hadn’t heard it in a while.” (Not lost on those of us schooled in Swiftian numerology: The Blue Nile released the song “The Downtown Lights” in 1989, the year Swift was born and, of course, the title of one of her albums.)
In perhaps the most controversial musical reference of them all, Swift also outs both herself and Healy as fans of … Charlie Puth? It is, shockingly, not the first time Healy’s penchant for Puth has been logged in the annals of history — in 2018 he took to Twitter to describe a song Puth did with Boyz II Men as “harrrrrd.” Six years later, it’s come back to haunt him. “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate,” Swift sings in “The Tortured Poets Department” (possibly a reference to “Chocolate,” one of the 1975’s most well-known songs). “We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” There’s a lot to unpack here, but the main takeaway is that they both love a singer-songwriter with a sexy eyebrow scar. Don’t we all?
Swift has some thoughts about Matty Healy’s drug use.
TTPD is for some reason stuffed with references to hard drugs, and though I strongly suspect Swift thinks making a pun about the word “heroin” makes her sound cool, she also seems to be writing about Healy’s drug use, which he’s spoken and sang about publicly. Lyrics about a partner struggling with addiction crop up such as “You needed me but you needed drugs more” in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” (four names with no apparent link to Swift’s life) or “the dopamine races through his brain” in “I Can Fix Him.”
In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” after insulting someone’s “Jehovah’s Witness suit” (widely interpreted as a jab at to the formal outfits the 1975 performs in), Swift appears to unpack the end of their relationship while recalling Healy’s habits: “You tried to buy some pills from a friend of friends of mine / But they just ghosted you / Now you know what it feels like.”
Despite it all, Healy seems to be feeling okay about all this.
As shitty as Swift makes Healy sound, one alleged “insider” told Us Weekly that, actually, Healy is feeling “relief” upon hearing TTPD. “We were all nervous about what she might have said on the album,” the source reported, since “the last thing that he needs is for every Swiftie in the world to think he’s a villain.” Apparently, though, Healy is “happy he can move on with less anxiety.” I suppose he’s accustomed to much worse.
This post has been updated.
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