Taylor Swift had sworn her loyalty to “me, myself and I” after her respective breakups from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy, using music as a way to cope.
“I definitely think writing music is a form of therapy. Every record represents something different,” Swift, 36, said in the fourth episode of her End of an Era docuseries, which premiered Friday, December 19. “Tortured Poets album is, like, this purge of just everything bad that I felt for two years.”
She continued, “It was a really rough time in my life, so the songs reflect that [and] feeling like I’m not a person. I’m just this big conglomerate that no one sees as a real human being and, like, especially not men that I date.”
Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April 2024, with several songs seemingly alluding to her splits from Alwyn, 34, and Healy, 36. Swift notably dated the Conversations With Friends actor from 2016 to 2023. Within months of Swift and Alwyn’s breakup, the pop star briefly connected with Healy. Their fling fizzled by May 2023, just two months before Swift’s now-fiancé, Travis Kelce, publicly asked her out via podcast.
Taylor Swift Calls Out the ‘Worst Men’ in ‘TTPD’ Booklet: Read the Poem
As Swift navigated her breakups, she continued performing shows on her Eras Tour — and writing songs for TTPD.
“In the whole process, [it] just being like, ‘Nothing works, there’s no one for me in the world,’” she recalled, later revealing in the doc how the concert tour sustained her mental health at the time. “There were points in this tour when the tour was the only thing that was really keeping me going in my life.”
As Swift proved she could perform even with a broken heart, much like the TTPD song explained, the Grammy winner never wanted to postpone a concert.
“There were never points in the tour when I thought, ‘Oh, you know what? I want to quit the tour ‘cause the tour’s hard.’ No, my personal life was hard,” she said. “I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour, and that’s a lot of breakups actually. The show was what gave me purpose and was what I could use to get me out of bed.”
Taylor Swift Addresses Doing ‘Eras Tour’ After Joe Alwyn Split on ‘TTPD’
Swift continued, “So, the tour has never been the hard thing in my life. The tour has been the thing that has allowed me to find purpose outside of the s*** that was going on in my life. Men will let you down, The Eras Tour never will.”
Swift started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Kelce, 36, in summer 2023 because of The Eras Tour. As he recalled on his “New Heights” podcast weeks later, he went to the KC concert with hopes of exchanging phone numbers. His pleas went unanswered until his — as Swift said in TIME magazine — “metal-as-hell” shout-out, and she reached out shortly after.
Kelce proposed to Swift in August after two years together.
“Travis has given Taylor a sense of calm,” a source exclusively revealed in the latest Us Weekly cover story. “He supports her in ways that she could have never imagined, and he never expects her to perform or curate a persona around him. That kind of ease has given her permission to be her real self.”
The first four episodes of Taylor Swift: The End of an Era are now streaming on Disney+. Episodes 5 and 6 premiere Tuesday, December 23.
