Taylor Swift had numerous surprises in retailer for followers when she dropped her anticipated eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Division, on Friday (April 19). Amongst them the late night time bombshell that it’s truly a double album, coming in at a heft 31 tracks over two hours.
However it was frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner of The Nationwide who offered one of many greatest reveals in regards to the roiling, emotional assortment in an Instagram publish simply hours after the album dropped. “I’m so excited and honored to share that I’ve contributed to my expensive buddy and collaborator @taylorswift‘s good eleventh album — a 31 music double album / anthology referred to as The Tortured Poets Division,” he wrote within the publish that additionally featured a snap of a smiling Swift within the studio and pictures of the album’s moody black and white cowl.
Dessner revealed that he and Swift started engaged on the songs again in 2022, after they dropped their two 2020 pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore, and seemingly after she recorded her 2022 album Midnight. “We began engaged on these songs over two years in the past and it appears like they’ve saved us firm and developed in lovely and sudden methods by way of a lot life lived throughout this course of,” Dessner wrote, marveling at the truth that the duo have now recorded greater than 60 songs collectively over the previous 4 years, together with 17 on the brand new album.
“I’m ceaselessly grateful to Taylor for sharing her insane skills with and trusting me along with her music. I imagine these songs are a number of the most lyrically acute, intricate, susceptible and cathartic Taylor has ever written and I’m regularly astonished by her abilities as a songwriter and performer,” he wrote. Dessner additionally thanked one other one in every of Swift’s most stalwart collaborators, Jack Antonoff, giving him kudos for his “open hearted and open door collaboration with me by way of all these many tasks”; Dessner and Antonoff roughly break up co-producing duties with Swift on the album.
The multi-talented songwriter/producer/composer additionally thanked his twin brother and fellow Nationwide bandmember, Aaron Dessner, engineers Laura Sisk, Jonathan Low, James McAlister, Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) and Bella Blasko and musicians Glenn Kotche (Wilco drummer), Benjamin Lanz (synths, trombone) and Rob Moose (viola, violin), amongst many others.
“It’s not misplaced on me how fortunate I’m that that is my job and I really feel so grateful to be part of creating this huge, magically detailed and symbolic world of songs Taylor has crafted that all of us get to inhabit and revel in,” Dessner wrote. “Maintain looking out and also you’ll discover some new element, layer or sliver of that means with every hear.”
Along with serving to write and produce the Poets Division songs “So Lengthy, London,” “However Daddy I Love Him,” “Loml,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “Clara Bow,” “The Albatross,” “The Bolter,” “How Did It Finish?,” “So Excessive College,” “The Prophecy,” “Cassandra,” “Peter” and “Robin” (he additionally co-produced “The Manuscript”), Cincinnati native Dessner additionally collaborated with Swift on Purple (Taylor’s Model) and Midnights, and shared a Grammy along with her for album of the 12 months for Folklore.
Take a look at Dessner’s publish under.
