Subscribe
Follow Us
Swifties may not have predicted Taylor's secret second album release but they certainly called this one — Taylor Swift's infamous breakup after six years dating British actor Joe Alwyn was definitely chronicled in The Tortured Poets Department, most heartbreakingly on the fifth track of the first (non-surprise) album in a track called “So Long, London.”
The song has so many callbacks, references and easter eggs that you may have to get your cholesterol checked after listening to it. Luckily, E! News provided a thorough breakdown of them all so let's get to it.
For starters, even the song occupying the fifth spot on the album is telling. Swift has a history of reserving that spot for her most heartbreaking breakup anthems in the past, and this one is clearly meant to serve as a bookend to the fifth song on her 2019 album Lover, which was called “London Boy” and covered the joy and freshness of the new relationship with Alwyn.
This one? Not so much.
The glorifying, picturesque look at England's capital from London Boy has been replaced by Swift's feelings of outsiderness and isolation in So Long, London.
“I didn't opt in to be your odd man out,” Swift sings. “I founded the club she's heard great things about / I left all I knew, you left me at the house by the Heath.”
There are also some on-point references to the London fog and famous British refrain from World War II to “keep calm and carry on” as metaphors for her growing apart from Alwyn.
“I saw in my mind fairy lights through the mist / I kept calm and carried the weight of the rift,” Swift belted in the first chorus. “Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away / My spine split from carrying us up the hill.”
Then, as her “weary bones caught the chill,” Swift started to lose hope: “I stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe.”
Article Continues Below
Past the London Boy parallels, there are also various allusions to “You're Losing Me,” Swift's much-discussed 2022 Midnights track also believed to be about her relationship with Alwyn.
On the Midnights track, Swift sang “I can't find a pulse / My heart won't start anymore” and on So Long, London she belts, “I stoppеd CPR, after all, it's no use / The spirit was gonе, we would never come to.”
Swift even makes references to looking for her own easter eggs, this time about trying to find evidence of elusive boyfriend's feelings.
“And I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free,” she sings, a reference to the fact that they dated from when she was 27 until she was 33. Later, she adds, “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof.”
There's also some poignant color connections between You're Losing Me and So Long, London. In You're Losing Me, Swift sings about her face going gray, and in the Tortured Poets Department track, she follows up with “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days / And I'm just getting color back into my face.”
Those are just the tip of the iceberg, but you get the idea. Swifties expecting Taylor Swift to elaborate on her feelings about her Joe Alwyn breakup were not left disappointed, though they may be saddened to learn just how painstaking the process was, as detailed in Swift's latest classic breakup anthem, So Long, London.
