As if 31 tracks and more lyrical burns than an emergency room waiting room on the Fourth of July wasn’t enough to work with, Taylor Swift’s new double album The Tortured Poets Department also features an original poem penned by none other than Stevie Nicks.
Physical copies of the album feature a poem by the Fleetwood Mac icon, which lacks a title apart from “A Poem By Stevie Nicks” and bears a handwritten date (Sept. 13, 8:50 p.m.) and dedication: “For T — and me…”
The poem, aptly for the subject matter of the album, is about heartbreak and the end of a relationship.
It reads:
Nicks and Swift are no strangers: They’ve performed together, have vocally been fans of one another, and have been compared to one another—the latest comparison coming from Swift herself on the TTPD track “Clara Bow.”
The song is about that quintessential idea of “making it” and becoming the “It Girl.” (Bow, a silent film star, is considered to have pioneered the archetype.) “You look like Stevie Nicks / In ‘75, the hair and the lips / Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, a full eclipse” one verse begins, with the final lines invoking Swift’s name, looking into a future where she’s just another icon of the past. “You look like Taylor Swift / In this light / We’re loving it. / You’ve got an edge she never did, / The future’s bright / …Dazzling.”
Nicks has also praised Swift through the years, and in October 2023 thanked her onstage for writing the Midnights track “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” invoking the song as an example of how she felt about bandmate Christine McVie, who died in 2022, and why she couldn’t see Fleetwood Mac touring again without McVie.
“That was Christine and I. We were on our own in that band. We always were. We protected each other,” she said. “Who am I going to look over to on the right and have them not be there behind that Hammond organ? When she died, I figured we really can’t go any further with this. There’s no reason to.”