Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Taylor Swift made her eagerly awaited return with ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ on Friday (April 19) and, surprise! It turned out not to be the break-up album about Joe Alwyn we’d been expecting, but one about her situationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy.
On the album – which expanded to a double album within a few hours of release – the pop superstar references the US state of Florida a couple of times. First, it pops up in the lyrics of Post Malone collab ‘Fortnight’, when her guest sings: “Move to Florida, buy the car you want.”
Later, a whole song is named after the Sunshine State and features the dramatic vocals of Florence + The Machine’s Florence Welch. Fans have picked up on this apparent importance of Florida and have begun theorising about what it could mean.
TikToker @raghavkalra711 suggested in a video that the state is a metaphor for Healy. They reasoned that Swift’s “‘home’ where she’s just a guest in” referred to Alwyn, while The 1975 frontman is her “timeshare”. They added that Florida was the first stop on The Eras tour after her break-up with Alwyn was announced.
Raghav also pointed to other lyrics like “Florida!!! I can use you up” and “I need to forget so take me to Florida”, claiming they were Swift trying to get away from and forget about Alwyn with Healy.
For her part, Swift explained her thinking behind using Florida as a place of escape during a takeover of iHeartRadio. “I think I was coming up with this idea of what happens when your life doesn’t fit or your choices you’ve made catch up to you and you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgement, and circumstances did not lead you to where you thought you’d be.
“You just wanna escape from everything you’ve ever known. Is there a place you could go? I’m always watching Dateline. People have these crimes they commit – where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida. They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all’. So that was the jumping off point behind where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida!”
Read The Forty-Five’s review of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.
