Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets’ Becomes First Album to Get One Billion Streams on Spotify in a Single Week

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Ringo’s rotogravure is back, as it were, with a new EP, “Crooked Boy,” that will delight fans who’ve wanted a real rock record that was as steady as his backbeat. Linda Perry wrote and produced all four songs for this, the latest in a series of EPs that Ringo Starr began recording during the pandemic and is keeping on with well into the 2020s. He’s not married to the short-form format, though.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg is having a bit of a “hail the conquering hero” moment that very few people would have expected him to be having this far into the 21st century, least of all himself. Although he has had many successes in film and in the theater over the last 60 years or so, he remains most famous as the director of the Beatles documentary “Let It Be” — and that 1970 film remains most famous as something that has been kept locked in the vault since it got a brief VHS and laserdisc release in the early 1980s.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “There’s a river of love that runs through all times,” the singer-producer T Bone Burnett sang in a signature song of his back in the 1980s. But that’s not a river he’s necessarily always been riding.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift‘s “The Tortured Poets Department” registered 439,000 album-equivalent units to return as the No. 1 album in the U.S. in its second week out, according to data from Luminate first reported in Billboard.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Maggie Rogers is headlining arenas for the first time this fall, but she didn’t want it to feel like moving into bigger spaces for her concerts would mean a more impersonal experience. So for 11 shows that just went on sale in late April, she went out and personally manned the box office on opening day to help sell tickets for those big shows.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Taylor Swift has just introduced 31 brand new songs to the world, as she did in April with the deluxe double-album that is “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” it may be a fool’s errand to immediately assess where where all that fresh grist fits into the overall scope of her catalog. Foolish, and also irresistible.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Morgan Wallen and Post Malone have been teasing a joint single, and the two singers premiered the new song, “I Had Some Help,” in a duet performance during Wallen’s headlining set at the Stagecoach festival in California Sunday night. The new song, “I Had Some Help,” is a drinking-buddies anthem and includes the key lyrics “I had some help / It ain’t like I can make this kind of mess all by myself / Don’t act like you ain’t help me pull that bottle off the shelf / Been deep in every weekend, if you couldn’t tell / They say teamwork makes the dream work / Hell, I had some help.” No official announcements have been made about the single, much less a release date.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift‘s “The Tortured Poets Department” has lived up to its blockbuster potential and then some. Billboard reported Sunday that, per data provided by Luminate, the new release racked up 2.61 million album-equivalent units in its first week out — the best one-week figure for any album in nine years. The last album to debut with a higher figure was Adele’s “25,” which bowed with 3.482 million in 2015, a number that is considered unrepeatable with the changes that have occurred in consumption since then.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Beyonce did not show up. Reba did. And it was enough.

Taylor Swift on her new album.The boozer, which is based in Vauxhall, south London, is mentioned by the pop star in the song ‘The Black Dog’ from the extended ‘Anthology’ edition of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’.“And your location, you forgot to turn it off/ And so I watch as you walk/ Into some bar called The Black Dog/ And pierce new holes in my heart/ You forgot to turn it off,” Swift sings. “And it hits me/ I just don’t understand/ How you don’t miss me/ In The Black Dog….”The track is thought to address Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who lives in the same area as the pub (and inspired 2019’s ‘London Boy’).

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic David Gilmour, who has often given off the appearance of being happily retired, hasn’t been keeping himself from the studio after all. The ex-Pink Floyd singer-guitarist has announced his first album in nine years, “Luck and Strange,” and he’s giving everyone time to prepare for it, with the release not coming till Sept.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic More than 20 years after his death, there are treasures in the Johnny Cash vault that have remained unmined, despite assumptions that everything interesting might have been brought into the light in the posthumous recordings that came out in the years following his 2003 death. On June 28, Universal Music will issue “Songwriter,” a collection of 11 previously unreleased recordings that Cash demo-ed in 1993, all of them self-penned originals.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic There’s no golden ticket quite like the golden ticket of finding your name in the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song. It’s one thing if you’re Charlie Puth, and already on a list of Spotify’s 150 top monthly artists. But for another musical artist name-checked in Swift’s album “The Tortured Poets Department,” the impact stands to be much more impactful.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic If we had the ability to assess who is the most beloved figure in music — not in overall numbers, but sheer adoration, per capita and per peer — it likely wouldn’t be Taylor or Beyoncé but Mavis Staples, who has been taking us there since the late ’60s. There being the smile that crosses anyone’s face when fortunate enough to be in the same room, or even in just giving a passing thought to that voice, that presence, and all the different ways in which Staples embodies righteousness.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift can’t quit breaking her own records. After Spotify revealed Friday that “The Tortured Poets Department” had become the first album in the DSP’s history to amass 200 million streams in a single day, the service updated that news early Saturday, to report that first-day streams actually surpassed 300 million, when all was said and done and counted.

Steven J. Horowitz Senior Music Writer Taylor Swift has made Spotify history with her new release “The Tortured Poets Department,” becoming the first album to exceed 200 million streams in a single day, Variety can exclusively reveal. The feat comes less than 24 hours after its release, signaling that the numbers could stretch even higher once the final figures are tallied.

Taylor Swift‘s new album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ have been unveiled.Swift dropped the new album this morning (April 19) and later announced it is in fact a double album as she shared the remaining tracks.Now the full credits to the first half of the album have emerged. You can listen to it below.The opening track ‘Fortnight’ as previously reported features Post Malone while Florence + The Machine appears on ‘Florence’.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The torture is over for fans who waited weeks and months for Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” to arrive. But the truly faithful still have some work ahead, in trying to decode what or who is the subject of each of the 16 songs (plus four bonus tracks).

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift usually writes either an essay or poem to be included in her album packaging, but for “The Tortured Poets Department,” she used the buddy system. Stevie Nicks contributed a handwritten poem she wrote for Swift, which is the first thing fans will see when they open the LP gatefolds or CD booklets Friday morning. That doesn’t mean Swift skipped out on her usual duties, as the album packaging also includes a long handwritten poem she penned herself, placed after the lyrics in the booklets as a sort of epilogue.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Would you be surprised to know (or be reminded) that Taylor Swift hasn’t really released a breakup album in a decade? For a gal who’s never really shorn that as her songwriting reputation, it’s funny to think that she’s spent the better part of the last 10 years being off-brand, in a manner of thinking, with most of her new material. Granted, it became hard to think of her as anything but the queen of bust-ups when “All Too Well” got transformed from a 2012 also-ran album track into the Song of the 2020s.