Taylor Swift has debuted five curated playlists on Apple Music, dubbed covering each of the five stages of grief and heartbreak. The new playlists are exclusively available on Apple Music, and they come ahead of the release of Swift’s new The Tortured Poets Department album on April 19.
Each of the playlists includes Taylor Swift songs accompanied by “A Message From Taylor” voice memo describing the goal of the playlist. The first playlist, “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life,” represents the denial stage. In the voice memo accompanying this playlist, Swift explains:
“This is a list of songs about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion. Results may vary.”
The second playlist: “You Don’t Get To Tell Me About Sad Songs.” This one covers the anger stage of grief, Swift says:
“These songs all have one thing in common: I wrote them while feeling anger. Over the years, I’ve learned that anger can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, but the healthiest way that it manifests itself in my life is when I can write a song about it, and then oftentimes, that helps me get past it.”
Next, we have bargaining, or “Am I Allowed to Cry?,” as Swift describes it.
“This playlist takes you through the songs that I’ve written when I was in the bargaining stage, times when you’re trying to make deals with yourself or someone that you care about. You’re trying to make things better, you’re oftentimes feeling really desperate, because oftentimes we have a gut intuition that tells us things are not going to go the way that we hope, which makes us more desperate, which makes us bargain more.”
Fourth is depression, in a playlist titled “Old Habits Die Screaming.”
“We’re going to be exploring the feelings of depression that often lace their way through my songs. While these things are really, really hard to go through, I often feel like when I’m either listening to songs or writing songs that deal with this intensity of loss and hopelessness, usually that’s in the phase where I’m close to getting past that feeling.”
And finally, we have acceptance: “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
“Here, we finally find acceptance and can start moving forward from loss or heartbreak. These songs represent making room for more good in your life, making that choice because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too.”
You can find all the new playlists on Taylor Swift’s artist page on Apple Music.
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