Taylor Swift Shares Behind-the-Scenes Montage Recording ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Taylor Swift spent quite a few fortnights creating her freshly released 11th studio album The Tortured Poets Department, and the superstar gave fans a glimpse into her recording process with a brand new YouTube Short released on Tuesday (April 23).

Soundtracked by the album’s lead single and Post Malone collaboration, “Fortnight,” the Short shows a montage of footage featuring Swift in the studio, posing for promotional photos and overall enjoying the album-making process.

On Friday (April 19), what was originally slated to be a standard 16-track album turned into a 31-song anthology when Swift surprised fans just hours after release with an additional second half of the project. “It’s a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”

Following its release, The Tortured Poets Department sold 1.4 million copies in traditional album sales on its first day, according to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate. That marks Swift’s biggest sales week ever for any album in the U.S. (Luminate’s sales, streaming and airplay data powers Billboard’s charts. All numbers in this story are for the U.S. only.)

In less than 12 hours after its release, The Tortured Poets Department become Spotify’s most streamed album in a single day in 2024 so far. The 31-track double album snagged the honor from the previous record-holder, Beyoncé’s Billboard 200-topping Cowboy Carter, which ultimately earned 300.41 million on-demand official streams in its first full week of release. The pop superstar’s latest release also became the first album in the streaming service’s history to have more than 300 million streams in a single day.