Taylor Swift’s New Album Opens With a Stevie Nicks Poem

If you’re lucky enough to have a physical copy of Taylor Swift’s new album on release day, you can hear it kick off with a Stevie Nicks poem. 

Dated August 13, 2023 in Austin, Texas, and featuring the charming note “For T — and me,” the poem reads like a stunning precursor to The Tortured Poets Department, with lines like “She looked back from her future/And shed a few tears/He looked into his past/And actually felt fear.” 

The poem ends on a dreamy yet sad note, concluding with “She was just flying/Thru the clouds/Where he saw her/She was just making her way/To the stars/When he lost her.” Swift also included a poem of her own in the physical release.

The rock icon is one of the many appearances on The Tortured Poets Department, which released Friday, including collaborations with Post Malone (“Fortnite”) and Florence Welch (“Florida!!!”).

Last year, Nicks thanked Swift for writing the Midnights track “You’re On Your Own Kid,” which helped her grieve for her friend and bandmate Christine McVie, who died at 79 in November 2022. 

“Thank you to Taylor Swift for doing this thing for me, and that is writing a song called ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid,’” she said. “That is the sadness of how I feel. As long as Chris was, even on the other side of the world, we didn’t have to talk on the phone. We really weren’t phone buddies. Then we would go back to Fleetwood Mac, and we would walk in and it would be like ‘little sister, how are you?’ It was like never a minute had passed, never an argument in our entire 47 years.”