How the pop star went from a clean-cut country girl who never drank to music filled with alcohol and drugs is revealed in the lyrics of her new album

Taylor Swift’s new album – The Tortured Poets Department – has been released with to much much fanfare, with fans and critics hailing the surprise double album as her ‘best storytelling yet‘, praising the ‘surreal, beautiful, and insane‘ lyricism with ‘intimacy of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop gloss of Midnights’.

The lead track Fortnight – featuring Post Malone – opens with Taylor describing herself as a ‘functioning alcoholic’.

‘I was s’posed to be sent away / But they forgot to come and get me / I was a functioning alcoholic / ‘Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic,’ she sings.

While the 14-time Grammy winner often sings about fictional and imagined situations, her references to wine, other alcohol and drugs has increased significantly since her early days as a church-going, clean cut country girl.

This is perhaps unsurprising, given she was just 16 when her self-titled debut album was released.

Taylor Swift’s new bum – The Tortured Poets Department – has been released with to much much fanfare, with fans and critics hailing the surprise double album as her ‘ best storytelling yet ‘, praising the ‘ surreal, beautiful, and insane ‘ lyricism with ‘i ntimacy of Folklore and Evermore with the synth-pop gloss of Midnights. Taylor is pictured during her Eras tour

But in the years following, she said she wasn’t a hard party girl.

‘Maybe I’ll have a glass of wine, but nothing too hard-core for me,’ she told Ladies Home Journal in 2010 about her 21st birthday celebrations.

‘I’ve never had the burning desire to drink,’ she told Ladies Home Journal.

‘I need to be in control of what I say, and if I drank, I’d stress out about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.’

‘It’ll be cool that I’ll be able to go to a lot of concerts that my friends always go to and I sit at home because it’s 21 and over,’ she said. ‘Other than that, I don’t think I’m going to all of a sudden start being in love with the idea of going to a club,’ she added to People.

In fact, her first four albums – Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now and Red – didn’t mention alcohol at all. Even 1989, written when she was 24, living in New York and certainly going out more she only made a thin reference to booze.

‘You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore,’ she sings in Clean, believed to be about ex-boyfriend Harry Styles.

The liquor- references really took off with her 2017 album Reputation, largely inspired by her move to London, her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West – as well as romance with Joe Alwyn.