Home » Albums » THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT » Songs on THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT » Down Bad

Down Bad

THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (2024)

“Down Bad” is track four on Taylor’s eleventh studio album, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (2024). It was released on April 19, 2024, through Republic Records. She wrote and produced the song with Jack Antonoff about an abrupt breakup that left her feeling whiplashed and alienated.

Background and Release

Taylor started working on THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT immediately after she submitted her tenth studio album, Midnights, in early 2022. She continued working on it in secrecy throughout the US leg of “The Eras Tour” in 2023. The album’s conception took place when her personal life was once again a widely covered topic in the press after her split from her boyfriend of six years, Joe Alwyn, and subsequent short-lived relationship with Matty Healy. Taylor described THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as her “lifeline” during this time, and as album which she “really needed” to make:

«TORTURED POETS is an album that I think, more than any of my albums that I’ve ever made, I needed to make it. It was really a lifeline for me, just the things I was going through, and the things I was writing about. It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life. And I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I’d needed it on TORTURED POETS.»

Taylor Swift

“Down Bad” specifically was recorded on June 29, 2023, as confirmed by Jack Antonoff.

Lyrical Theme

In “Down Bad,” Taylor sings about being “down bad” for a love interest. The lyrics are a word play in that she is both “down bad” (as in feeling low) and “down bad” for him. Throughout the song, she uses the metaphor of being abducted by aliens and then being brought back “down” to earth against her will to get her point across. In an interview with iHeartRadio in April 2024, she said:

«So lot of the songs on THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT deal with the idea of heartbreak or loss in a metaphor of something else. The metaphor in 'Down Bad' is that I was comparing sort of the idea of being love bombed, where someone rocks your world, and dazzles you, and then kind of abandons you. As an alien abduction where you were abducted by aliens but you wanted [it]. Like this girl is abducted by aliens but she wanted to stay with them and then they drop her off back in her hometown. She’s like 'Wait, no. Where are you going? I liked it there, it was weird but it was cool, come back.' And so the girl in the song just felt like, 'I’ve just been exposed to a whole different galaxy and universe and I didn’t know it’s possible. How can you just put me back where I was before?'»

Taylor Swift

The song has an extraterrestrial story that it uses as a metaphor for an abrupt breakup — specifically, the end of a relationship that leaves one feeling whiplashed and alienated. In the verses, Taylor sings about otherworldliness, weirdness, and cosmic love. The chorus is a jarring return to reality: in the narrator’s case, to being “down bad crying at the gym,” a possible reference to Taylor’s rigorous “Eras Tour” training routine. She told TIME in December 2023: “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud. Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.”

Elsewhere, people have spotted that the clean version of the song has a completely different post-chorus. Instead of, “Fuck it, if I can’t have him,” Taylor sings, “What if I can’t have him?” She also switches, “Cause fuck it, I was in love/So fuck you, if I can’t have us” to, “Cause what if I was in love? What if I can’t have us?”

Production

Taylor co-produced the song with Jack Antonoff. The sonic differences between the verses and the chorus symbolize the contrast between being “heavenstruck” and then going back to the utter mundanity of life. Jack told the Los Angeles Times in an interview in October 2024:

«It just captures this vacillation of the human experience so perfectly for me – like, I'm dancing, I'm driving in the dark. Am I crying? Am I making out with someone? It does a thing that a lot of my favorite songs do, where it just puts me in a place. [I'm particularly proud of] just the totality of it: the LinnDrum; the tremolated, wobbling synth; the shimmering guitars. I could dissect it, but it just grabs me as soon as I hear it. It's like a born universe.»

Jack Antonoff

Live Performances

Starting with the European leg, which kicked off in May 2024, Taylor added “Down Bad” to the regular setlist for her sixth headlining tour, “The Eras Tour” (2023-2024).

Critical Reception

In publications’ reviews, critics favorably deemed “Down Bad” a catchy song. Pitchfork‘s Olivia Horn thought that the song worked “because of the juxtaposition between its banal hook and its description of ‘cosmic love'”. Bobby Olivier of NJ.com picked the track as the album’s catchiest. In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich appreciated the simple lyricism of “Down Bad” and summed it up as “a woozy song about feeling like shit”. Josh Kurp from Uproxx felt that the track was a representation of the album’s verbose and genre-less quality but opined that it was “extremely personal […] to the point of discomfort”.

Commercial Performance

Upon the release of THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, “Down Bad” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, during the chart week ending on May 4, 2024.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Did you really beam me up?
In a cloud of sparkling dust
Just to do experiments on
Tell me I was the chosen one
Show me that this world is bigger than us
Then sent me back where I came from
For a moment I knew cosmic love

[Chorus]
Now I’m down bad crying at the gym
Everything comes out teenage petulance
“Fuck it if I can’t have him”
“I might just die, it would make no difference.”
Down bad, waking up in blood
Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up
Fuck it if I can’t have us.
I might just not get up
I might stay down bad
Fuck it if I can’t have him
Down bad
Fuck it if I can’t have him

[Verse 2]
Did you take all my old clothes?
Just to leave me here naked and alone
In a field in my same old town
That somehow seems so hollow now
They’ll say I’m nuts if I talk about the existence of you
For a moment I was heaven struck

[Chorus 2]
Now I’m down bad crying at the gym
Everything comes out teenage petulance
“Fuck it if I can’t have him”
“I might just die, it would make no difference.”
Down bad, waking up in blood
Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up
Fuck it if I can’t have us.
I might just not get up
I might stay down bad
Like I lost my twin
Fuck it if I can’t have him
Down bad
Down bad
Waving at the ship
Fuck it if I can’t have him

[Bridge]
I loved your hostile takeovers
Encounters closer and closer
All your indecent exposures
How dare you say that it’s—
I’ll build you a fort on some planet
Where they can all understand it
How dare you think it’s romantic
Leaving me safe and stranded
Cause fuck it, I was in love
So fuck you if I can’t have us.
Cause fuck it, I was in love

[Final Chorus]
Now I’m down bad crying at the gym
Everything comes out teenage petulance
“Fuck it if I can’t have him”
“I might just die, it would make no difference.”
Down bad, waking up in blood
Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up
Fuck it if I can’t have us.
I might just not get up
I might stay down bad
Like I lost my twin
Fuck it if I can’t have him
Down bad
Down bad
Waving at the ship
Fuck it if I can’t have him

[Outro]
Like I lost my twin
Fuck it if I can’t have him
Down bad
Waving at the ship
Fuck it if I can’t have him