Swift’s 12th studio album returns to her pop roots, with lots of love-struck lyrics and upbeat melodies.
Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott
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Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott
Taylor Swift created her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, as she was touring her discography around the world and falling in love with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce — all under an incredibly bright spotlight.
When she announced its release on a widely-watched August episode of Kelce’s New Heights podcast, she promised a peek into “everything that was going on behind the curtain” during her grueling, record-breaking, 21-month Eras Tour.
“This album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage, it’s about what I was going through offstage,” Swift said.
Swift, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, has a reputation for writing highly confessional songs even as she tries to keep parts of her personal life private — a balancing act that she especially seems to grapple with on The Life of a Showgirl.
Armed with bright melodies, bold beats and referential lyrics, Swift takes shots at the industry and fame itself while swooning over Kelce and the life they are building together. The 12 tracks are packed with takedowns of unnamed critics, wry odes to her beau and hints at what the showgirl has her sights set on next.
Here are eight key takeaways.
The album pulls no punches
Swift said on New Heights that the album comes from an “infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place.” But a lot of the songs on it have much darker undertones, with Swift taking shots at those who have criticized or, in her view, flat-out wronged her.
She bemoans cancel culture and welcomes scandal-plagued friends to her “underworld” in “CANCELLED!” “Actually Romantic” is actually a diss track, in which Swift saccharinely thanks another artist for their attention. “Father Figure” — which interpolates George Michael’s 1987 hit by the same name — is a retelling of a betrayal by a music industry executive.
Swift is no stranger to biting back at her enemies. She’s done it throughout her career, from seeking post-breakup revenge on her debut album’s “Picture to Burn” to telling off her detractors on 2010’s “Mean” — not to mention the darkly defiant tone of her entire Reputation album.
It reunited Swift with her Reputation producers
Swift flew back and forth to Sweden during the European leg of her tour to create The Life of a Showgirl with Max Martin and Shellback, whom she previously worked with on 2012’s Red, 2014’s 1989 and 2017’s Reputation. The Swedish producers and songwriters have partnered with a long list of hitmakers including Britney Spears, Kesha, Usher and One Direction (and Martin even has a Broadway jukebox musical, &Juliet).
The three have made what Swift described on New Heights as some of her favorite songs, including “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “Style” and “Ready For It.”
For her last four albums, Swift collaborated primarily with Jack Antonoff and The National’s Aaron Dessner. She said reuniting with Martin and Shellback “felt like catching lightning in a bottle.”
It’s a return to pop
Swift said on New Heights that her goal for this album was to create “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”
That’s a departure from some of Swift’s more recent albums, which she herself has described as “esoteric.”
Whereas her last album The Tortured Poets Department was “really a full catharsis,” whose goals were “strictly lyrical,” Swift said Showgirl, and her life while writing it, is much more upbeat. The proof is in the uptempo beats of Showgirl songs like “Honey” and “Opalite,” plus the saucy wordplay in “Wood” (“Redwood tree / It ain’t hard to see / His love was the key / That opened my thighs.”)
That doesn’t mean all of its songs are pure, shiny pop. “Eldest Daughter,” the fifth track on the album, is a piano ballad.
It’s about Swift’s relationship with fame and the music industry
Swift has grown up in the spotlight, releasing her first album as a teenager in 2006 and often writing about the music industry itself. Now 35, she seems to have both sharpened her critiques of the system and made her peace with her place in it.
In “Elizabeth Taylor” — named after the heavily-scrutinized Hollywood star — she sings: “Be my NY when Hollywood hates me, you’re only as hot as your last hit, baby.” She says she would “trade the Cartier for someone to trust,” then murmurs, “just kidding.”
Then there’s the final and titular track, “The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter).” In it, a seasoned showgirl warns an aspiring performer about the dark side of success — an especially interesting dynamic considering Swift is seen as a mentor to Carpenter, who was one of her Eras Tour opening acts.
As the veteran thanks the newcomer for her bouquet, she tells her the life of a showgirl is not as glamorous as it seems. “They leave us for dead,” she says, “they ripped me off like false lashes and then threw me away.”
It’s also about her relationship with Kelce …
The album is in many ways an ode to Swift’s relationship with Kelce, which began after he tried unsuccessfully to approach her during one of her Eras Tour shows (she credits New Heights, where he publicly pursued her, with getting her a boyfriend).
Swift references that courtship in the first track, “The Fate of Ophelia.” The opening lyrics of the album are: “I heard you calling on the megaphone, you wanna see me all alone … And if you’d never come for me, I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.”
She goes on to sing Kelce’s praises in other songs including “Honey” and the raunchy “Wood.”
“Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet to know a hard rock is on the way,” Swift sings before name-dropping the Kelce brothers’ podcast. “Seems to me that you and me, we make our own luck. New Heights of manhood, I ain’t gotta knock on wood.”
Swift also sings of her hopes for marriage and motherhood, admitting on “Eldest Daughter” that “when I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.” On “Wi$h Li$t,” she says she wants “a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you.”
“We tell the world to leave us the f*** alone, and they do,” she continues. “Got me dreamin’ ’bout a driveway with a basketball hoop. Boss up, settle down … I just want you.”
The two announced their engagement in late August.
… But not all the songs are about him
One of the album’s love songs, “Ruin the Friendship,” is clearly not about Kelce, if its hometown references to Nashville and “second period” are any indication.
Its lyrics suggest it’s about Swift’s romantic regrets — “should’ve kissed you anyway” — with a school crush who has since died, news delivered by her best friend Abigail (who is famously referenced in “Fifteen” on Swift’s 2008 Fearless album).
Elsewhere, the track “Actually Romantic,” which looks at first glance like it would be a love song, is actually addressed to a Swift hater. Fans are speculating the song is about fellow musician Charli xcx, whose song “Sympathy is a Knife” from last year’s album Brat was rumoured to be about Swift.
On that song, Charli sings about a girl who makes her feel insecure: “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show … I hope they break up quick.” Charli is married to George Daniel, who is a member of the British group The 1975 alongside Matty Healy, whom Swift briefly dated during the Eras Tour.
In “Actually Romantic,” Swift seemingly alludes to Charli xcx’s song. “Wrote me a song sayin’ it makes you sick to see my face, some people might be offended,” Swift sings. “But it’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me.”
It’s spoken like someone who owns her masters
In May, Swift announced that she had bought back the masters for her first six albums from a private equity group, who had in turn gotten them from music executive Scooter Braun.
Braun acquired Swift’s first music label, Big Machine Label Group, and with it Swift’s masters in 2019. Upset by the deal, it sparked Swift’s years-long quest to re-record and release them as “Taylor’s Version” albums.
Swift doesn’t explicitly address that fight on the new album. But the song “Father Figure” describes a toxic mentorship from the perspective of a powerful male music executive, who sings of taking Swift under his wing in exchange for her loyalty and making “deals with the devil” for “pure profit.”
The song would appear to reference former Big Machine head Scott Borchetta and his sale of her masters to Braun. In a 2019 Rolling Stone interview, Swift said of Borchetta: “To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of ‘Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.’ “
It’s only 12 songs, as promised
Swift is known to drop surprise double albums and extra songs, like The Tortured Poets Department “anthology” that turned a 16-song album into a 31-song opus and the seven extra tracks released on the “3am edition” of 2022’s Midnights.
But Swift promised The Life of a Showgirl would be different.
“There’s no other songs coming … This is 12. There’s not a 13th,” she said on New Heights. No singles were released before the album came out.
But just because it’s a relatively pared-down album doesn’t mean it isn’t getting full-blown promotion.
Swift has sold eight different vinyl variants in the lead-up to the album’s release, and is scheduled to appear on the late-night circuit next week. She is also releasing an 89-minute movie, called The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which includes the world premiere of her “The Fate of Ophelia” music video and behind-the-scenes footage of the album’s creation. It will be in theaters nationwide Friday through Sunday.