For a minute, it felt as if Taylor Swift was about to embark on her own Never Ending Tour. It’s more fair to say Swift is on something closer to a perpetual victory lap. Beyond the Eras Tour grossing over $2 billion in sales, she scored a record-breaking fourth Grammy for Album of the Year, dropped an exposé of a double album, and reacquired the masters to her first six albums after nearly completing the Taylor’s Version project (note: this is just recounting the major points of last year). Each new Taylor Swift record means a new cultural movement, more records to be broken, and, perhaps most integral, a batch of songs to contextualize in the Swiftian canon.
So give a warm welcome to The Life of a Showgirl, Swift’s 12th studio album, which foils The Tortured Poets Department in a few major ways. For one, it’s a tight 12-track run compared to the colossal 31-track of TTPD. Max Martin and Shellback—reuniting with Swift for their first new body of work together since 2017’s Reputation—produced and wrote the entire record with her. And The Life of a Showgirl finds Swift on cloud 9, swooning over her future with a fiancé and her present, infinite success. Here are 5 takeaways from the album.
The Tortured Playwrights Department
Turns out the chairman of the Tortured Poets Department is hosting a playwriting seminar, and the Bard’s tragedy Hamlet is required reading. The Life of a Showgirl opens with “The Fate of Ophelia,” where Swift recounts the major facets of the presumed bride of the Prince of Denmark. Ophelia is driven to madness after the murder of her father and flaky romantic advances from Hamlet, and before long, takes her own life. The Hamlet of Swift’s world possesses much more agency than the original; here, he is no longer cowardly and immobile, but honest about his infatuation with Ophelia and sweeps her off her feet. “And if you’d never come for me,” Swift declares, with the bass pulsing like a racing heart, “I might’ve lingered in purgatory.” It’s easy to see why she’s drawn to revise Ophelia’s ending (she does love giving a few notes to William Shakespeare), especially as Showgirl’s love songs are entranced with her soon-to-be husband, Travis Kelce. Call it her honeymoon era.
Cell Block Taylor
OK, let’s talk about it: “Actually Romantic” is already believed to be about club rat turned worldwide phenomenon Charli XCX, whose song “Sympathy is a knife” was a public blood-letting of her deepest insecurities as a 30-something female pop star; when she spots a certain singer backstage, she detests her, then feels guilty for the vitriol and jealousy pumping through her veins. Out of the gate, “Actually Romantic” is in your face with its barbs. Swift calls her a cowardly cokehead, a yipping lapdog, and maims XCX’s now-husband George Daniel (“How many times has your boyfriend said, ‘Why are we always talking ’bout her?’”). I almost expected Swift to recall a line from Mean Girls when she feigns flattery from the lopsided feud.
You could categorize most of Swift’s discography into different emotions or subjects, and this song will be filed under the Vindictive Diss Tracks label. Unlike Swift’s biggest enemies (slimy businessmen looking to make a buck, those complicit of the Swift–West 2016-17 crisis), “Actually Romantic” is reminiscent of Swift’s earliest revenge songs, where she was too caught up in her anger to see straight. It’s a far cry from the Taylor who revised a lyric on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) for fear of being labeled as slut-shaming and anti-feminist.
So High School
This is what Swift said to GQ about her tour in 2015: “I’ve just been onstage for two hours, talking to 60,000 people about my feelings… When I get home, there is not one part of me that wishes I was around other people.” So while The Life of a Showgirl gives a glimpse behind the curtain of being the biggest pop star in the world, the album is less about the rush of being on stage than the desire for a simple life. Swift dreams up a white picket fence life on “Wi$h Li$t,” complete with gaggles of children playing house together, while “Ruin the Friendship” imagines a teenage Swift too stunned to make a move on a boy she’s crushing on; it ends with her at his funeral, reminiscent of the frosty Red (Taylor’s Version) track “Forever Winter.” Most major celebrities or pop artists will tell you their lives are spent in a glass cage, and yearn for mundanity as much as some pine for fame. In Taylor’s words on the record’s rapturous finale, “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe, and you’re never gonna wanna.”
That’s How You Get the Girl
On the Midnights opener “Lavender Haze,” Swift brushed off an enduring question regarding her former, long-term partner: When are you two finally going to tie the knot? Despite the song’s cool confidence, it was obvious she was exhausted by this query, and maybe her stance on matrimony had begun to shift. Swift and Kelce announced their engagement a few weeks after the album’s announcement, and Swift’s adoration for the Kansas City Chiefs player (Killa Trav if you’re nasty) bleeds into a trio of tracks on The Life of a Showgirl. What were once sour memories of barroom condescension now taste like sugar water; “Gave it a different meaning ’cause you mean it” she chirps on “Honey.” Taking notes from the Carpenter Songbook, she goes on a double entendre bonanza on “Wood,” where in one breath proclaims knowing Kelce’s the one, and in the next, name-drops his podcast to describe his, erm, virility (“New Heights of manhood”). Only time will tell if the basketball hoop in “Wi$h Li$t” will join the red scarf, a rickety screen door, and a downtown bar as canonical motifs of love in the Swiftiverse.
Swiftian Semantics
- “Your thoughtless ambition sparked the ignition/On foolish decisions which lead to misguided visions” (“Father Figure”)
- “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness/I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool” (“Eldest Daughter”)
- “Glistening grass from September rain/Gray overpass full of neon names” (“Ruin the Friendship”)
- “Now they’ve broken you like they’ve broken me/But a shattered glass is a lot more sharp” (“Cancelled!”)
- “Buy the paint in the color of your eyes and graffiti my whole damn life” (“Honey”)
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