Taylor Swift's 12th studio album, 'The Life of a Showgirl,' achieved unprecedented pre-release success, breaking multiple records. Released unexpectedly soon after her Eras tour, the album marks an artistic shift, featuring a concise 12 tracks of breezy soft rock, a departure from her signature pop sound. Despite its massive anticipation, the album is critically noted for a lack of memorable hooks and a mixed lyrical approach, particularly regarding her relationship with Travis Kelce, leading to questions about whether it lives up to Swift's high standards.
There are albums for which vast success seems preordained, and then there is The Life of a Showgirl. The podcast on which Taylor Swift announced the release of her 12th studio album – her fiance Travis Kelce’s ordinarily sports-focused New Heights – garnered half a billion views, breaking a record set by Donald Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in the process. A “launch event” film, featuring the kind of lyric videos and backstage footage that anyone else would release on YouTube, is instead set for a theatrical release in more than 100 countries: in the US alone, it sold $15m worth of tickets in 24 hours. The album itself has been pre-saved more than 5m times on Spotify, breaking another record in the process. “I’m immortal now,” Swift sings on the title track, which seems less like an extravagant boast than a statement of fact. Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl. The excitement has been amplified because a new Taylor Swift album seemed unlikely. Even given her famously Stakhanovite work rate and her keen understanding of pop’s constant churn and unceasing clamour for content, you might have expected her to take a break after the Eras tour, which lasted nearly two years. But no: not 10 months since it wrapped, here is she again, bearing a new album trumpeted as an artistic handbrake turn. In contrast to last year’s The Tortured Poets Department – which by the time she’d finished releasing expanded editions and bonus tracks, was nearly two and half hours long – it offers a crisp 12 songs in 40 minutes. Her recent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner are nowhere to be seen. Swift made The Life of a Showgirl in between Eras dates with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish duo who co-wrote and produced her most forthright pop bangers of the 2010s: Shake It Off, Blank Space, Don’t Blame Me, Bad Blood. But anyone anticipating something similar from Showgirl is in for a shock: the fizzing electronic pop of Reputation and 1989 is conspicuously absent. Instead, its primary currency is breezy, easy-on-the-ear soft rock: acoustic guitars, misty synth tones, subtle orchestrations and breathy backing vocals. Wood’s laid-back take on disco recalls not the sweaty hedonism of the dancefloor but the late 70s moment where four-to-floor rhythms and chicken-scratch guitar temporarily invaded the oeuvres of west coast singer-songwriters. More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There’s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift’s claims of “keeping the bar really high”. The lyrics – supposedly inspired by her life on and off-stage on the Eras tour – occasionally do the stuff one expects a Taylor Swift album to do. Actually Romantic eviscerates a nameless pop rival, dropping enough clues along the way that anyone can work out it’s a response to Charli xcx’s Brat song Sympathy Is a Knife. Cancelled! deals with the Kim-and-Kanye-adjacent controversies that beset Swift in 2015 and 2016, and Father Figure concerns former label boss Scott Borchetta, both in needless-to-say-I-had-the-last-laugh style. There are some spiky lines here and there – “you made a deal with this devil / turns out my dick’s bigger” snaps Father Figure – but they don’t really click. Perhaps that’s because Cancelled! and Father Figure revisit very well-trodden ground, while eviscerating a rival when you’re the world’s most successful pop star is, by default, punching down, even if she did apparently call you “boring Barbie” behind your back. But the album’s real lyrical thrust is Swift’s relationship with Kelce, which turns out to be very much a mixed blessing. You could claim that Wi$h Li$t’s dreams of suburban domestic contentment reflect Swift growing older alongside her audience – the high school kids who heard their daily lives reflected in Love Story or Fifteen are now well into their 30s and may also be reflecting on the possibility of “two kids” and “a driveway with a basketball hoop”. But despite her estimated personal fortune of $1.6bn she declares herself uninterested in success and materialism – “that yacht life under chopper blades … those bright lights and Balenci’ shades” – which rings a bit hollow when, minutes previously, she was likening the distinctly five-star circumstances of her fiance’s courtship to the love life of Elizabeth Taylor; dropping in references to the Plaza Athénée, a Paris hotel where the cheapest room will set you back £2,000 a night; and singing of getting “the best booth” at fabled Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank. Taylor Swift’s romantic travails were the soundtrack to mine. What does her engagement mean for fans’ love lives? | Hollie Richardson Read more Then there’s Wood, a song that, metaphorically speaking, drunkenly clambers on a table in Wetherspoons pub with a skew-whiff bridal veil on its head and an L-plate around its neck and favours everyone in earshot with a loud paean to the size of her fiance’s penis, which it variously describes as his “magic wand”, his “redwood tree” and his “hard rock” (there is also a regrettable degree of punning on the word “cocky”). Of course, Swift is perfectly entitled to write about whatever she wants, TMI or not, but there’s no escaping the fact that comparing her partner’s knob to a magic wand constitutes weak writing from someone who made her name, at least in part, by being a sharper, wittier, more incisive lyricist than her peers. In fairness, Wood is one clanging misstep on an album that isn’t terrible: it’s just nowhere near as good as it should be given Swift’s talents, and it leaves you wondering why. Perhaps romantic contentment simply writes whiter than vengeful post-breakup bitterness, or perhaps it wobbles your judgment. Perhaps it was rushed. Or perhaps its author was just exhausted, which would be entirely understandable. Even the immortal, it seems, sometimes need to take a break from pop’s constant churn and unceasing clamour for content. This week Alexis listened to Mildred – Green Car A beautiful song that might have been designed for autumn: slow-paced, it gradually washes over you, infused with a weary sadness.
