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 $15m worth of tickets in 24 hours. The album itself has been pre-saved more than 5m times on Spotify, breaking another record in the process. “I’m immortal now,” Swift sings on the title track, which seems less like an extravagant boast than a statement of fact.
In contrast to last year’s The Tortured Poets Department – which by the time she’d finished releasing expanded editions and bonus tracks, was nearly two and half hours long – it offers a crisp 12 songs in 40 minutes. Her recent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner are nowhere to be seen. Swift made The Life of a Showgirl in between Eras dates with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish duo who co-wrote and produced her most forthright pop bangers of the 2010s: Shake It Off, Blank Space, Don’t Blame Me, Bad Blood.
But anyone anticipating something similar from Showgirl is in for a shock: the fizzing electronic pop of Reputation and 1989 is conspicuously absent. Instead, its primary currency is breezy, easy-on-the-ear soft rock: acoustic guitars, misty synth tones, subtle orchestrations and breathy backing vocals. Wood’s laid-back take on disco recalls not the sweaty hedonism of the dancefloor but the late 70s moment where four-to-floor rhythms and chicken-scratch guitar temporarily invaded the oeuvres of west coast singer-songwriters.
More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$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”.
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.
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.
The fact that it’s not full of more revved-up songs is what surprised me, given the name of the album and Taylor’s return to working with Max Martin and Shellback. I was expecting upbeat pop bangers, and not… this. I also don’t understand Taylor’s need to churn out albums every year, especially when it certainly feels like she’s running out of good material. That’s the larger point though – Taylor’s in such rarefied air, she believes/knows that her fans will buy every single song, every album, every variant she sells, regardless of quality. Every artist makes dumb songs – very few artists release all of their dumb songs because they feel the need to churn out an annual album. I’m including some reactions below, and Taylor’s new IG post full of Showgirl pics.
