“Life is more upbeat,” Taylor Swift responded when her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, described the sound of her 12th album as such. Yet as the pop titan is wont to do, The Life of a Showgirl still contains plenty of surprises that will wrongfoot any Swifties expecting sunshine and rainbows.
Having completed Eras, the biggest tour in music in history, and shattered a few more industry records, Swift has seemingly raised the bar higher than any other artist can hope to reach – at least this decade. So what next? In the case of this album, her answer seems to be to go as rogue as she fancies. Sonically, this is one of Swift’s most experimental albums, one where she flits between Stevie Nicks-indebted pop-rock (“Opalite”), the Folklore-meets-Reputation backdrop of “Honey” – with its stuttery beats, fuzzy Hammond organs and cascading piano notes – and even Jackson 5 funk on the innuendo-ridden “Wood”, the most outrageous song she’s ever released. In theme, too, she is giddy and in love one moment, pen sharpened and ready to draw blood the next.
The Life of a Showgirl is Swift’s first collaboration with Swedish production powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback since 2017’s Reputation. That album – one of her greatest to date – was a portrait of an artist healing from, as she put it, “getting cancelled within an inch of my life and sanity”. Yet it also delivered songs about newfound love, in which she confessed to her trepidation at making herself so vulnerable while also detailing how said relationship helped muffle all the outside noise.
Misogynistic predictions published ahead of this record’s release suggested that Swift would struggle to write anything as enthralling about her happiness with Kelce as her famous exes… as if “Love Story” and “Our Song” aren’t still some of the best works of her career. Sublime opener “The Fate of Ophelia” should be enough to quieten those detractors, anyway, yielding as much literary flair as songs from Folklore (2020) or The Tortured Poets Department (2024) (only now we have just 12 succinct songs, as opposed to the latter’s somewhat exhausting 31).
Swift sings of her gratitude at being spared the fate of Shakespeare’s doomed, drowned noblewoman. It’s a gratifying twist on the teenage romanticising of her earliest work, in which she cast herself as the lovelorn princess waiting for Romeo to rock up. There’s a lightness in her voice that matches the buoyancy of the instrumentation: “T’is locked inside my memory/ And only you possess the key/ No longer drowning and deceived/ All because you came for me.”
Her prowess as a storyteller continues on the magnificent, orchestral “Elizabeth Taylor”. There, she sketches parallels between the scrutiny and scandal of the Hollywood icon and her own life, remembering “the view of Portofino” and the Plaza Athénée – where Elizabeth Taylor and her lover Richard Burton famously holed up for six months during their romance. The dramatic stomping flourish of the piano brings to mind Nicholas Britell’s Succession score, as Swift, singing through a violet-eyed gaze, thinks of the flames at her heels: “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby.”
Listeners anticipating the high-octane pop of 2014’s 1989 will be surprised by the grunge-leaning “CANCELLED!”, a minor-key missive supporting famous female friends who’ve found themselves caught up in scandals of their own. “Ruin the Friendship”, too, is a disarming, prettily arranged acoustic throwback to her high-school days that reflects on a could-have-been romance cut tragically short.
“Actually Romantic”, the subject of much fan speculation after its title was unveiled, will do nothing to convince fans that it isn’t a thinly veiled swipe at the UK’s reigning cool girl, Charli XCX (the Brat star appeared to reference insecurities that transpired during Swift’s brief fling with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy on her own 2024 track, “Sympathy is a Knife”). Many will balk at lyrics such as, “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse/ That’s how much it hurts,” destined to be Swift’s most divisive line since her notorious “tattooed golden retriever” on the title track of TTPD. Yet it’s one of the catchiest songs on the album, oscillating in tone between the jaunty “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” from Reputation and the similarly themed, but more pastel-hued, “I Forgot That You Existed” from 2019’s Lover.
More ambiguous is the George Michael-interpolating “Father Figure”, delivered in Swift’s silkiest croons, that positions her as a kind of cigar-puffing Michael Corleone figure offering the world in return for undivided loyalty. “I’ll be your father figure… I can make deals with the devil ‘cos my d***’s bigger,” she promises, before her warning: “Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card cancelled.” There’s another throwback, this time to TTPD’s “Clara Bow”, in the way she addresses a former protégé. Yet it also appears to speak to her own experiences of being double-crossed in an industry always looking to replace its female stars with someone younger, hotter, shinier.
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Her fatigue at this permeates “Eldest Daughter”, accepting she will never be the “cool girl” – the song is a deft and moving assessment of the roles women are expected to fill without question. Fellow pop star Sabrina Carpenter joins her on the title track, a curtain closer incorporating country-fied slide guitar, lush synths and, at the very end, audio from Swift’s Eras Tour farewell. The Life of a Showgirl might be one of her most uneven records, but she’s as compelling as she’s ever been – the showgirl, the ringmaster and the circus all in one.
