Taylor Swift has stood atop the pop world, glittering in a sequined midnight blue bodysuit with rainbow confetti falling at her feet. She has mesmerized stadiums packed with fans, whose screams and cheers registered on the Richter scale. She’s broken streaming and chart records she herself has set. She’s released a career’s worth of music in a span of five years. Nearly two decades into her career, spinning in her highest heels, she has reached a whole new artistic and personal peak, each time reaching higher and higher than her last. Just when the world thought Swift couldn’t climb any further, she did. Earlier this year, she bought back her masters, effectively owning everything that has ever been, well, hers. She also locked it down with a cowboy like her in football star Travis Kelce; the pair are now engaged and it’s like she has finally found her fairytale ending.
So there’s no imaginable way she could possibly get any bigger, right? Well, that’s where The Life of a Showgirl comes in. Only a sucker would think the curtain close of the Eras Tour marked the end of Swift’s almighty reign in the pop sphere. With her twelfth studio album, the musician shoots into a fresh echelon of superstardom — and hits all her marks.
From the first Fleetwood Mac-inspired drum roll and melancholy keys of “The Fate of Ophelia,” it’s clear Swift has stepped into uncharted territory. The world might know how Shakespeare’s Hamlet ends, and even how the latest chapter of Taylor’s own love story goes, but the tantalizing melody shaped by a wondrous mix of steel guitar and Omnichord trills, makes you want to keep listening to find out just how Swift changed her prophecy.
Notably, the pop star chose not to work with longtime producer Jack Antonoff, and instead forged a reunion with studio genius Max Martin and Shellback. But their return isn’t just a callback to the grandiose synth-bangers of 1989 or warehouse-ready electric grit of reputation. Instead, the trio takes from all they’ve each learned in the eight years apart to chart a whole new path.
Unsurprisingly, The Life of a Showgirl is a stark departure from last year’s deeply personal, prosaic, and tortured-as-hell The Tortured Poets Department. “There’s nothing I hate more than doing what I’ve always done,” Swift wrote in The Eras Tour book. Where TTPD was a greige and drawn-out in 31 songs, Showgirl is bursting with iridescent color and a tight 12. That’s all by mastermind design, of course. No one could’ve known that when Swift played her Martin-era masterpiece “New Romantics” during the final Eras Tour surprise-song set, it was an Easter Egg for the soundscape of this album.
“You’re only as hot as your last hit baby,” Swift quips against the thunderous glamour of “Elizabeth Taylor.” With that in mind, the singer makes scorching sonic choices. “Actually Romantic” is built around a Nineties rock riff in the vein of Weezer. That edge she never had on TTPD’s “Clara Bow” — she’s got it here, and it makes lines like “it’s kind of making me wet” hit that much harder. It’s exactly the kind of song fans have been clamoring for since Swift brought out electric guitar versions of Red for 1989’s world tour.
Meanwhile, “Father Figure” interpolates George Michael’s song of the same title. But those Prince-like snares are rounded out with a full string orchestra of Swedish musicians. The same ensemble is present in totally different capacities across Showgirl highlights like the title track and “CANCELLED!” The horn section on “Wood” saves the song, which would be a misstep on its gauche lyrics and thinly-veiled metaphors alone.
“I want to be as proud of it as an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons,” Swift told Martin while they were in Sweden making the album. With its spotlight concept and showstopping production, Showgirl is the direct result of Swift’s all-encompassing career feat — and an extension of it. She hand-picks elements from all of her eras, just as she did on tour, and combines what works best. “Honey” is a sultry reclamation carried by both a Speak Now-style banjo and hip-hop beat from 1989, as a Midnights-esque Wurlitzer twinkles in the background.
The glitzy sheen across these glitter gel pen songs doesn’t mean she’s skimping on her signature detailed storytelling. She is as hilarious as ever, comparing a foe to a “toy chihuahua,” and thanking the haters that call her “bad news.” She’s bolder than she has been, embodying a dick-slinging music mogul with eerie threats like, “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning.” She’s even topping herself in the tortured corniness department — the “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” refresh “Wi$h Li$t” is littered with designer brand references, and even one abbreviated “Balenci.”
As she reaches for new heights, Swift still provides glimpses behind the curtain at her guitar-stained vulnerabilities. On “Eldest Daughter,” Showgirl’s Track Five (usually Swift’s most devastating song on an album), she makes brutal admissions like “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness/I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool” and “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.”
But with every step Swift takes, she sheds those feelings of loss and despair. Showgirl is the castle she built out of all the bricks that have been thrown at her. She begged on her knees to change the prophecy, and the love she writes about here did just that. She lost her life’s work, but now the empire belongs to her. Everything you lose is a step you take. It’s a lesson she even offers her lover in the bridge of “Opalite” when she sings “failure brings you freedom.”
For Showgirl’s curtain call, Swift is even beckoned by the freedom that could come if she gives up her crown one day. The closing track, notably the title track, prominently features none other than Swift’s understudy Sabrina Carpenter. The 26 year-old singer takes a full verse and even harmonizes with her idol for the sped-up, showtune-y bridge. It’s almost as if Swift is passing the torch to the next generation of showgirls as she takes a bow. Could it be her final one? Well, no. This showgirl won’t be left for dead; she’s immortal now. “We will see you next time,” Swift promises as an audience cheers. After all, despite the rock on her finger, Swift is married to the hustle — and with an album as good as this one, she might even try to outdo herself, again. That’s just show business for you.
