Lights, camera, action.
In just two weeks, Taylor Swift will release this year’s most anticipated album: The Life of a Showgirl, and I expect it to mark a reinvention — a deliberate relaunch of sorts.
The past few years have been dedicated to her cultural juggernaut of a show – The Eras Tour. It travelled across 51 cities and had a total of 149 shows, with each running over three hours.
Additionally, in May, Swift announced she had purchased her original master recordings. In 2019, Swift’s first six albums were sold to Scooter Braun, who later sold them to Shamrock Capital in 2020. It triggered the Taylor’s Version project, where Swift re-recorded her albums, one by one, to regain a sense of control over her music.
Now that these two chapters have closed, The Life Of A Showgirl is seemingly acting as a regroup, or a possible reset for her career. From the cover alone, it’s clear this is being positioned as the antithesis to her previous album, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, where monochromatic silhouettes have been replaced with bold and maximalist glitz.
What We Know For Sure
Swift announced the album on the New Heights podcast, hosted by her fiancé and NFL star, Travis Kelce, alongside his brother Jason. She also unveiled several pieces of information and teasers for what fans can expect.
Perhaps the biggest piece of information Swift unveiled is that The Life Of A Showgirl has been produced exclusively with Swedish pop royalty Max Martin and Shellback, whom she has not worked with since reputation in 2017. Together, the trio has written the timeless hits ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’ and ‘Shake It Off’, to name a few. Further, Martin, himself, is responsible for some of the biggest pop songs of all time: ‘…Baby One More Time’, ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’, and ‘California Gurls’. This alone makes it clear Swift wants pop smash hits – and lots of them.
This also means that Swift has parted ways with two of her long-time collaborators for this project: Aaron Dessner and, more notably, Jack Antonoff. Antonoff has been working with Taylor since the release of 1989 in 2014, though their collaboration has been more exclusive since 2019 and the release of Lover. The pair produced pop excellence with ‘Cruel Summer’ and ‘Anti-Hero’, as well as more critically acclaimed work on folklore, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Though in recent years, critics have begun to suggest that Swift and Antonoff have become stagnant in their efforts together, marking work as overly familiar and repetitive, hence the possible shift in creatives for this new project.
What This Might Mean
Max Martin is renowned for prioritising the melodic structure of a song before anything else (‘Roar’ by Katy Perry). In other words, his focus is on crafting a catchy hook that generates hits (‘Since U Been Gone’ by Kelly Clarkson). As Swift described the twelve tracks as “bangers” with “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at [them]” on the New Heights podcast, it is clear she went to Martin to focus on clarity and conciseness. This positions herself in an area of restraint, lyrically, to fit in with Martin’s formula. Unlike recent projects, she will not be able to have such diaristic and confessional songwriting. Additionally, it limits how long her tracks can be – don’t expect any ten-minute songs on this album!
The extremity of this style of writing is best exemplified in the titular track from her previous album (“You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever), where the lyrics are niche and oddly specific. It’s sprawling and unfiltered, focusing on affective writing over effective writing.
Personally, I see her moving towards a more cinematic and distanced writing style. A strong, previous example of this is in ‘Wildest Dreams’: “He’s so tall and handsome as hell / He’s so bad, but he does it so well / I can see the end as it begins / My one condition is”. The turns of phrase are more sweeping and idiomatic, lessening the narrative voice of Taylor Swift the person.
By reducing her personal voice, Swift can embody a persona much like she did on reputation. This time around, she is the showgirl: a glittering facade of glamour, combined with “everything that was going on behind the curtain”. The Life Of A Showgirl looks set to concentrate on elements that revolve around her celebrity, rather than her relatability as “the girl next door”. And after THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT was so honest and vulnerable, causing an influx of speculation dissecting her private life, it makes sense that Swift may want to create some distance from her fans to avoid intense scrutiny. I’m sure she will still include some nods to her future husband, though I just hope she comes up with something more refined than “You know how to ball / I know Aristotle”.
In terms of tracks themselves, it’s impossible to predict what Swift might say. ‘Father Figure’ seems placed to at least reference, if not sample, George Michael’s song of the same name. ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ looks set to alter the ending of Shakespeare’s tragic female Hamlet character. ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ and ‘CANCELLED!’ could be ruminations on life in the public eye, with the titular track, featuring Sabrina Carpenter, examining how the “showgirl” trope is passed down through generations. And then there’s ‘Wood’, which could be the most confusing Taylor Swift song title of all time.
What is certain is that Taylor Swift is still in control of the cultural landscape. The Life Of A Showgirl is already the most pre-saved album in Spotify history. Her ever-dedicated Swifties will, ultimately, support and praise whatever she has in store for them. Meaning, when the curtain goes up on October 3rd, the musical tour-de-force will have yet another huge hit on her hands.
Words by Ben Oxley
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