Pop singer Taylor Swift released her twelfth studio album “The Life of a Showgirl” on Oct. 3, via Republic Records. It marks the departure of her last album and era, “The Tortured Poets Department” (2024). This departure marks a sparklier and care-free record, but ultimately drags her songwriting with it.
Record producers Max Martin and Shellback collaborated with Swift, making it their first collaboration since Swift’s sixth album “Reputation” (2017).
While “The Tortured Poets Department” covered themes of heartbreak, showcasing her vulnerability, her latest album contrasts it with themes of love, happiness, betrayal, and what is truly behind the facade, while also dwelling on the past.
Opening the album is the lead single “The Fate of Ophelia.” It is definitely one of the best lead single choices that Swift made, as it is catchy and upbeat.
“And if you’d never come for me / I might’ve drowned in the melancholy”
Swift describes a love interest saving her from succumbing to a lonely fate, singing lower notes in the verses and the bridge and higher notes in the chorus.
My personal favorite is “Opalite,” a song I’d definitely put on to escape the negativity of life. It’s a lively and encouraging song about a person brightening life when everything is down.
These two songs, which are the first few tracks on the album, had reinforced my expectations for the album. However, the rest of the album failed to deliver.
A trend in Swift’s more recent work is that her lyrics try to appeal to her fans as more authentic and relatable. This worked in the past, but it’s not well executed in “The Life of a Showgirl,” making them more edgy and more inauthentic.
The tenth track “Cancelled” is a good example of this, which Swift emphasizes with those who have been cancelled because they’ve been set at a higher standard. It seems like she’s trying to mimic the sound and lyrics of “Reputation,” an album released at a time where Swift was “cancelled,” but instead it translated to some of the most questionable lyrics I’ve heard.
“Did you girl-boss too close to the sun? / Did they catch you having far too much fun?”
The fifth track, “Eldest Daughter” is a more vulnerable song about not wanting to let her fans and the people she loves down, and burdens of being an eldest daughter. This song would do a lot better without the cursing, because it takes away from the deeper meanings of the song.
Again, this seems like an attempt to appeal to the Swifties as more relatable, but it feels manufactured and artificial.
The showgirl concept also isn’t fully explored in the album. “Elizabeth Taylor” and the title track (featuring Sabrina Carpenter) match this concept, but that’s just that. The album is more of a Travis Kelce-dedicated album rather than the behind the scenes of her life as a performer and singer.
As a Swiftie, I enjoy “The Life of a Showgirl” and understand where Swift comes from, but it is not her strongest work compared to “1989” (2014) or “Folklore” (2020). For an album with heavy “fear of missing out” marketing with the countless amount of vinyl and digital album variants released, it was underwhelming.
You can listen to “The Life of a Showgirl” here:
