Taylor Swift might not be capable of making a bad record, but “The Life of a Showgirl” is at least a little bit cringe.
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Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Newsletter editor
Between the Eras Tour, her engagement to the football star Travis Kelce, and now two original albums in less than eighteen months, Taylor Swift has become “freakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots,” the music critic Amanda Petrusich writes today in her review of “The Life of a Showgirl.” And yet, even amid all this crazy success, the singer has stuck to her underdog mentality. On her latest album, she sings about the struggles of being famous, adopting a tone that’s, at times, more vengeful than tender, Petrusich writes, to mixed results. “Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t.”
I caught up with Amanda, as well as the senior editor Tyler Foggatt (who has written about Swift’s rerecording efforts), to discuss their initial reactions to the new album. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce: O.K., first thoughts?
Tyler Foggatt: I’m liking it so far, but I’m not really seeing that much of a connection to the showgirl theme! It’s kind of hilarious how she spends so much time crafting and pushing forward a particular aesthetic for each album (like the whole seventies thing she did for “Midnights”) and then the music doesn’t match at all. It would be actively strange to watch her perform some of these songs wearing, like, a sequinned headdress.
Amanda Petrusich: Totally. It’s funny to think that “The Tortured Poets Department” is actually the more showgirl-y album—it’s certainly more focussed on the cognitive disconnect of onstage vs. offstage. Given the extremely deliberate marketing rollout here—shout out to the branded briefcase she whipped out on the Kelce brothers’ podcast, “New Heights”—I was also expecting songs more in the “Lights, camera, bitch, smile” vein of “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart.” But I think it’s possible that we’ve reached the point where everything Taylor Swift writes is about being famous—I don’t know. That sort of bums me out?
Nyce: That’s interesting, Amanda. How are you all thinking about this album in the greater arc of the Swift universe? We know she loves an era.
Petrusich: Since “evermore,” really, it has felt to me like Swift’s eras are linked more explicitly to some predetermined extra-musical color scheme, rather than the actual content or sound of the record. Which is fine, she’s a multimedia artist, but this one feels especially inscrutable!
Foggatt: Exactly—take Track 6, “Ruin the Friendship.” It’s about an old friend who Swift regrets not pursuing romantically. And then he . . . dies. Now, don’t get me wrong: I liked this song. I was genuinely touched by it. And it’s a return to the kind of storytelling that made me such a big Swift fan in the first place. But it’s followed by what appears to be a diss track aimed at Charli XCX (“Actually Romantic”) and then “Wi$h Li$t,” in which Swift sings about wanting the simple life: a couple of kids, and “a driveway with a basketball hoop.”
Petrusich: Life of a showgirl, baby!
Nyce: I was expecting this to be a big pop album, because of the branding, but also the Max Martin of it all—for this one she partnered with him and Shellback instead of Jack Antonoff. What are you hearing?
Petrusich: I do not think she delivered the twelve bangers she promised on “New Heights.” I also think you can still, somehow, hear Antonoff on this thing.
Foggatt: I think it sounds the way that “Midnights” looks.
Nyce: How might the sophisticated music consumer think about this album?
Petrusich: Swift is too practiced and savvy to ever really make a “bad” record. (So is Max Martin, incidentally—they are both virtuosos of the form.) If you are a connoisseur of pop music, you will surely find things to enjoy here; but if, say, Sonic Youth is your favorite band, I’d probably keep it moving. Mostly, I think she sounds stuck. Maybe it’s healthy that Travis Kelce is not proving to be her muse, but I found myself hungry for a new, more mid-thirties-ish point of view. That she calls out his podcast by name in a song about his sexual prowess is hilarious.
