Life of T: What Taylor Swift Did wrong in the New record

On Friday, October 3, The Life of a Showgirl— the 12th studio album by Taylor Swift, the most popular artist in the world, was released. The album was billed as a departure from Swift's melancholic recordings of recent years and a return to a cheerful, energetic pop aesthetic in the spirit of the 1989 and Lover albums. Izvestia listened to The Life of a Showgirl and is in a hurry to inform you: this album may become one of the most successful in Swift's career, but it will go down in history as one of the worst recordings in the singer's discography.

Taylor Swift's New Album

14 Grammy awards, the highest-grossing concert tour in history, Time's Man of the Year status, countless chart hits, streaming records, unprecedented influence on American and global popular culture, and even politics. This year, Taylor Swift bought the rights to master recordings of her first six albums: before that, she did not own the songs to the end and, in order to control her own catalog, she re-recorded some of the works entirely. These rights are a huge fortune. And then she announced that she was marrying Travis Kelsey, an American football star. What more can you want, what more can you want, where can you find motivation for new songs and big releases?

The audience might have been willing to take a short break from the singer's work. But no: Swift is a workaholic. The Life of a Showgirl comes after a gigantic stadium tour by Eras, in which she performed 149 concerts, and just over a year after the double, excessively long The Tortured Poets Department.

That album, a commercially successful but slow and arty album with lengthy synths and introspective lyrics, dissolved into the general pop cultural discourse last summer. Critics on social media also discussed Charlie XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappelle Ron much more — three very different singers, who at the same time share the ability to record short and hit dance songs. Swift seems to be worried about this.

Therefore, for The Life of a Showgirl, she did not invite her key collaborators of recent years, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, to the studio, but brought in Max Martin, a Swedish pop industry veteran who wrote for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, and at the end of the last decade presented the megahit Blinding Lights to the Weekend. Shellback's long—time partner is in business with him. With this team, Taylor has already made major hits for the albums Reputation and 1989. So, the three of them recorded Shake It Off, Blank Space and Bad Blood.

A couple of months ago, while announcing a new album, Swift revealed the tracklist, cover, and photoshoot in the style of chaste glamorous candor. Fans had no doubt that a 100% pop record was coming: the queen would show the pretenders to the throne how to do it.

How did fans and critics rate the album?

Swift's commercial result will be very serious. Her personal brand is so successful that The Life of a Showgirl, even before its release, broke the record for presaves — pre-saves of an album in the libraries of streaming platforms. You can predict in advance: the album will turn out to be, if not the most listened to and sold in 2025, then close to it, and ten tracks are certainly capable of occupying the first ten lines in the Billboard Hot 100.

But there are already questions about music. Fans are perplexed on social media, and negative reviews appear in the major press. So, The Guardian gave The Life of a Showgirl two stars out of five.

And here it's hard to disagree: The Life of a Showgirl is not just an unsuccessful release, but frankly a weak work that demonstrates Taylor Swift's complete detachment from ... the essence of her own art.

It's worth remembering that Swift started out as a country artist. Her two most compelling albums, folklore and Evermore, released at the beginning of this decade, are drawn to the Western songwriting tradition of the 1970s, to James Taylor and Carole King. Simply put, Taylor is a very American author-performer, a classic songwriter with a guitar, aimed not only at music, but also at lyrics. For Swift— a song is primarily a story that needs to be told to the listener.

What can I say, because The Tortured Poets Department largely kept the listener's attention precisely with the texts — sometimes controversial, lurid, verbose, but still revealing the inner life of the artist. Even 1989, which was positioned as Swift's first pure pop album and her final farewell to country music, is filled with lengthy, arty, very authorial things - just remember one of her best compositions Out of the Woods.

Therefore, the overall texture of The Life of a Showgirl is amazing. The signature rich sound of Max Martin and Shellback is embedded in the tedious compositions: the producers seem to highlight hooks that are not in the songs. The sound palette sparkles and burns, but the choruses don't stick in the memory. It is significant that the most memorable melody is borrowed from George Michael's Father Figure (moreover, Swift's song is called the same way).

Perhaps the material would have worked better with a different presentation — for example, if it had been more sparkling and straightforward. Girlish prowess, speed, emotionality of voice once pulled Bad Blood and Shake It Off. But on the new album, Swift sounds like she hasn't rebuilt after The Tortured Poets Department: she suffers, complains, and sometimes cries.

Who got it in Swift's new album

The glamorous aesthetic — the shiny sconce and rhinestone tanga briefs adorning the cover; the feathers and pin-up in the accompanying photo shoot — turned out to be just a beautiful wrapper of bitter candy. The Life of a Showgirl seems like an offended, depressed, apathetic, sometimes depressing album — and this despite the fact that much of the material is directly addressed to Travis Kelsey. But even the songs about him seem to drown in gloomy metaphors and minor: "All this time I was sitting alone in my tower. / You were just honing your powers. / Now I see everything. / Late at night you dug me out of the grave / And saved my heart from Ophelia's fate."

Perhaps the most revealing in terms of the overall gloomy mood of the album are the three songs. Eldest Daughter is also formally dedicated to Kelsey, but it starts with an extremely sad and very long verse.: "Everyone on the web is such a punk, no one cares. / Any joke is full of trolling and memes. / Sadly, apathy is in fashion, / There's a lot of carnage in the comments." As a result, the beginning turns out to be the most difficult, almost three-level. The song boils down to the fact that the culture of online communication directly influenced the difficulties at the beginning of a relationship with her future husband: Kelsey tried to appear sincere, and Swift tried to keep her distance, because that's what cool people from the Internet do. But this plot — this meaning of the song — could easily have been conveyed more gracefully.

Actually Romantic is entirely addressed to Charlie XCX. Last year, the British singer released the song Sympathy Is a Knife on the critically acclaimed album Brat, where she sang about self-doubt against the background of Taylor's fame. Swift took this as a rude transition to personality — and now reproaches Charlie for cocaine addiction, comparing her to a "little yapping chihuahua." This is a manifestation of pettiness and grouchiness, completely out of keeping with the scale and status of the artist.

But the main piece of pure, uncluttered kringe is Wood, perhaps the worst song of Swift's career (although, perhaps, I still have the lead! from the album Lover). You can hear the influence of Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor's friend, who has forged the image of an ironic camp diva over the past two solo albums, as if going to bed with kilograms of makeup on her face and singing witty songs about men and sex. Wood is also stated as a kind of joke — the meaning rhymes with Natasha Koroleva's old thing "The Magic Wand" and essentially glorifies Travis Kelsey's manhood ("the magic wand", "mahogany"). But the composition is absolutely terrible. Swift can't manage either snide, hooligan, or truly joyful intonations: for some reason, the song sounds extremely serious, which immediately kills any irony.

On the other hand, Wood is a great metaphor to describe the whole album. In the summer, announcing the upcoming wedding, Swift accompanied the news with an ironic and slightly condescending remark: "Your physical education teacher and English teacher are finally getting married!". It can be assumed that the artist sees herself as a "cool teacher": a woman, albeit with the syndrome of an excellent student, but who knows how to give fire when necessary. In fact, The Life of a Showgirl proves that Taylor Swift is a top—notch touchy nerd. Sometimes it's better to really keep quiet.