Is the world ready for Taylor Swift, utterly untortured poet? Possibly — it’s not as if a whole season’s worth of NFL television cutaways didn’t prime the planet for the idea that Dark Taylor might be ready to take five for a bit. And, sure, the Eras Tour went a little way toward that, too, as no one’s idea of an angst-ridden experience. But not everyone has gotten past the original line on her, that she is someone who professionally mines heartache for hits. She’s almost overturned that notion as a cliche when her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” actually really did trade in real-life misery, again, for much of its length… not withstanding the very late-breaking addition of a single song about a football player. Even on tour, fans go expecting dramatic catharsis to be undergirding all that glee. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” she proclaimed, asking fans to dance while considering whether her performance might be a false front.
But now we have it confirmed, for sure: She can also do it with a fully intact ticker.
And nobody does it better, now or at any recent time, when it comes to delivering world-dominating pop that feels all the feels and doesn’t stint on the thoughts, either. That those feels are now very much on the sunny side is not a huge surprise, but it’s still just slightly startling how light-hearted the near-entirety of her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” is. She’s flirted with writing an album focused on a love that is actually realized before — most notably on the half of “Reputation” that was about her then-burgeoning relationship and not about Kimye-gate. But on that record, even the happiest songs had a kind of love-among-the-ruins feel, where the romanticism seemed hard-fought. On “The Life of a Showgirl,” though, love seems easy-fought. And the belief that it might actually be a breeze, instead of, like, the eye of a hurricane, makes for an album that stands as close to being an uncomplicated good time as anything she’s ever done.
There is shade amid all this sunshine, mind you… as in, the thrown kind. If you haven’t yet heard about the pair of diss tracks that arrive as prominently as banner headlines in the middle of the album, “Father Figure” and “Actually Romantic,” you probably will soon enough. What would a Taylor Swift album be without scores to settle, even if they are just passing asides this time instead of a main dish? She flourishes with adversaries, even if they are relegated to her peripheral vision or rear-view mirror. But the aforementioned tracks are actually two of the happiest-sounding numbers on the album, which is saying something. It’s just a given: the suite at Arrowhead Stadium will never be the only place where she’s keeping score.
But back to love. “The Life of a Showgirl” is filled with it, and in getting that ebullience across, she has the aid this time of two super-producers who are returning to her side after eight years, Max Martin and Shellback. It’s one of the few times she’s ever used the same producer(s) for an entire album project, and certainly the first where she’s only co-written with that same team and no one else. It seems safe to assume she is not estranged from either Jack Antonoff or Aaron Dessner, the steadiest enablers of her modern eras. And those two maestros can certainly help her write a good love song, it’s been proven. But you get the sense she wanted to make sure there was nothing dainty about this aural engagement party, and maybe that’s where she felt Martin and Shellback would offer some extra insurance.
They have delivered, with an album that doesn’t really sound exactly like their parts of “Red,” “1989” or “Reputation,” yet is filled with basic-sounding but compelling beats that immediately make you feel like she has entrusted herself and her fans into the right hands for now. It’s a love story, and it’s also a Swedish family reunion.
The album starts off with what we now know to be its first single and music video, “The Fate of Ophelia.” (In true 2010s Swift fashion, no one got the slightest public whiff of either before the full album was out for judging as a whole; she learned her lesson from her very last pre-album single, “Me!,” and can also afford to be withholding.) From the title, you’d think it would be one of those fatalist ballads that peppered the second half of the deluxe edition of “Tortured Poets Department”… most of which were pretty terrific, by the way. And for about 10 seconds, the chords sure sound like a Dessner track. Then the Martin/Shellback throb kicks in, and before the first word is sung, we know we’re not in New England anymore. Of course, title notwithstanding, this opener is as gleeful as the rest of the record, as Swift sings about being rescued from a descent into Shakespearian madness by her happy-go-lucky baller. She sings: “On the land, the sea, the sky / Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.” (Don’t worry — that is the last quasi-football reference on the album.)
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Next up, “Elizabeth Taylor” is the closest thing to a skip on the album — disappointing maybe to those of us, anyway, who’d hoped it would have more to do with the actress herself than a reference to Swift “crying my eyes violet.” (“Ready for It?” seemed to have more to do with Liz than the track named after her does.) And the weight of “Reputation-but-not-as-good” hangs over it. But the album seriously kicks into gear with its third number, “Opalite,” a song that starts modestly and then surprises you with a sheer pheromone rush of a chorus. From that slow-burning head-rush forward, “The Life of a Showgirl” never lets up, in the quality of its subtle but completely engaging pop arrangements or in Swift’s audacity in giving every lyric a high-concept variation on a theme. The Chiefs’ chief music critic did not lie, in that podcast: It is an album full of bangers, and even the ballads pop off.
“Showgirl” is not aimed at the dance floor, per se, though there are plenty of songs that have propulsive rhythm enough for a sweeter kind of grind. One track is a real outlier, though, and bears a prominent mention as such: “Wood.” It’s a Jackson 5 song in everything but name, credit or composition, with a funk-pop guitar riff classic-sounding enough that I had to double-check the credits to make sure it wasn’t a Motown sample. (No, this is not an invitation for someone to file a nuisance suit.) It also ends up being maybe the most sexual song Swift has done, and while that may not seem like it’s saying a lot, this is the women who sang “Dress,” so there’s some precedent there. Let’s just say that the title may not refer strictly to Home Depot materials, and there is a repeated reference to Swift’s thighs that rivals her friend Sabrina Carpenter‘s recent single for anatomical specificity.
On the other side of the coin, a hearty shift toward big romance and a little eroticism has not kept Swift from dipping into her characteristically more reflective songwriting, as a yin to the album’s celebratory yang. All the talk of sun rays does not negate that there’s one truly sad song on the album, “Ruin the Friendship,” although it sounds so uplifting, it doesn’t drag the proceedings down. There, Swift sings about a boy who knew in school who was kept in the friendzone, by unspoken mutual assent, despite a shared crush. By the end of the song, she is being called home — by Abigail, the bestie Swifties well know — to attend his funeral, where she whispers, “Should’ve kissed you anyway.” It actually ends up being rousing, in spite of itself, as Swift gives her young and old listeners some life counsel: “My advice is always ruin the friendship / Better that than regret it / For all time… / And my advice is always answer the question / Better that than to ask it.” If this reads at all treacly on paper, rest assured it will break just a tiny piece of your heart off as you hear it sung.
“Ruin the Friendship” counts as one of the prettiest songs Swift has ever written, and so, for that matter, does a much happier number, “Eldest Daughter,” which is about being a lover first of all and birth order only incidentally. It’s one of her love songs to her new beau, and begins with a dystopian view of the meanness that the web fosters, before Swift lifts her voice and plaintively sings: “But I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage.” She reverts from talk of childhood to the self-protections that set in in life: “Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter / So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.” And a nod to hjim when she says: “Every youngest child felt / They were raised up in the wild / But now you’re home.”
But does the woman who sang “Bad Blood” really believe that she’s not a bad bitch, to borrow her language? There are those two provocations, or slap-backs, depending on how you look on it, on the album, and suddenly she doesn’t sound so much like the softie she proclaims herself to be to her man in that tender centerpiece. “Father Figure,” without much filter to speak of, seemingly a deep dig at Scott Borchetta, borrowing George Michael’s title and chorus cadence to invent a new tale of a Svengali who gets what’s coming to him — some presumed guilt or remorse — even as she gets the masters that are coming to her. The song doesn’t get quite that literal, but when she sings “You pulled the wrong trigger / This empire belongs to me,” we don’t have to read the Genius.com notes to know what she’s talking about. She’s written her share of slightly disguised songs about that situation — “My Tears Ricochet” was one — but now, at the right time to do a victory lap, she’s taking the brakes off.
And then there’s “Actually Romantic,” which will appear to most observers to plainly be an answer song to the tune that former tourmate Charli XCX released last year referencing her. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave / High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me / Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some people might be offended / But it’s actually sweet / All the time you’ve spent on me,” she sings. If it sounds nasty, it’s in the high-spirited tradition of “I Forgot That You Existed,” her kiss-off to the Kim and Kanye situation of some years back. It’s funny as hell, but barbed as hell, and whether the recipient deserves it with what Swift clearly sees as salvos that came her way first will be much up for debate that goes above our pay grade.
Swift is obviously on better terms with some of her other opening acts, with Sabrina Carpenter coming in for a full-on duet (versus Lana Del Rey’s recent near-ghost vocal) on the title track that closes the album. Here, the star makes a further detour from the more diaristic songs that preceded it to tell a narrative tale of weathered entertainers passing down homespun and hard-fought wisdom, a la “Clara Bow” or maybe even harking back to “The Lucky One.” It’s an outlier, but an anthemic one to go out on.
What Martin and Shellback have done here, with Swift obviously very active as a co-producer, is help deliver an album that has the confident sheen you expect with them, but also just drops most of the possible instrumentation out for stretches of almost every song. Can a record be shiny and also kind of earthy and spare, in the whole? If it can, that’s what a lot of “The Life of a Showgirl” sounds like — utterly pleasing and deceptively simple rhythms, where it really seems like there’s “not a lot going on at the moment,” to borrow a phrase. Some of the most ear-tickling passages just consist of a bass, a drum loop (or maybe real drums, hard to say) and then Swift’s very naked solo voice suddenly triple- or quadruple-tracked into a playful choir, without any big army of synths to bolster it. “Elizabeth Taylor,” the second song, might be the album’s closest flirtation with a truly big and overwhelming production. That one sounds like it could be a “Reputation” outtake, but it’s also maybe the least impressive cut on the album. “Showgirl” is really at its most engaging, sonically, when it’s a little more bare-bones than that. And who knew the day would come when you’d fine somebody acclaiming Martin and Shellback for being brilliant minimalists, but here we are, with a pretty groove-alicious Taylor Swift record that spreads its love primarily through crafty mid-tempos.
Swift has never made two albums that sound alike, and that’s certainly the case with this nearly polar-opposite followup to her “Tortured” era. We like her when she’s mad (with apologies to the Incredible Hulk), and of course, she already proudly told us there’s nothing like a madwoman. But she also once told us, “Why be mad when you can be glad?” Yes, there was an acronym involved there we’re leacving out, but the point stands: Maybe, just maybe, we can like her at least as much when she’s just mad about the boy. It’s too late for Swift to have a “song of the summer,” but this feels like the Album of the Summer — the calendar be damned. It’s giddy, funny, touching, silly, haughty and moving in about equal measure, but most of all, it’s got a sunstruck kind of love that seeps through the orange LP grooves. Bring your own SPF 50.
From Variety US