Welcome to “The Lyrics of a Showgirl.” Any Taylor Swift album is endlessly quotable, and her 12th is far from the first exception, even if you have to go a few tracks in to start getting to the truly provocative or meme-worthy lines you know are coming. It’s an album primarily of romantic songs — more flagrant and uninterrupted professions of love than she’s ever allowed herself on a single album before, that’s for certain — and so, with grievances fading into the background a bit, you should be prepared for Swift coming on as a swooning softie. But there are also a couple of numbers in which her more lacerating side is in full view, even if she sounds playful as she tells perceived adversaries what’s what.
Here’s a song-by-song guide to the most telling lyrics in each of the 12 songs. (And before or after you scan these lyric excerpts, take a separate look at Variety‘s full review of the album.)
THE FATE OF OPHELIA
Surely, since the dawn of the internet, there have never been quite so many young people doing searches on a specific work of Shakespeare as there have since Swift announced the title of this album’s leadoff track, which has also turned out to be its first single and music video. In short, things don’t go so well for Ophelia in “Hamlet” so borrowing her name for a song title sounds more appropriate for one of the darker bonus tracks from “The Tortured Poets Department” than an entirely post-Kelce album. True, Ophelia does go mad in the play, and Swift has already expressed her fondness for madwomen.
The eldest daughter of a nobleman
Ophelia lived in fantasy
Her love was a cold bed full of scorpions
The venom stole her sanity
But the bouncy music bed provided by Max Martin and Shellback makes it clear that Swift is treading the light side, and the song is about how her fiance saved her from going insane in the membrane. She breaks from Shakespeare to describe her beau’s legendary cold calling…
I heard you calling on the megaphone
You wanna see me all alone
As legend has it you are quite the pyro
You light the match to watch it blow
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And the song gets the album’s sole sports allusion out of the way early:
On the land, the sea, the sky
Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes
As we soon will see from some of the lyrics that lean less toward the strictly lovey-dovey and a bit more toward the risque, Swift has definitely not gotten herself to a nunnery.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Despite titling the second track after one of filmdom’s greatest legends (a la “Clara Bow” on the last record), and having once invoked Taylor in song before (remember “He can be my jailer/Burton to my Taylor”?), Swift doesn’t go in very deep on references to Taylor’s life or career. She seems mostly interested in the late actress’s swoon-making eye color:
And if your letters ever said “goodbye”
I’d cry my eyes violet
There’s a reference to her favorite chart position, and her long-running singlehood:
I been number one but I never had two
Meanwhile, it’s gift-giving season:
Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?
Babe, I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust (just kidding)
That wiseacre parenthetical addition lets us know she’s not pretending to be a completely immaterial girl. (For equivocation, the “just kidding” she adds might be ambivalence on the level of John Lennon singing “Revolution 1” and singing “You can count me out” of the revolution and then quietly adding “in.”)
OPALITE
This third track on the album is the first one that actually sounds as completely sunny as some of the lyrics are. It’s a burst of full color, even if the repeated references to “onyx” and “opalite” will send some listeners looking up all these different shades of joy. This might be the least quotable song on the album, honestly… but what it lacks in lyrical meme-worthiness, it makes up for in pure joy. Amid all the positivity, the most memorable lines might be the more sour ones the song opens with:
I had a bad habit of missing lovers past
My brother used to call it “eating out of the trash”
FATHER FIGURE
The late George Michael can take credit for the title and the hook but not much else in a song that takes a detour from romance to her lingering capacity for pure vituperation. Most listeners will figure it’s about former mentor Scott Borchetta, since she’s made no secret of that grudge since he sold Big Machine and her catalog with it. In any case the first half of the song takes place from a possible would-be Svengali’s perspective:
I’ll be your father figure
I drink that brown liqor
I can make deals with the devil
Because my dick’s bigger
This love is pure profit
Just step into my office
I dry your tears with my sleeve
You may notice in those lines a sly, somewhat subtle allusion to an earlier classic in her catalog, “This Love,” now with a less earnest twist.
When the song gets to the bridge, Swift changes the perspective from the executive’s to her own:
Your faultless ambition sparked the ignition on foolish decisions which led to misguided visions
That to fulfill your dreams…
You had to get rid of me
I protect the family
And, a bit of a victory cry following the reclamation of her recorded catalog after six years of trying:
You pulled the wrong trigger
This empire belongs to me
And, oh, by the way… just a bit more braggadocio from Swift to the father figure in question:
Turns out my dick’s bigger
ELDEST DAUGHTER
Arguably the most tender love song on the album begins with an excoriation of the nastiness the web breeds:
Everybody’s so punk on the internet
Everyone’s unbothered till they’re not
Every joke’s just trolling and memes
Sad as it seems, apathy is hot
Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments
Every single hot take is cold as ice
This is really just a preamble to Swift proclaiming that she is a softie, when it comes to her new love:
But I’m not a bad bitch
And this isn’t savage
I’m never gonna let you down
And, a confession that will not come as a huge surprise, given present circumstances:
When I said I don’t believe in marriage
That was a lie
RUIN THE FRIENDSHIP
The one truly sad song on the album is a heartbreaking remembrance of a boy Swift was friends with in school days — Abigail is mentioned as a mutual classmate — and flirted with while keeping things in the friendzone. The nostalgia brings up the only reference to another artist on the album, after her last album was filled with them:
And it was not an invitation
But as the 50 Cent song played
Should’ve kissed you anyway
Now, he’s dead, and the singer flies home for the funeral, whispering her regrets over her timidity at his graveside. And she offers her listeners some personal wisdom:
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
All your life
ACTUALLY ROMANTIC
Well, here’s what will surely be the most discussed track on the album. Turns out Borchetta may not be the only former associate with whom she has unresolved issues. Although you can count on Swift never confirming it in this lifetime, it’s going to be widely assumed this is about Charli XCX, who wrote a song for her last album alluding to their estrangement since they toured together in 2018, stating some nervousness over the fact that they were both dating members of the 1975 for a season:
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
As the song reveals its full playful conceit, Swift insists she is flattered by any bad will coming her way… flattered to the point of, um, arousal:
You think I’m tacky, baby
Stop talking dirty to me
It sounded nasty but it feels like you’re flirting with me
I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it
It’s kind of making me wet
WI$H LI$T
Back to pure romance — but, again, Swift sets up the lovey-dovey stuff in the chorus with a lot of amusing context about other people’s dreams that don’t exactly align with hers.
They want those bright lights and Balenci shades
And a fat ass with a baby face…
They want that complex female character
They want that critical smash Palme d’Or
And an Oscar on their bathroom floor
What she wants, in contrast, is to be left to live out the suburban dream with her husband-to-be (albeit with not too much noseyness from the neighbors), children included:
Have a couple kids
Got the whole block looking like you
We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone …and they do…
Got me dreaming ‘bout a driveway with a basketball hoop
Boss up, settle down
WOOD
The theme of the album’s most upbeat and danceable track is initially getting over superstitions about the impossibility of true love — hence the repeated “knock on wood” references. And although this was presumably recorded pre-engagement, she didn’t mind predicting its imminence:
Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet
To know a hard rock is on the way
But “wood” comes to take on a different meaning by the end of the track. At least, it doesn’t seem like she’s referring to a trip to Northern California when she refers to a “redwood tree.” And then, she shares her pal Sabrina Carpenter’s recent predilection for letting us know what is happening with her upper legs. Sorry, mums and dads:
It ain’t hard to see
His love was the key
That opened my thighs
CANCELLED!
Here Swift assures friends coming into her girl-pack that she doesn’t mind if they’ve got, you know, reputations.
Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?…
Good thing I like my friends cancelled..
At least you know exactly who your friends are
They’re the ones with matching scars
HONEY
In another tender love song, Swift offers various scenarios in which seeming terms of endearment like “honey” and “sweetheart” made her flinch in the past, because they were either uttered sarcastically by testy schoolmates or by lovers being careless with her affections. But not her new guy, who has finally made her love the H-word, and other loving sentiments like it.
When anyone called me late night
He was screwing around with my mind
Asking, “What are you wearing?” too high
To remember in the morning
And when anyone called me ‘lovely’
They were finding ways not to praise me
But you say it like you’re in awe of me
The album’s final track, a duet with Sabrina Carpenter, is the only one that offers a “Folklore”- or “Evermore”-style detour into a (presumably) fictional character narrative. It’s one in which one or both of the two ladies first get advice at the stage door of a showgirl they adore, then pass that advice along to others coming up after them who need the same counsel. It may not literally track that the song’s heroine, “Kitty,” is a showgirl who is besieged by autograph hounds despite being described as a member of a chorus line of 50 women. But no need to get too hung up on that. In this number, which is ultimately kind of akin to the previous album’s official closer, “Clara Bow,” the point is to get to Swift and Carpenter describing show biz as both challenging and triumphal:
You wanna take a skate on the ice inside my veins
They ripped me off like false lashes
And then threw me away
And all the headshots on the walls of the dance hall are of the bitches who wish I’d hurruy up and die
But, I’m immortal now, baby dolls
I couldn’t if I tried
That’s chutzpah! But the album then ends on a note of camraderie between showgirls — the real-life Swift and Carpenter — as even the lyric sheet includes the snippet of on-stage dialogue from the Eras Tour that is appended to the track’s end:
“Give it up for the band, and the dancers, and of course, Sabrina!” … “I love you, Taylor!” All’s well in the world of showgirls that ends in stadium-sized co-bills.
From Variety US