From the first beat of Taylor Swift’s twelfth album, The Life of A Showgirl, I’m dancing. And I don’t stop. Except for the exquisite ballad moment – I can’t be the only one who thinks ‘Eldest Daughter’ is a songbook highlight, right? Fun is in every pore of this, and it feels so good.
What unfolds over the twelve tracks is a sleek silver bullet of a pop record, drenched in sunshine, red lipstick and champagne. I was singing along to some, before I’d even finished hearing them for the first time (hi Opalite!).
If Taylor Swift felt more like Max Martin’s apprentice on 1989, well now the Showgirl is the master – and honey, it suits her.
Photo by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott
This is Taylor as I’ve never quite seen her before, and I’ve been around a long time. Since she had curly hair and wore cowboy boots with sparkly dresses, getting ‘in trouble’ for putting boy’s names in her songs. I’ve seen her climb every mountain, watched her stumble and fall, take the sharpest edges of shattered glass and twist them into a snakeskin suit of armour and ascend to heights so dizzying I wonder how she’s ever kept her head. But this is new. This is a fully realised woman finally embracing her power and it’s glorious to watch.
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I mean, I never thought I’d hear the words “I can make deals with the devil because my d***’s bigger” come out of Taylor’s mouth, as they do on the swaggering ‘Father Figure’ but I’m so glad I have. Because you know what? She’s right.
She takes swings no one else has the audacity to dream up and they look easy, because she always sticks the landing. Calling out Apple Music and Spotify for the way they treat artists. Re-recording albums and starting culture wide recognition of why people deserve to own the art they make. It’s an empire built on blood, sweat and tears. Good times and bad. And it’s hers. That much was clear with every bead of a friendship bracelet, surprise song livestream and record broken as the world shifted into stage formation for the Eras Tour.
It always has been.
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When she announced this album, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her fiancé Travis Kelce in a chat that we now know was bursting with Easter eggs (keeping it 100 anybody?), she said she wanted to be “as proud of it as she was of the Eras Tour” and honestly, I think she can be.
Photo by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott
The sparkly synths. The killer basslines. The earworms that still make you think and pause, the way her folklorian lyricism did. Sure, they’re different pens, but each is as sharp, don’t let the music fool you. The Life of A Showgirl is twelve entire worlds, expertly crafted and contained. Each of them a novel I could write and voraciously read all at the same time.
This is an album that sounds like a smile and sometimes maybe even a fit of laughter. Some of its humour is sly and subtle while other times the punchline hits you in the ribs. Yes, I am one of those people who thinks ‘Actually Romantic’ and ‘Wood’ are genuinely hilarious and clever. That New Heights pun was 13/10. Unbothered Taylor is one of my favourite Taylors, especially in the face of all those who will grind the gossip mills and wring their hands and have things to say from on high. She doesn’t care and she’s having more fun than you, the same way she did as a mouthy teenager. Isn’t it funny how some part of us will always set free our younger selves, but in a more mature way?
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Somehow the record stays lighter than air, even when it touches on darker moments – that plot twist in ‘Ruin The Friendship’ knocked me sideways. The shades of grey are no longer an albatross to carry, a world forever rendered in shades of violent blue. They’re just colours, moments, all of them collected, worked through and then left where they belong. Revisited from the safety of an anchored life, I got the impression that for maybe the first time ever, Taylor trusts the solid ground underneath her feet to be just that. Steady and sure.
We thought we’d heard an ‘I’m happy, I’m in love, I made it’ record before with Lover, Swift’s seventh musical offering. But it turns out the refuge she thought she’d found had cracks, most of them then hidden.
This doesn’t.
There’s none of the anxiety, which in hindsight, loomed large among that pastel glitter palette and came back with bite on ‘Midnights’. He doesn’t read into her melancholy, leaving her to swim alone in a lavender haze, he saves her from it and along the way reminds her how much light she’s always had inside. She was getting there on her own but having a “human exclamation point” as her partner certainly helped.
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There’s no fear. No jealousy. No feeling too big. No bargaining. It just is. The future she imagines on ‘Wi$h Li$t’ is a matter of when, not if. Two people building a life together. Wholly and truly shared. Finally, an equal. For me, one of the narrative highlights is ‘Honey’ for what better way to be in love with someone then help them reframe things, particularly words that have once driven them to tears or made them feel small?
It’s not until I get to the end of the album that it hits me. This is the first time ever I haven’t heard Taylor Swift wonder if she’s enough.
Not on a single song. She’s not dreaming of running away, hatching escape plans or making herself small. Twisting herself into knots, worried about being seen not as something shiny and new but as a woman, when the lights go down. She isn’t worried about news cycles or legacy or ageing out.
She knows who she is – the motherf***ing showgirl. And there’ll never be another like her. Besides, she’s not going anywhere.
(Feature Image Credit: courtesy TAS Rights Management, photo by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott)
