One downside of turning your release strategies into scavenger hunts and layering clues within your work is that it invites enormous amounts of scrutiny about your potential motive. When Taylor Swift announced an expanded edition of last year’s critically maligned The Life of a Showgirl this week, subtitled The Encore, many fans instantly suspected one of two things: that it was designed to remind Grammy members of Showgirl’s existence during their voting period to determine next year’s nominees, or to oust country ingenue Ella Langley from her record-breaking US No 1 run.
If that sounds cynical, it’s also worth remembering that when Swift announced Showgirl last year, she said that unlike her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department – a 16-track record immediately inflated to 31 songs on release day – the purposefully concise, 12-track Showgirl would not be expanded. (This didn’t stop her releasing 34 variants of the record, with various acoustic demos and so on, to juice sales.)
After Showgirl had the biggest US opening week ever, Swift went to Sweden to celebrate with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, she revealed this week. The trip was intended to be about reflection and gratitude, she wrote on Instagram. “But,” she continued, “there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: we wrote more songs.” One hesitates to liken Swift to Kanye West, but The Life of a Showgirl is starting to look a little more like The Life of Pablo, West’s endlessly extended seventh album.
A slipperiness has infected the whole endeavour, not helped by Swift’s initial promise that Showgirl was all “bangers” and about “keeping the bar really high”, a claim quickly dismissed: the record is a travesty, a word that feels particularly apt when you recall Wood, a Bruno Mars-lite abomination about her now-husband Travis Kelce’s penis. And for an album that was supposed to be about the giddy highs of life on Swift’s own record-breaking Eras tour, it contained a tedious amount of well-worn score-settling. Adding four more songs written some time after the initial sessions further dilutes the record’s already flimsy premise.
The most Swiftian thing about these four tracks is their visceral sense of course-correction. For all that Swift chafes against The Haters – more on them to come, shocker – she’s always reacting to criticism. Recall the scene from her Miss Americana documentary where she learns that her sixth album, Reputation, didn’t get nominated for the album of the year Grammy: “I just need to make a better record,” she says, visibly crushed. (That’s the folly of working like this: Reputation is her best record, and those voters are idiots.) Showgirl was panned for its excessive wordiness and defaulting on the promised bangers; these Encore songs largely pare back the verbiage and double down on hooks and firework-laden bridges, Swift’s metier. It’s like watching an ambitious chorus line dancer breathlessly flay herself in the spotlight to prove herself worthy of our love.
Every Swift album except Reputation has a deluxe version, though just a handful of those bonus songs are keepers: Jump Then Fall (from Fearless), New Romantics (1989), Bigger Than the Whole Sky and Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve (Midnights). None of these new songs are destined to join those ranks, though Patient Zero comes closest. Hooked around a mournful and curiously processed Celtic fiddle sample, it recalls the spirit of Lover, where it felt as though Swift was trying out potential new sonic futures. Its pained chorus also evokes Tortured Poets’ Fortnight: a slinky, low-key yet insidiously catchy melodic Möbius strip, with lyrics offering connection to a woman recently burned by an ex whose games Swift knows well.
It’s one of two Encore songs that contain a palpable sense of humanity, unlike anything from its childish parent album. Pink Clouding is a mature apology to a kind ex she let down – “Neither of us knew at the time / That I was a liar” – filled with the sort of regret that will never lose its shameful sting. Unlike Swift’s post-2020 turn to heavily detailed narrative writing, it’s written in a pure-pop form, braiding shades of pink and various flowers into a sweet and effective conceit without defaulting on emotional grace. It is ardent synth-pop, a sweet balance of airy and punchy; it also sounds a little like it could’ve lived next to Cruel Summer on Lover, though truthfully it recalls Tegan and Sara’s classic 2013 album Heartthrob, which inspired Swift’s 1989 pop makeover.
The beauty of Pink Clouding is that it sounds genuinely believable, a quality curiously missing from Swift’s songs about Kelce. Tortured Poets bonus track So High School is as close as she’s gotten; the Showgirl songs about their romance framed it as a triumph over venal and conniving haters. It’s a very strange lens through which to write about supposed true love, and one she returns to here. The appalling Cleveland! is all about how Kelce loves her despite internet commenters saying she can’t dance (a long-dead criticism) and that she’s annoying, and is sung with such oozing self-satisfaction it’s like being repeatedly poked and asked if it hurts. Spiritually, it is a cut-and-shut of two of her worst songs ever, Lover’s Me! (about being cringe but free) and Showgirl’s Honey (about other women being jealous haters). Despite her long-term collaborator Jack Antonoff not being part of the Showgirl era, it still sounds like warmed-over Bleachers.
It is a mess of contradictions: it has an oddly sour tang for such a festive, all-bells-jangling confection, like biting into a lavishly iced cake to find the sugar swapped for salt. For a song about having found the one, its standards are barrel-scrapingly low: “You only need to find one person in this entire world / Who doesn’t find you completely insufferable!” she declares. Girl! Aim higher! Where on Honey, and other recent songs, she has proven strikingly eager to call other women bitches, here she coyly stops short of calling herself a “whore” and “bitch” in incomplete lines that make conspicuous features of those gaps.
And for all that she laments the haters, she sure does write a lot of songs about them. The more dogshit like Cleveland! she releases, the more criticism it may garner, in turn generating inspiration for … more songs like this. It is Swiftian Groundhog Day: she seems unwilling or unable to extricate herself from the vast web of self-reference she now seems condemned to operate within, having reached the point in the corporate life cycle where novelty is all but exhausted and it’s easier to double down on core values.
It’s hard to tell what any of this has to do with Showgirl (other than pushing the album back to No 1 until Christmas). Every song sounds as though it could have been appended to a different record. Closing track Babylon is sub-Evermore in its overcomplicated narrative of a fractured family and grave, watery production. You could point to their very loose shared theme, each taking different angles on the gap between a facade and an intimately understood truth – though the greater truth affirmed by this batch of music is that the more Swift releases, the weaker her output gets. It doesn’t take any detective work to deduce that the healthiest thing for her creativity would be to let the curtain fall for a while.
