Laura Snapes Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl (TLOAS), has been a smash statistical success. She’s broken records that she previously set, and in the US is second only to Adele for the most sales in a single week. The cinematic release party this weekend grossed $34m in the US and an additional $13m worldwide. But it’s second only to her 20-year-old debut – written in her teens – as the worst reviewed album of her catalogue, with a 70% approval average on Metacritic. What are the successes and failures of this record?
Alexis Petridis The success part is obvious. It’s set to become the biggest-selling album of the year by a preposterously long chalk. In terms of shortcomings, I think the biggest one is prosaic – a lack of really memorable melodies. I think you’d be hearing a lot less about the cringy lyrics if it was packed with tunes that were up to the standard of Blank Space, Don’t Blame Me or Bad Blood.
Shaad D’Souza I’m less inclined to see the commercial victory of this album as any kind of profound success. Swift has been bigger than everyone else for years now, and I don’t think any achievement of hers will ever seem as big as the Eras tour, which was the kind of monocultural event a lot of people thought couldn’t exist any more.
If there’s overall success here, beyond a couple of individual songs, it’s in brand maintenance. A new album gives Swift a reason to charm late-night audiences and radio hosts, which she hasn’t done in a while, and I think after the moody-teen aesthetic of The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), it’s fun to see her return to the kind of peppy, high-wattage aesthetic she explored on Lover, even if with a far inferior album. I think the main failure is the overall feeling of regression, which ties in to the same failure that’s dogged her for a good while now: she seemingly has no internal sense of quality control any more. There are some truly unforgivable lines on this album.
Elle Hunt The lack of quality control struck me too. The way she talked about this project on Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights, it seemed conceived in direct response to the criticisms of TTPD: a tight 12 tracks versus a variable 31, “infectious” pop bangers in place of wordy angst. Bringing on Max Martin, the producer behind most of this century’s solid-gold pop hits, including her own, seemed to underscore this ambition. There are some catchy melodies and the production is slick, crowd-pleasing, expensive-sounding.
The big issue, as you say, Shaad, is the lyrics, which are often so clanging that they invalidate any pleasure you’re taking in the music. Eldest Daughter is the prime example, with the sparse piano focusing your attention on these horrible, meme-y turns of phrase: “We all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire” is just nonsense. “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” from Cancelled! dates it immediately. Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have all released smarter, funnier, more high-concept pop in the past two years. Does Swift know that, too? Or does she really believe she’s working at her best?
LS In her intro videos to each song, in the dismal cinematic release party, she seemed very pleased with the record. But I think the playful, poppy sound is a play to re-establish herself as a major hitmaker – ie someone who has more than one major single per record, like Olivia, Sabrina and Chappell have had, after TTPD and Folklore only spawned one hit apiece. I also think that the mammoth Eras tour, as well as the shifting company she keeps – from artsy lovers and collaborators and pals like Boygenius, to the fairly normie sports world she’s now part of – may have recalibrated her desire to speak to as many people as possible. No more “esoteric” records, as she called everything from Folklore to TTPD. Whether that’s because those are periods of her life she’d rather leave behind or because she internalised criticism of how unwieldy her writing had got, who knows? And the biggest fans of this album that I know of, other than apparently the staff of Rolling Stone, are all under the age of 10. Having Shake It Off-style hits that play at kids’ birthday parties is good business, too.
I also find it regressive. Although I don’t think 2019’s Lover is most people’s favourite Swift album, its spread-betting styles offer a really interesting document of a pop star fresh out of the contract she signed as a teenager, on the edge of 30, working out what an adult pop career might look like. Folklore and Evermore felt like her vacating that space; Midnights was largely a convincingly adult recalibration of it. But this feels like time-travelling back to the 2010s, pretending none of that ever happened.
SD A lot of people were thrilled about Swift returning to Martin and Shellback, but neither producer has been on a hot streak over the past decade, or longer. Martin’s last true smash was the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights in 2020. Swift’s music has never exactly been in conversation with the rest of the pop world. She has always seemed more invested in pop’s business trends than its musical trends, and her choice of collaborators here is revealing: she’s at a point where she’d rather look back into her own archive than the world around her, for instruction. One look at the charts might have told Swift that her style of “centrist pop” isn’t really necessary any more – as streaming subsumes radio, it’s less necessary to appeal to all bases. That Showgirl has such an easy, all-encompassing sound makes this album feel weirdly old-fashioned – she could have taken bigger swings here, still within the realm of “pure pop”, and still dominated. Instead, we get Bruno Mars-y lite-funk and wan Abba pastiche.
One question now is where she goes next, creatively. I’d love to see her work with a younger producer such as Leroy Clampitt, who’s made excellent sinister, synthy pop with Madison Beer and Sabrina Carpenter; or Carter Lang, who’s made pop that’s earthy, but still hooky, with SZA and Lola Young. My pipe dream is that she strips it all back and works with someone like Cass McCombs (check his Sky Ferreira collaboration, Sad Dream, for a proof of concept) on a back-to-basics album.
AP More than anything, she probably needs to take a break. Her star is so big that the usual rules of streaming-era pop don’t apply. She doesn’t need to put out a constant stream of music, and she could easily take a few years off. That would make the level of expectation around her next album higher, and it’s probably worth it for her to recalibrate what she does, to come up with something different, to not feel impelled to keep pumping material out when she doesn’t have to. Folklore and Evermore were creatively different from the albums before them, and they came out of the enforced break of lockdown.
EH More than just a break from the public eye, it feels like Swift needs to live a little, venture out from the Taylor Cinematic Universe and have some new thoughts and experiences that aren’t already enshrined in her lore. Except for Ruin the Friendship, all these songs deal with either: a) her new relationship bliss; or b) her grievances with how she’s perceived. It’s not a surprise, given her schedule over the past few years, but it’s not particularly interesting or novel. Often here Swift feels like she’s rehashing musical and lyrical ideas that she’s already executed, often better. That’s why the album feels so non-essential: her creative well has not been replenished, forcing her to draw from the same stagnant, self-referential water. Imagine if she’d taken the time to actually reread Hamlet and made a concept album, The Life of Ophelia (rather than just reference it in the first track, The Fate of Ophelia). Or properly committed to the showgirl concept with a Broadway sound and story. Instead, it just feels as if she’s hedging her bets with the broadestpossible, frequently banal pop, simply to hang on to the spotlight.
LS I’d love to see her jettison the Easter eggs, “numerology” – at this point, essentially: “Hey kids, math is fun!” – and bits like putting her saddest song at track five. Naturally they generate terabytes of headlines as fans put the pieces together, but it’s such a constraining framework and the acrobatic self-referencing makes her output feel more and more claustrophobic. Sadly, I think there’s a gnat’s chance in hell of any of this happening. Next year is the 20th anniversary of her debut album, and her next record will be her 13th – her lucky number. There’s no way she won’t mark that, with either another new album or the version of her debut that she re-recorded for Taylor’s Versions but didn’t ultimately need to release once she got her masters back. It will be framed as a gift to fans, albeit one they have to pay to receive in various vinyl variants. You’d hazard a guess at her getting married next year, once her fiance’s final football season has finished – also, incidentally, his 13th – an event that almost no one is going to be able to act normally about.
I’m interested in the phrase “too big to fail”, which I’ve heard a lot since Friday. None of the criticisms of the album have stymied its vast commercial success, for sure. But I am curious about how many of her fans are engaged, ardent Swifties, a number of whom have registered their disappointment with the album – plus the cost of paying for the numerous physical versions, and the evident use of AI in promo clips – and how many are casual consumers, otherwise unengaged in pop, who just know her as the default pop star of our age and don’t engage with the lore. In the US, she has an exclusive product deal with the supermarket Target, and her albums strike me as the kind of thing a kind parent would drop in the trolley for their kid. How many disappointing records would it take for them to stop automatically outstripping their predecessors? As with the shift from TTPD to TLOAS, will she adjust her next release in line with the many criticisms it’s received? Or is its proudly basic worldview (rich husband-lovin’ girlie who defends the family) a sign that she’s over her period of craving critical respectability? Are the hints of a backlash serious enough to flourish? Or is life now just an endless Eras encore?
AP: I don’t think the backlash is serious enough to have any real impact, and I think the casual consumers you mention are the people any artist has to reach if you’re going to be huge. One thing I do think is interesting about TLOAS is how much the “proudly basic worldview” may chime with her long-term fans’ own lived experiences. Say she does take time off, gets married, has kids, all that stuff she’s talking about on Wi$h Li$t – can she then write an interesting album about that? That’s a massive challenge. I’m trying to think of a mainstream pop album that successfully addresses those topics and I can’t come up with one. But it’s got to be more intriguing than stuff about internecine pop squabbles and internet backlash. She’s spent her career basing a chunk of her songwriting on the model of You’re So Vain. To extend the Carly Simon comparison, it would be interesting to hear her start basing it on Coming Around Again.
EH I might be disappointed by this album/cash grab but my interest and investment in Swift will inevitably survive at least one more cycle. Ultimately, though, on her return I’d love to see her writing with self-reflection, imagination and rigour instead of this internet-addled defensive crouch or increasingly tedious, triumphant underdog shtick. Without being blind to the irony of noting this here, my other hope for her next album would be for a more proportional, measured response from the media. Nothing on TLOAS justifies or rewards the volume of coverage, depth of analysis, or cross-platform fanfare. It’s a pop album, and a mid one at that – not a ‘London Bridge is down’-level global news event. I hope that, in future, Swift will be covered on merit, not just because she is too big to ignore.
SD I choose to take a long view of this, perhaps foolishly: there were entire decades when artists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell didn’t make good records! With any hope, this is just an artistic down period, and she’ll wake up in a few years with some hunger to make an album with the integrity and specificity of Speak Now or Lover.
