"The Life of a Showgirl" - Taylor Swift

Disappointment has flooded the Internet over the last two weeks. Upon the release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, Swift has faced more backlash related to her songwriting than ever. Here are my die-hard Gen-Z swiftie takeaways.

The Life of a Showgirl fits the album as a title. The record is not as much in the pop-rock area as I would’ve anticipated, and a few song topics lose the plot of the lifting-the-curtain theme, but it’s not an awful way to summarize this collection of songs.

The album cover for The Life of a Showgirl

Between individual tracks, this album can be separated into three categories: great melodies with great lyrics, great melodies with bad lyrics, and bad melodies with bad lyrics. Because of the lyrical weakness, I give the album a 6/10.

The first three songs are great in both respects. “The Fate of Ophelia” immediately signifies a change in producers. This album brought back some prime collaborators of Swift’s from the 2010s, Max Martin and Shellback. This was after five and a half years of Swift almost exclusively writing and recording new material with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. When promoting the album, Swift said it would combine the lyricism of folklore (2020) (made with Dessner and Antonoff) with the catchiness of 1989 (2014) (made with Antonoff, Martin and Shellback). The opening track is accurate enough to that description, featuring lyrics like, “You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia”, referencing Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Elizabeth Taylor” is shrouded in imagery and reminds me of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” (2019). I love “Opalite”, particularly the cascading of “oh”s descending into, “Oh my Lord, never met no one like you before”.

My favorite songs on the album were the ones with deceivingly romantic titles. “Ruin the Friendship” discusses high school and death. It hits the way “Suburban Legends” (2023) from 1989 (Taylor’s Version) does until the bridge. She yearns and then punches listeners with the plot twist, “I whispered at the grave, ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway’”. “Father Figure” shades Scott Borchetta, Swift’s ex-label boss. Over a catchy melody, she describes faux loyalty pleas turning into betrayal and her coming out the bigger man (though Swift says it in a more inappropriate way). “Actually Romantic” is a cheeky love letter to a hater. Many people dislike the song solely because of the celebrity they theorize it’s about, but that feels irrelevant to me. I think you lose out on the optimal listening experience if you relate a song to the singer’s life instead of your own. Lastly, Swift prepares us for the upcoming storm with the seemingly Sabrina Carpenter-inspired line about how the subject’s insults are “kind of making me wet”.

A picture from a Life of a Showgirl studio session

We kick off the great melody-bad lyric section with the most heavily Carpenter-inspired track, “Wood”. Carpenter’s brand has been so sexual recently that her feature on the later title track makes it almost go without saying that Swift’s been taking notes. There’s so much to uncover with “Wood”. The song is incredible melodically. But the title is immediately off to a bad start. The lyrics are one icky sexual innuendo after another. Carpenter’s innuendos are incessant at worst while Swift’s make me feel like I’m reading a BookTok YA novel. “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see”? “New Heights of manhood” (a reference to Kelce’s podcast)? “A hard rock is on the way”? I can’t.

“CANCELLED!” feels like a Reputation vault song that was cut for a reason. It’s the tamer of the two tracks that display Swift’s apparent need to sound like a member of Gen-Z. “Girl-boss too close to the sun” and “Let’s f***ing off her!” are almost excruciating. But the song has an addictive beat, to the point that it took me a moment to realize how much I hated the lyrics. “Eldest Daughter”, the infamous track 5, has even more unlistenable lyrics. The clean version uses “baddest” to make the lyric “I’m not a bad bitch” a little more tolerable. But then there’s the mentions of memes, hot takes, and the statement, “We looked fire”. Her message is clear – eldest daughters feel pressured to be cool. They feel a certain maternal sense over others. While the verses are clearly satirical, they don’t work. That said, the bridge is stunning.

But now for the worst of the worst. “Wi$h Li$t” is pretentious, and ironically so. Swift explains how everyone wants rich-people things while she just wants her partner. This wouldn’t be a big drawback for me if Swift didn’t include dollar signs in the song title. After the verses, the irony feels mocking. The falsetto choruses are good, but that’s about where my liking for the song ends. “Honey” is a better song conceptually; it just wasn’t pulled off the right way. Swift embraces being called pet names by her lover despite previously hating them. It contains jazz influences and simultaneously reminds me of Midnights (2022). But the structure strikes again – the choruses should be verses. The hook is weak, “You can call me honey if you want, because I’m the one you want”.

Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter performing together on the Eras Tour

The laziest is the title track and closer. Sabrina Carpenter’s feature saves it. The opening lines, “Her name was Kitty, made her money being pretty and witty” have a lazy rhyme scheme. The song has a coming-of-age feel, but in the most mundane way. But Carpenter’s vocals, starting in the second verse, are incredible. After the fast, staccato bridge, I want to hear Carpenter embrace the theatrical vocal style in her own work. The album closes with a recording from the final night of the Eras Tour.

If anyone has justification for being cocky about their talent, it’s Taylor Swift, and she knows it. The effects of Swift’s success this decade are clear as day on this album: she’s confident enough to change how she writes about certain topics like sex, money and the Internet. This shift allows Swift to keep surprising people (her favorite thing), but she’s dug herself into a hole. Because with these shifts… why? Why is she writing about money carelessly, sex awkwardly, and using slang improperly? The answer is most likely, “For the hell of it”. So in conclusion, while this album was absolutely not my favorite Swift album, I’m very interested to see what she does next “for the hell of it”, because I still think she’s earned that privilege!