On ‘Showgirl,’ Taylor Swift feels love’s glow and fame’s glare : NPR

Taylor Swift appears like she’s having enjoyable throughout her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, at the same time as her lyrics paint an image of a star chasing the highlight and trapped by it.

Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

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Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

The complete image is true there from the beginning. In the primary few seconds of “The Fate of Ophelia,” monitor one on Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, a commanding drum fill units up a dreamy keyboard line, after which comes the bass: enormous and buoyant, like a type of bouncing balls in outdated cartoons that observe a music’s lyrics and direct you to sing alongside. Swift takes a cue from that limber backside and lets her voice dip and bend — she sounds smitten and a bit hungry as she remembers first contact together with her now-forever lover, but additionally self-aware and playful, so certain of herself that she fills this newest confession with one-liners at the same time as she is aware of her listeners will take it very critically. “I heard you calling on the megaphone,” she swoons. “You wanna see me aaall aloooone.”

The reverb on the vocal makes this reverse come-on huge and intimate on the similar time. Here’s that showgirl of the album’s title, drawing others in with a stage whisper. But she’s additionally murmuring into the ear of that suitor who was in a position to “wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine.” She tells him (everyone knows his title) that she’s locked this reminiscence away, however as he definitely is aware of, in a showgirl’s world there is not any secret so valuable that it will possibly’t be transformed into materials. And anyway, the music is saying one thing extra rapid: For the primary time on a recording shortly, Swift is having enjoyable. Her voice has by no means sounded stronger, the collaboration together with her studio mates by no means simpler. The bass and drum give off little alerts in regards to the musical terrain the place the music has taken root — a shade of Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood” within the Omnichord, a contact of Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” wafting by means of the melody, a slowed-down and extra evenly modulated echo of Swift’s personal “Wildest Dreams.”

We are in Max Martin’s world, the place musical epochs are compressed and linked inside music constructions that mix so many parts of Top 40 historical past that they arrive out sounding unique. When Swift final entered this house together with Martin’s then-protegé Shellback, additionally a producer on this launch, she has stated, she and the youthful Swede have been each gifted apprentices. Now, as The Life of A Showgirl makes clear, they’re all equals.

Her time spent inside Martin’s zone helped Swift assemble her personal — alongside the realm of her counterpart Beyoncé, probably the most expansive and highly effective one in what’s left of the musical mainstream. Thirteen years after she reset the course of the streaming period with Red, Swift has reunited the workforce to inform a selected story, but additionally to make a spectacle of herself in full flower, at 35 as anchored and musically versatile as she’s ever been. Her lyrics might deal with how her romance with fiancé Travis Kelce introduced her again from a deadly heartbreak, however the bangers which are the purpose of The Life of a Showgirl trumpet one other resurrection: Taylor Swift as Western pop’s definitive presence, the star that could not be dimmed.

The album’s credit present that Swift made Showgirl in relative isolation in Sweden, hiding out together with her two multi-instrumentalist collaborators in between stops on one of the elaborate live performance excursions in historical past. During her retreats into the studio she was fascinated with the work and the values behind modern stardom. The album performs out this dynamic, Swift as mega-celebrity assembly Swift as studio artist, by means of hermetic assured hits that usurp the extra muted explorations of her previous couple of albums whereas letting the questions they ask linger within the background. Its chorus-driven bangers chase success whereas expressing doubts about its results.

It’s no accident that the album’s first two songs evoke theatrical queens whose fates have been both tragic or melodramatic — Ophelia, the juiciest ingenue position that prices your life, and Technicolor goddess Elizabeth Taylor, that violet-eyed over-emoter. Taylor was not a showgirl however a critical actress whose public picture was distorted by a pain-filled personal life (particularly her tumultuous relationship with fellow actor Richard Burton) that fed the beast of tabloid journalism within the mid-Twentieth century.

Always a enterprise lady, Swift deploys the showgirl trope partly as a result of it presents her growing old viewers with an grownup model of the sparkles they donned for her as teenagers. It additionally depicts showbiz as a combating enviornment. No longer the rising auteur who appeared to rappers to assist her negotiate her popularity on the Martin-produced 2017 album of that title, Swift picks up the feather headdress to think about what defining herself within the highlight has value her. She sees a method out by means of love. But worry lingers; that did not work when Liz pledged all to Dick, or when Ophelia floated down the river time and again.

The Life of a Showgirl arrives at a second that appears illogical on the floor, however which is sensible in mild of Swift’s inexhaustible ambition. She and NFL hunk Kelce introduced their engagement simply over a month in the past, and if the synth-y energy ballad “Wi$h Li$t” is to be believed, she’s able to “have a couple kids” and “tell the world to leave us the f*** alone.” An excellent chunk of Showgirl has little to do with its overarching idea, as a substitute consisting of straight-ahead love songs that any couple who meets of their 30s may respect. At first hear, these mash notes have fun the personal house she and Kelce have created collectively — even the truth that the 2 overexposed lovebirds have finished so is a miracle, slightly onerous to imagine.

But discover how Swift connects the Travis odes to her personal earlier love declarations, erasing these outdated amours with this replace. “Eldest Daughter,” a marriage music for the ages, goes all the best way again to the “careful daughter” Swift was in 2010’s “Mine,” whereas “Wi$h Li$t” factors towards the music construction of her 2014 hit “Style.” Martin and Shellback’s manufacturing work reinforces the concept that this album is a summation, not merely of Swift’s profession however of pop itself — the “Happy Days” nostalgia of “Opalite” (which quotes The Ronettes’ well-known “Be My Baby” refrain) and Shellback’s Motown bass in “Ruin the Friendship” are simply two examples of how Showgirl dials into their method of leaping eras to create a complete pop expertise. If Swift sees Showgirl as a smooth announcement of her stepping again from the stage, she’s going to be thorough. No one is extra acutely aware of the legacy she’s constructing than she is; a compulsive huge thinker, she lives to recontextualize successes and shut loops.

She’s undoubtedly aiming for closure about her rapid creative and private previous. While some followers (together with me) applauded The Tortured Poets’ Department, the sprawling, lyrically and sonically uncooked reckoning together with her shattered connections to not one however two Englishmen who disillusioned her and rearranged her head, that 2024 album was Swift’s first crucial near-whiff since she’d parted with Martin after Reputation and grown her crucial clout in league with producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. The 5 unique albums she made throughout that interval enhanced Swift’s profile as a singer-songwriter and sonic adventurer, however her swish slide right into a extra standard concept of seriousness threatened to hazard her dominance because the queen of pop. (Beyoncé solved the same downside by exploring completely different genres, increasing her vary, particularly globally.) Meanwhile, the primary technology of direct Swift inheritors, most notably Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, started to problem her each on the charts and as media sensations. The Life of a Showgirl instantly responds to those developments by reasserting her capability to make irresistibly singable, danceable hits whereas sacrificing not one of the conceptual chops she’d developed in her folkish, disco-y, Joni Mitchell-esque days.

All of Swift’s albums since her first effort with Martin, Red, function on two ranges thematically: one, confessional — what her life is instructing her in that interval — and two, conceptual — what bigger body may match round her autofictions. On Showgirl, the tough-broad persona of a greasepaint survivor permits her to mood the just about too earnest tenderness she feels about her sudden achievement with Kelce and to handle issues which have lengthy preoccupied her, particularly the problem of private loyalty among the many pleasant rivals of the leisure world.

On each subjects, the showgirl character permits Swift to take some wild swings. As an unabashed celebration of the emotional and sexual achievement she’s discovered at Kelce’s facet and in his mattress, the album goes to date that it features a risque ode to the tight finish’s anatomy known as (cough) “Wood,” ripe with photos of redwood timber and, nodding towards his common podcast, “New Heights of manhood.” Happy for you, Taylor! If Sabrina Carpenter’s success as a Twenty first-century flapper posed the problem to be extra frank that Swift wanted, I congratulate her for rising to the event. Sex speak is commonly slightly cringeworthy; it is sort of candy that Swift simply goes for it.

While her comparatively latest flip towards the ribald remains to be typically awkward, the place Swift runs into bother on Showgirl is within the by-now acquainted terrain of the Swiftian diss music. “CANCELLED!” is a Disney-esque gothic anthem about valuing private fealty above all else, together with, it is implied, political allegiances. Swift doubling down on her credo that unhealthy bitches have every others’ backs and can defeat anybody who crosses them is not any shock — she did it a decade-plus in the past together with her infamous girl-squad video for “Bad Blood” — however she should know that to invoke the phrase “canceled” is to ask a political learn, one thing Swift typically avoids. It will bother some individuals, solely making sense as a deployment of that showgirl character, one powerful broad who takes no guff from her rivals and is aware of precisely when a supposed good friend is out to get her.

The similar is true of “Actually Romantic,” a sarcastic and weirdly merciless assault on a perceived pop rival (the steaming scorching gossip says it is her ex Matty Healy’s pal Charli XCX). The worry of girls as undermining rivals is a trope that usually performs out inside the story of the showgirl — see the paradigmantic Hollywood model, All About Eve, and its ’90s successor, the aptly named campfest Showgirls, for examples. There’s a “no new friends” feeling emanating from this album’s meaner moments that gestures towards the divisiveness that typically afflicts our tradition in 2025. It’s very attainable that Swift is leaning into pettiness and even unhealthy style as a method of additional fleshing out the spotlight-hardened character she’s exploring. But to ship such messages now could be a alternative.

Swift has honed her blade extra fastidiously with regards to taking down males who’ve finished her improper. “Father Figure,” one of many album’s trickiest and most evocative tracks, is a ballad kissed with strings and constructed round an virtually martial drumbeat. It pursues one other favourite Swift topic, her adverse experiences with males within the music biz, exchanging the vulnerability of her 2020 music about her ex- label head Scott Borchetta, “My Tears Ricochet,” for the sharper tone of a girl who’s muscled up and is now decided to ship blows as a substitute of absorbing them. Built round an interpolation of the melody that George Michael made well-known in his irresistible (if … questionable) ode to an age-gap relationship with the identical title, “Father Figure” begins wounded after which pulls out the knife. The quaver in Swift’s voice, enhanced by the monitor’s ethereal manufacturing and that well-known tidal hook, hardens shortly and assuredly as she twists the music’s metaphor: Turns out she is the daddy determine, the one possessing a manhood that intimidates. Threatening her former mentor in no unsure phrases, Swift performs on a line from the beautiful Tortured Poets examine of fame’s prices, “Clara Bow,” to indicate that tender issues do typically develop into their energy. She leaves her traitorous mentor to sleep with the fishes, snarling over her shoulder, “This empire belongs to me.”

Despite these Darth Vader moments, Showgirl is mostly a sunny album, its pleasure rooted in its fundamental motivations: Swift’s happiness with Kelce and her pleasure in flexing within the studio with Martin and Shellback. The love songs that set its temper are unreservedly attractive and most of all humorous — together with that soiled “Wood” — expressing real affection and delight. Showgirl additionally gives a few signature reminiscence songs, one a traditional that might have been on virtually any of her albums and one other adroitly up-to-date.

“Ruin the Friendship” returns Swift to the interval through which her profession started, and which she has continued to favor, adolescence, as she remembers a boy she was too shy to kiss, now lifeless. “As the 50 Cent song played, should’ve kissed you anyway” is an immortal Swift line, embarrassingly particular and fully plausible. She and her collaborators weave this unhappy little daydream right into a traditional Martin association, redolent of every thing from New Edition teen pop to ’90s nation to Swift’s personal first hits, these teenage heartbursts.

The concluding title monitor is completely different: Driven by a gradual handclap and constructing like a peppy, feminized “Nights In White Satin” — get out these lighters! — it carries its two protagonists, Swift and visitor star Carpenter, by means of girlish goals and hard-knock nights to a climax that is each triumphant and, if not bitter, undoubtedly seasoned with some salty tears. Back in 2017, Swift would have left the cruelest strains out of those lyrics — she would have by no means known as one other lady a bitch, on condition that she fought in opposition to others utilizing that phrase in opposition to her. Now she lets the showgirl in her admit that typically she thinks of her competitors that method, and realizes the price of such ruthlessness. “I’m immortal now,” she sings to the “baby dolls” who want she’d “hurry up and die.” Then comes the punchline, as sharp as a programmed beat. “I couldn’t if I tried.” Motherhood and semi-retirement could also be looming in Taylor Swift’s fantasies, however she’s clearly unsure if it is actually in her playing cards. She’ll keep our showgirl, idolized and despised. The combine grows deafening and he or she walks offstage into her sweetheart’s arms, searching for an unlikely redemption. Thank you, she says with a rueful smile, for the beautiful bouquet.