If you ask me my favorite thing about Taylor Swift, I’ll have a lot to say. Since I first heard “Tim McGraw” on the radio at the age of nine and became a die-hard Swiftie overnight, Swift’s music has seen me through innumerable eras of my own, each album magically dropping, it seemed, at exactly the moment I needed to hear its message most. Swift has a unique gift not only for music and storytelling, but for making people feel seen and heard in our most vulnerable moments. And with over 250 songs in her catalogue and counting, the scope and range of those moments is enormous. It often feels like she has a song for every single point on the entire spectrum of human emotion. If you’ve felt it, Swift’s written about it in painstaking, raw, unfiltered detail. Her range as a musician is also unparalleled, with her music spanning just about every genre under the sun, and her talents as a musician, performer, director, and storyteller are not only expansive but growing continually with each new release. The joy she takes in her craft is palpable and deeply inspiring, and always leaves me itching to pursue my own art with renewed passion.
But my favorite thing—my favorite, favorite thing—is the analysis.
Swift is a storyteller as much as she is a musician, and an extraordinarily gifted one at that. And she is at her best when she uses her albums as a whole as a medium for long-form storytelling, with common themes and a central message that ties the whole production together. One of her most celebrated albums, and one of my favorites of all time, folklore, even had recurring characters and complex fictional storylines interwoven between the songs. She understands that storytelling is about far more than the lyrics—it’s about meaning and message. It extends into your choice of medium, into the metanarratives that arise from the work, and continues to grow in the hands of your audience, whether they love or hate it. Swift has even said that if she weren’t a musician, she’d want to be an English teacher. And in true English teacher fashion, every album of hers, particularly in recent years, leaves me with the feeling of having a book report due in the best possible way.
So let’s talk about The Life of a Showgirl: the hidden brilliance of its storytelling, its larger statement about the nature of fame and celebrity, and the way it was designed to leverage the inevitable first wave of criticism to prove its point.
The Initial Reception of a Showgirl
TLOAS, as I will henceforth be calling it because I’m too lazy to type all that out every time, is Swift’s twelfth album (not counting re-records), which released on October 3rd 2025 in record-breaking fashion. It was the most pre-saved album in Spotify’s history, and sold 2.7 million copies on its first day—the second-highest first-day sales of any album in the modern era. The lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” broke Spotify’s record for most streams in a single day. The TLOAS Album Release Party in theaters broke the record for biggest album debut event in cinema history. And none of this should be surprising. The album consists of twelve of the most fun, danceable, catchy, addictive pop songs I’ve heard in years, infused throughout with a message of hope, optimism, and unapologetic joy most of us badly needed to hear.
So imagine my utter consternation when the first thing to hit my social feeds after this album dropped was a parade of grouchy, confused listeners declaring the album a flop with bad writing that failed to deliver on the promises of its marketing. This consternation, of course, was quickly followed by grudging acceptance—not because I agreed with any of their takes (as you’ll see, I firmly do not), but because, as a wise woman once sang, I think I’ve seen this film before.
There is a pattern with Taylor Swift albums, you see. In the days following the release, there’s a storm of criticism. The Tortured Poets Department was too long and not pop-sounding enough, too heavy on the poetry despite being literally called The Tortured Poets Department (some people really failed an open-book exam with that one). Midnights, of course, was too pop-sounding and too much of a pivot from the quiet, cerebral storytelling of folklore and evermore, which were too poetry-heavy and not enough like the brash, bold, colorful world of Lover, which was too bubbly and fluffy after the darker, more serious tones of Reputation, which was…
I assume you get the picture.
As I said—we’ve seen this film before.
And the thing that usually turns it around—because it always does turn around—is the flood of careful lyrical analysis in the weeks following the release as people unpack the symbolism, storytelling, and thematic undercurrents of the album. Honestly, I can understand this. There are songs it has taken me years to fully appreciate and love the way they deserve (I only really got into “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” like, a month ago—yes, I know), and I truly love the way we Swifties come together to share our analyses and swap notes on the little grains of meaning we’ve unpacked for ourselves. And please understand, I have no beef with anyone who doesn’t like this album. Like a lot of her work, it’s got a very specific style, and it’s not for everyone. We all like what we like. But the early backlash that seems to greet every fresh installment in Swift’s career—often disproportionately vitriolic and lacking in media literacy, and which tends to present subjective opinions as immutable facts—is still frustrating.
However, it is also predictable: a reliable trend that rolls through the fandom as regularly as the seasons. One Swift had to know was coming, and which I think she planned for this time around. With careful marketing and strategy, she was able to induce a specific type of initial criticism and use it as a component of the larger metanarrative surrounding this album. And therein lies the utter genius of The Life of a Showgirl.
The Marketing of a Showgirl
TLOAS was announced on Travis & Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast as part of one of the most authentic and grounded interviews Swift has given in her entire career. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to go watch it now. It was the first time any of us had seen her interviewed in an environment where she truly felt safe, by people who made no attempt to spin the narrative or take the reins out of her hands. Highlights included a wholesome sidebar on her sourdough baking hobby, a heartfelt discussion of her relationship with Travis (made even more wonderful when we all found out they got engaged literally right after recording that), and a nostalgic look back at the Eras Tour and what it meant to her.
We didn’t know this at the time, but it was also the first page in the story this album set out to tell.
The album was pitched as a look at Swift’s life behind the scenes of the Eras Tour, and the marketing campaign that followed the interview was largely centered on the colorful, flamboyant image of Swift as a glamorous showgirl. The photos associated with this album, all of which were released with enormous fanfare and glittery countdowns on her website, all carried a dark, sexy, intangibly tragic tone that, understandably, led fans to expect a similar tone from the album itself. Emotionally, they exude tragedy. The album cover references paintings of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who is also named in the title of the album’s lead single. Other pictures show Swift having what looks like a complete emotional breakdown in a darkened dressing room or leaning against the wall of a darkened, dingy hallway in full glam. She isn’t smiling in a single one of them, even when the backup dancers flanking her are grinning from ear to ear. Between the imagery of the album, the references to Ophelia, and the way Swift has always talked about her career in the past (largely discussing the emotional torture that is a life in the spotlight), you could be forgiven for assuming this album was going to be somewhat gritty and dark.
And somewhere in there, we all forgot that this album was announced casually, on a podcast with her boyfriend and brother-in-law, with Swift curled up in a cozy office and smiling as she talked about the simple joys of baking sourdough. Yet the tone of that podcast—a moment rendered minuscule by the magnitude and volume of the marketing campaign that followed it—was more aligned with people’s first impressions of TLOAS than any of the glitz and melodrama of those photos. And people were shocked. Flabbers were gasted. We were ready for Swift’s look behind the curtain to expose tragedy and pain, but as we’re about to see, nothing in our cultural understanding of women’s stories prepared us for her to write about actually enjoying her life. We forgot, in short, that unfiltered doesn’t always mean unhappy.
Our culture does not embrace stories about happy women. To be considered interesting, desirable, or otherwise worthy of praise, attention, or acclaim, a female character, real or fictional, must be glamorously unhappy. We love the showgirl who languishes in a diamond-encrusted dressing room with a single tear rolling gently down her cheek. We love Ophelia, floating in her aesthetically-pleasing pond in without a hair out of place, flowers scattered around her looking like they were thrown onto a stage in celebration of her final bow. Even dead, she is rosy-cheeked and gracefully posed—at her most attractive, artistic, and inspiring only after she’s been broken.
Ophelia’s prominent inclusion in the imagery of TLOAS was no accident. She’s more than a character—she’s an archetype our culture tends to project onto real women in the process of romanticizing them, and Swift is no exception. Her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, leaned hard into this imagery: the romantic tragedy of a heartbroken woman lying on a stage for us to celebrate the beauty of her untimely, perfect demise. But even before that, Swift has always been most celebrated for her sad songs. Whenever she’s happy, the press wrings its hands and laments the possible loss of her inspiration for tragic, gut-wrenching breakup ballads, as if they’d rather she be unhappy and poetic about it than happy, safe, well-adjusted, and no longer drowning. (I cringe every time she gets a question about whether she’ll still be able to write sad songs now that she’s getting married. “The Alchemy” was back to back with “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, and “So High School” had “How Did It End?” and “I Hate It Here” on either side of it; have you people no faith in this woman?)
In short, it didn’t take much to convince the world that a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Swift’s life during the Eras Tour would be an Ophelia-style spectacle of perfectly framed feminine suffering: the slow death of a spirit destroyed for the entertainment of the masses.
And then she went and wrote Ophelia a happy ending—and some of y’all had the nerve to get mad. But the joke’s on you, because I think that may have been the point.
The Twist of a Showgirl
The themes of optimism and fulfillment of this album were so unexpected, largely because of the marketing, that they passed a lot of people by altogether—in my opinion, by design. So let’s break down the twelve songs on TLOAS one by one and consider how they contribute the overall picture Swift painted with this album and its carefully crafted metanarrative. I also want to spend a few moments on the lyrics of each song, calling out particularly masterful writing where it’s relevant, because if I see one more allegation that the lyricism and poetry of this album isn’t up to par, I’m actually going to explode.
The album opens in a burst of energetic, upbeat instrumentation and lyrics about love and connection. “The Fate of Ophelia,” largely expected to be a lament about the beautiful tragedy of fame, quickly steps out of its initial minor key and becomes be a bright, hopeful celebration of being saved from that tragedy by a safe, healthy, and loving relationship. Ophelia’s fate in Swift’s universe is no longer to drown beautifully, but to live joyfully. “No longer drowning and deceived / all because you came for me,” she writes. This song was a flawless choice for a lead single, perfectly exemplifying the themes of optimism and romance that infuse the rest of this album while hiding behind a title and imagery that primes the listener to expect glamorous misery. (In other words, yes, she did bait you with that song title. And that was the point.) It is a reclamation of the archetype born from literature’s most iconic Sad Girl, and the rest of the album continues on that theme flawlessly.
Track 2, “Elizabeth Taylor,” is an incredible piece of storytelling that sounds like it belongs on Reputation, with heavy synth beats and a slightly apprehensive tone. In it, Swift prays to Elizabeth Taylor, a longtime muse of hers, like a patron saint, asking, “Do you think it’s forever?” and begging for someone to trust. One of my favorite lyrics from this song is “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever / in the papers, on the screen, and in their minds,” which references the way Swift—like so many female celebrities before her—has been reduced in the media to her relationship status. But that note of hope is still present: Swift’s voice in this song is that of a woman who knows what she wants, understands the stakes of the game she’s playing, and continues to courageously pursue love in a cruel world. It’s unquestionably the darkest song on the album, and the only one in which she centers her doubts about her lifestyle, yet through it all she carries the spirit and strength of a woman who walked this path before her, reminding both herself and us that the life of a showgirl is possible to survive.
There’s also a fantastic moment of contrast in this song, right in the first two lines: “That view of Portofino was on my mind when you called me at the Plaza Athénée,” possibly one of the most aggressively glamorous lines I have ever heard in my life, is immediately followed up with, “Oftentimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me.” She’s telling you, right there, that the picture she’s painting—the very one so many people wanted, with sparkling visions of a tragically beautiful young star—is not the reality of her experience. On the nose? Yes, but sometimes the truth should be.
Track 3, “Opalite”, is about making your own joy in a world that seems determined to deprive you of it (opalite, by the way, is a man-made form of opal, Travis Kelce’s birthstone). This song has several of my favorite lyrics on the whole album: “Failure brings you freedom” and “You finally left the table / and what a simple thought / you’re starving till you’re not.” It’s packed with references to previous songs (“I used to live with ghosts” references the “dancing phantoms on the terrace” from “loml”; “All of the foes and all of the friends” references the bridge in “Castles Crumbling”) that feel like old friends waving up at you out of a photo album as you look back on it in happier times. This song isn’t just about happiness, it’s about the fulfillment that follows devastation. Opalite’s joy is hard-won, and exists in defiance of a world that wants nothing from Swift but her poetic, beautiful suffering. If you went into this album expecting devastation and angst, this song’s sugary, incessant optimism would feel like a slap in the face. I think that’s intentional, and I love it. Sometimes, the world needs a good slap.
The end of Opalite’s bridge also has one of the most fun musical moments on the album: an escalating cascade of harmonies that sound straight out of a Broadway ensemble number, something that reminded me that some of the most beloved moments on the Eras Tour also had a distinctly Broadway feel to them. The intro to “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” (which directly foreshadowed TLOAS), as well as the choreography accompanying songs like “tolerate it,” “The Man,” and “the last great american dynasty” all felt more like you were watching a play than a concert. The choreography of “Vigilante Shit” was even a direct reference to “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago (and can I just say what a perfect Broadway counterpart to TLOAS that show is!). The Eras Tour as a whole was just as much about the costumes, the staging, the cast of beloved backup dancers and singers, the set pieces, and the production as it was about Swift and her music. And of course, I unfortunately must remind you all, Taylor Swift was in the Cats movie (sorry—you can go back to forgetting now). The point is, Swift loves Broadway, and in an album that is largely about finding joy in a tough career, the sound and tone of an art form we know is close to her heart fit perfectly. We’ll see this again in other songs, so put a pin in this.
“Father Figure” is up next—one of my favorite songs on the album, and one of Swift’s most fun storytelling moments, in my humble opinion. In it, Swift uses the metaphor of a mafia family to represent the world of celebrities, and to discuss the dark side of mentoring someone in the music industry: that sometimes, the person you once saw as a younger you turns around to stab you in the back for their own gain, and when that happens, it’s every showgirl for herself. It’s got an absolute banger of a key change after the bridge (who doesn’t love a key change?), and a lyric that perfectly encapsulates one of Swift’s loudest points about the nature of fame: “They want to see you rise. They don’t want you to reign.” And it has that Broadway theatricality to it again. You can just see the way it would be performed, with costumes and set pieces on theme, and backup dancers playing characters in the story. (Total side note: it also felt distinctly Reputation-y to me—anyone else getting “Getaway Car” vibes, just a little?) It’s a dark tale, but told in a way that makes it clear Swift is having fun with it, again in defiance of the expectation of her suffering.
And now for track 5. Track 5 of a Taylor Swift album is always sad. This is a truth universally acknowledged. Previous track 5s have included gut punches like “Dear John,” “So Long, London,” and of course, the Sad Girl National Anthem “All Too Well.” I don’t think I am alone in fearing for my life when I saw that track 5 of TLOAS was called “Eldest Daughter.”
But hear me out—it’s not sad.
“Eldest Daughter” is a sweet, hopeful ballad about finally finding yourself in a safe, loving relationship after a lifetime of desperately projecting strength, coolness, and apathy to a world that is determined to break you down. It addresses deep-seated fears of rejection through the lens of someone who finally feels truly accepted—a song that could have been sad if it weren’t written from the other side of the fence. Once again, we see that thematic through-line of hope and optimism. For the first time, she is rejecting the expectation that she romanticize her tragedy, and instead romanticizes emerging from tragedy, and all the healing and recovery and softness that comes along with that. It feels a bit like a commentary on the nature of track 5, in a way: a retrospective on the sadness she’s endured, and a vow to put her pain behind her.
“Ruin the Friendship,” track 6, is one of the ones I’ve been most excited to talk about, but in the interest of not spoiling it, I can’t say much. Much like the album itself and its marketing, it’s a deliberate, calculated bait-and-switch with a message behind it, and something very profound to say about life and love. Again, I’m hesitant to say more because I don’t want to ruin it if you haven’t listened to it, but after you do, just think about that contrast for a moment and how well it mirrors the metanarrative of this album. You go in dancing, and even when you find the aching, tragic core you were expecting, you come out with a bittersweet, beautiful truth in your hand. It’s a deeply humanizing behind-the-scenes view of a vulnerable moment from Swift’s life, and I think it’s one of the most powerful songs on the album.
“Actually Romantic,” like “Father Figure,” is a discussion of social conflict in the midst of fame. Plenty of people have already analyzed this in the context of who and what it may be referencing, so I’m going to back up and talk about this in broad strokes. This song is another positive take on the dark side of fame—optimistic to a fault, taking the emotional experience of hearing someone shit-talking you and framing it as a complement. “It’s actually sweet / all the time you’ve spent on me / it’s actually wild / all the effort you’ve put in.” And she’s right! Humans are wired to connect and love one another. Hatred and animosity take a massive amount of effort and emotional energy to sustain, and when you’re faced with a barrage of criticism, sometimes that thought can be comforting. Any press is good press, as they say, and in show business, sometimes just knowing you have claimed some real estate in another person’s brain is enough.
“Wi$h Li$t” is the cry for normalcy most people were expecting from TLOAS, but many haven’t recognized it for what it is because of, again, its resolutely optimistic framing. She dreams out loud about the world leaving her alone, and having a couple kids and a basketball hoop in the driveway, longing for those things more than any of the typical perks of fame. But it’s sweet and heartwarming, completely lacking the aching, lonely tone in which she’s always discussed normalcy in the past—probably because she knows she’s finally going to get it. It also sounds eerily similar to her song “Glitch,” which is about falling unexpectedly into a new romance—something she discusses here again. After all, in a life of pursuing the glitz and glam of show business, who would expect to find a relationship that feels normal and safe? And again, that longing for normalcy is exactly what many of her critics expected her to discuss on this album, and complained about it not having enough of. It just goes to show how unappreciative we suddenly are of women’s stories the moment they have an optimistic spin, or a happy ending tacked on.
“Wood” is horny. Let’s just get that out of the way. Mom, if you listen to this album, please skip this track.
Overt, unapologetic sexuality is not a new feature of Swift’s songwriting by any means. She’s been writing lyrics like “Only bought this dress for you to take it off” and “The altar is my hips” since the late 2010s. But I think we can all agree this is the furthest she’s ever gone. People have big feelings about that, and I think that’s okay—this song is absolutely not for everyone. But I do think it’s here for a reason.
With TLOAS, Swift promised us an intimate look behind the curtain at her life during the Eras Tour. I don’t know why anyone is acting surprised that that involves some actual intimacy. And that goes for more than just the actual content. The song itself feels like an intimate discussion between tipsy friends at a particularly wild girls’ night. She even addresses the audience directly at one point as “girls,” talking to us like we’re clustered around having an unfiltered chat at a slumber party gone off the rails. The openness in this song is downright jarring, and I think that’s the point. Boundaries being lowered where you don’t expect them to be is jarring, even if it’s what you requested. Even if you thought you were ready.
There are multiple ways you could interpret all this, depending on how much you feel like reading into things. Maybe she’s trying to tell us that true openness from our showgirl bestie isn’t really something we want, even if we think it is (similar to the “You think you want this life, but you don’t really don’t” sentiment reflected on the album’s final track, which we’ll discuss later). Maybe we’re just meant to think back to that line about “not measuring up” in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and have a little chuckle to ourselves—I am not ashamed to admit that’s what I did. But for an album so steeped in metacommentary—a piece of art so self-aware it incorporates its own marketing campaign as performance art—the more I listen, the more I can’t believe people think this song should have been omitted. I think she knew “Wood” wouldn’t be entirely well received, and as with the contrast between the marketing of the album and the reality of its content, that was part of the plan. This time, the message was about boundaries between an artist and her fans, and a reality check about what’s behind that curtain you wanted to pull back so badly.
“CANCELLED!” is another track that, like “Elizabeth Taylor” and “Father Figure,” sounds like it belongs in the world of Reputation, but with a fun, theatrical spin on it, and a core message about women who are hated by society for stepping out of their assigned molds banding together and staying by each other’s sides. This is a spin I don’t think we could have gotten on a previous album, but again, this one is about optimism. TLOAS isn’t about being miserable and drowning in fame, it’s about surviving it, and one of the ways in which human beings survive anything is by finding our friends—“The ones with matching scars,” as this song tells us. (It also has the line “a shattered glass is a lot more sharp,” which I love. I think the “the lyrics are bad” crowd is gonna be eating their words on this song in particular in a couple of months.)
I read this as a song explicitly about female friendship, especially since the things she lists as reasons for being cancelled (“Did you make a joke only a man could?”, “Did they catch you having far too much fun?”) are things women tend to be socially punished for, not men. It’s wonderfully rebellious, in a way, because we all know that women learning to stick together and lift each other up is anathema to patriarchal power structures (women being pitted against each other in order to prop up a male-dominated industry is actually an overarching theme of my book series, the first installment of which you can preorder now—excuse the shameless plug, now back to Taylor). Despite its dark tone, I found this song so refreshing and empowering, and a perfect way to explore another dark corner of the music industry with a very bright, warm-toned flashlight aimed into it.
“Honey” is probably the most underrated track on the album. It feels like what “Sweet Nothings” was to Midnights: a small, soft emotional breather tucked between the heavy-hitting tracks to remind you why you’re there. Like “Eldest Daughter,” it is a romanticization of recovery, contrasting the feeling of being called “honey” or “sweetheart” as an insult with the feeling of finally hearing it as a loving pet name after years of verbal abuse. But that’s not the only way in which this song feels like a reclamation of something once-beautiful that was tainted and lost to heartbreak.
Am I the only one that feels like the verses kind of sound like the bridge of “London Boy”?
Here’s a bit of Swiftie lore for the uninitiated: “London Boy”, a song from her 2019 album Lover, was explicitly about her now-ex, Joe Alwyn. It’s upbeat, fun, and packed with so much love it makes you feel like you’re in love just by listening to it. It also had a very distinctive rhythmic structure to its bridge—put a pin in that. When Swift and Alwyn broke up after six years, Swift visibly struggled to perform certain songs on the Eras Tour, which was ongoing at the time. Videos circulated of her performing “Lover” and “champagne problems” with tears streaming down her face. Despite “London Boy” being a huge fan favorite, she—understandably—didn’t perform it as a surprise song until fairly late in the tour, and she only played it once. I don’t think any of us expect to hear that song live again, and you know what? That’s aggressively okay—I have yet to encounter anyone who doesn’t have sympathy and understanding for that. However, it is undeniably an incredibly fun song, largely because of that infectiously catchy bridge, and I can imagine how proud she must have been of that segment of the song and how fun it must be to play and to perform—and how much it must hurt to sing it from the other side of a very rough breakup. If you haven’t heard it, I urge you to go listen to it.
Then listen to one of the verses of “Honey”.
Y’ALL ARE HEARING THIS, RIGHT?!
So much of this album is about reclaiming things, from Ophelia’s fate to the joy of being a musician and performer. And what a perfect place to gently wipe away the sad memories from a beloved piece of art and hang it back up on the wall. Because isn’t that what healing is all about?
At last, we arrive at the final track: “The Life of a Showgirl,” featuring Sabrina Carpenter. I adore this song. I had high hopes for the Sabrina/Taylor collab, because I love them both and we’ve seen how beautifully their voices blend and how naturally their styles as musicians fit together, and this blew me away. It’s the most literal piece of storytelling on this album: the story of a showgirl who warns an aspiring performer away from the business, cautioning her that it’s not what it seems from the outside. But the twist is that the newcomer doesn’t listen to her. She doesn’t shy away, but embarks on her career with her eyes open, knowing what to expect. She finds success at the cost of suffering, yet at the end of the day she wouldn’t go back and choose a different path if she could.
It ends with actual audio of the crowd cheering at closing night of the Eras Tour in Vancouver, Canada: a tangible reminder to the audience of what Swift and Carpenter both love most about their jobs, and the fact that even in a career rife with suffering and in a world that is determined to romanticize your pain, there is joy to be had, and that joy is worth it. Like other tracks we’ve discussed, parts of it sound like a Broadway song, with some people pointing out that the bridge almost sounds like something out of Hamilton, from the fast-paced, half-spoken rhymes to the stubborn determination to achieve greatness reflected in the words themselves. It’s bold and showy and heartfelt all at once. (Also, to the lyrics-hating crowd, “I took her pearls of wisdom / hung them from my neck” would like to have a word with you. Are the bad lyrics in the room with us?)
We could end the analysis of this track there, but there’s an important line in this song that often goes overlooked. It’s the original showgirl’s warning: “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe / and you’re never gonna wanna.” This feels like more than storytelling. This is Swift speaking directly to her audience. It feels like a perfect encapsulation of the overall theme of this album: that when you’re offered a peek behind the curtain, you truly cannot know what you’ll find, and you may not like what you see—at least at first. You might even wish you’d never asked. It certainly won’t be glitz and glam, but it also won’t be aesthetically pleasing tragedy, which the narratives our society loves best about famous women have taught us to expect from a glimpse behind the scenes. And even the moments that are what we expect—the beautiful suffering, the bitter social scuffles, even the small moments of hard-won triumph—will have a theatricality to them that reminds you that all the world’s a stage.
This album does not feel as much like a raw, unfiltered look at Swift’s life as it does an industry old-timer sitting you down by the fire for an evening of stories and wisdom. Not all of it is sunshine and rainbows, but she’s happy, so even the darker moments have a levity and an optimism to them that comes from knowing it all worked out in the end. You hear about how she was saved by love and happiness, how she prayed to the spirits of the women who came before her that this time it would actually be real, and how she realized that if you want joy in your life, you have to make your own, and the world won’t make it easy. She tells you about the struggles of mentoring other artists in a cutthroat industry, and maintaining friendships and relationships in a world filled with doubt, hatred, and suffering. She tells you that one day you’re going to make some enemies, and to remember that their bitterness is about them, not you. You come to understand that when people try to intrude on your private life, saying they want the real you, they don’t mean it, and they don’t even know they don’t mean it. You learn that your suffering, your pain, and your experiences are always yours to reclaim, and that despite all of it, doing hard things is worth it if you hold onto your hope and optimism and joy. You ask her if she ever wishes her life was simpler—if she ever dreams of being just an English teacher, married to the gym teacher with a couple of kids and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She smiles and asks you why you’re so convinced that living life is incompatible with living your dreams.
And now, at last, you know the life of a showgirl. If you still think this album’s writing is subpar, or that she should write more of whatever was on her last album (whatever that may be at any given time), then I can’t help you. And if you still think TLOAS failed to deliver on the promises of its marketing and feel let down by the bait-y song titles and glamorous photoshoot, then congratulations—you’re part of the story now. Thanks for the cool metanarrative! I really liked it. I’ll see you all next era, when you’re whining that her thirteenth album should have been more like Showgirl.
Happy listening.