October 2025 - Music

THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL

Taylor Swift has stood atop the pop world, glittering in a sequined midnight-blue bodysuit with rainbow confetti falling at her feet. She has mesmerized stadiums packed with fans, whose screams and cheers registered on the Richter scale. She’s broken streaming and chart records she herself has set. She’s released a career’s worth of music in a span of five years. Nearly two decades into her career, spinning in her highest heels, she has reached a whole new artistic and personal peak, each time reaching higher and higher than her last. Just when the world thought Swift couldn’t climb any further, she did. Earlier this year, she bought back her masters, effectively owning everything that has ever been, well, hers. She also locked it down with a cowboy like her in football star Travis Kelce; the pair are now engaged, and it’s like she has finally found her fairy-tale ending. 

So there’s no imaginable way she could possibly get any bigger, right? Well, that’s where The Life of a Showgirl comes in. Only a sucker would think the curtain close of the Eras Tour marked the end of Swift’s almighty reign in the pop sphere. With her 12th studio album, the musician shoots into a fresh echelon of superstardom — and hits all her marks. 

From the first Fleetwood Mac-inspired drumroll and melancholy keys of “The Fate of Ophelia,” it’s clear Swift has stepped into uncharted territory. The world might know how Shakespeare’s Hamlet ends, and even how the latest chapter of Taylor’s own love story goes, but the tantalizing melody shaped by a wondrous mix of steel guitar and Omnichord trills makes you want to keep listening to find out just how Swift changed her prophecy. 

Notably, the pop star chose not to work with longtime producer Jack Antonoff, and instead forged a reunion with studio genius Max Martin and Shellback. But their return isn’t just a callback to the grandiose synth-bangers of 1989 or warehouse-ready electric grit of Reputation. Instead, the trio takes from all they’ve each learned in the eight years apart to chart a whole new path.

Unsurprisingly, The Life of a Showgirl is a stark departure from last year’s deeply personal, prosaic, and tortured-as-hell The Tortured Poets Department. “There’s nothing I hate more than doing what I’ve always done,” Swift wrote in The Eras Tour book. Where TTPD was a greige and drawn-out 31 songs, Showgirl is bursting with iridescent color and a tight 12 tracks. That’s all by mastermind design, of course. No one could’ve known that when Swift played her Martin-era masterpiece “New Romantics” during the final Eras Tour surprise-song set, it was an Easter egg for the soundscape of this album.

The glitzy sheen across these glitter-gel-pen songs doesn’t mean she’s skimping on her signature detailed storytelling. She is as hilarious as ever, comparing a foe to a “toy chihuahua,” and thanking the haters that call her “bad news.” She’s bolder than she has been, embodying a dick-slinging music mogul with eerie threats like, “You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning.” She’s even topping herself in the tortured corniness department — the “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” refresh “Wi$h Li$t” is littered with designer-brand references, and even one abbreviated “Balenci.”

As she reaches for new heights, Swift still provides glimpses behind the curtain at her guitar-stained vulnerabilities. On “Eldest Daughter,” Showgirl’s Track Five (usually Swift’s most devastating song on an album), she makes brutal admissions like “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness/I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool” and “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.” 

But with every step Swift takes, she sheds those feelings of loss and despair. Showgirl is the castle she built out of all the bricks that have been thrown at her. She begged on her knees to change the prophecy, and the love she writes about here did just that. She lost her life’s work, but now the empire belongs to her. Everything you lose is a step you take. It’s a lesson she even offers her lover in the bridge of “Opalite” when she sings “Failure brings you freedom.”

For Showgirl’s curtain call, Swift is even beckoned by the freedom that could come if she gives up her crown one day. The closing track, notably the title track, prominently features none other than Swift’s understudy Sabrina Carpenter. The 26-year-old singer takes a full verse and even harmonizes with her idol for the sped-up, showtune-y bridge. It’s almost as if Swift is passing the torch to the next generation of showgirls as she takes a bow. Could it be her final one? Well, no. This showgirl won’t be left for dead; she’s immortal now. “We will see you next time,” Swift promises as an audience cheers. After all, despite the rock on her finger, Swift is married to the hustle — and with an album as good as this one, she might even try to outdo herself, again. That’s just show business for you.