A review of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl: Encore
Taylor Swift, our greatest living philosopher, returns to give us a pick-me-up right when we needed it with a four-song addendum to last year’s The Life of a Showgirl. It’s a brisk and lively EP that cements that album as the bright, confident doppelganger of 2017’s dark and moody reputation, a narrative about falling in love in the midst of life’s highest peaks rather than at its lowest points.
Where reputation’s insecurity and anxiety now seems to warn of a romance doomed to unravel—lyrics like “Don’t blame me/love made me crazy/Lord save me, my drug is my baby” don’t exactly suggest a relationship that’ll prove durable or even stable in the long run—The Life of a Showgirl sounds remarkably self-assured and relaxed throughout. reputation wants a new relationship to be something it ultimately is not, whileThe Life of a Showgirl sees Swift shedding the last of her romantic self-doubts and inhibitions. Songs like “Opalite” and “Honey” make clear that she’s found the sort of intimate connection she’s been searching for and writing about her entire career.
These four new songs embody the best Swift’s confessional storytelling and lyricism, drawing from all her past work with the poise of an artist with nothing left to prove to anyone—not even herself.
“Patient Zero”: Born of painful romantic experiences past, this track distills the themes and motifs of 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department down to their essence and then reverses the album’s polarity. Swift has looked back at her own relationships—“Felt the reeling, done the healing, said the curses and prayers”—and can now offer hard-earned wisdom to others from a place of relative equanimity. There’s none of the apprehension and insecurity of her earlier work, just reflection and contemplation; she’s no longer romantically anxious and now refuses to devalue herself for a subpar partner who’s “bathing in your reflected light.” Her writing remains sharp as ever—“I bet he kissed the rain off your face,” she surmises—and her bridges still cut deep.
“Cleveland!”: An infectiously joyful and sugary-sweet song, “Cleveland!” was clearly made by a woman deeply in love and uncomplicatedly happy as a result. It’s a track that’s “about” a lot of things, including her spouse and her maladjusted critics. But it’s also about notions of home and its importance, a theme raised on the main album’s “Eldest Daughter” and later again on “Babylon.” In Swift’s view, it’s extremely meaningful that her future spouse took her to see his own childhood haunts. There’s also a bit of Stoic jiu-jitsu involved in listing all the faults her critics identify and agreeing with them.1
But in the end “Cleveland!” is a fun song, one that puts Swift’s wry, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. (The first thing to remember about Taylor Swift is that she’s a huge dork—that’s why so many of us love her—and the second thing to know about her is that she’s actually quite funny.) We see it on full display here, especially with the lyric that she’s now found the “one person in this entire world/Who doesn’t find you completely insufferable”—a line followed by a brief cackle to make her point blindingly obvious.
“Pink Clouding”: On this track, Swift reveals she still experiences some acute anxiety from time to time—not romantic worries, or those having to do with her perceptions of her own inadequacies; those are long gone—but regret over her past behavior. Amidst a neon soundscape reminiscent of 1989 and a lyrical color palette of magenta, fuchsia, and pink that wouldn’t have been out of place on Lover, Swift admits she unknowingly strung along a significant other (“Neither of us knew at the time/That I was a liar”) and worries that she “left scars on a good person.” Though she’s self-aware enough to articulate this concern, she’s still uncertain about how to make amends—instead hoping in the bridge that he’s discovered the same sort of happiness she’s since found. “Pink Clouding” serves as something of a counterpoint to “Patient Zero,” as Swift knows she’s made her own fair share of mistakes and unintentionally hurt partners who didn’t deserve it.
“Babylon”: The stand-out song on this EP, echoes of evermore tracks “champagne problems” and “’tis the damn season” reverberate across the indescribably melancholy “Babylon.” It’s a brutally philosophical song about the failure to recognize what’s actually important in life: love, home, and family, not money or a career. Indeed, the song’s main protagonist sees love as “ice upon the ladder that you need to climb” and remains so checked out from his own life that he doesn’t understand what really matters until it’s too late. As Swift puts it in the devastating bridge, it’s “the self-harm of never being where you are” that inevitably leads to “missin’ all the best parts” of life—a bridge followed by perspective shift where the protagonist’s spouse telephones her mother that “It’s not workin’/It’s just not worth it if we’re not what he wants.” Or to paraphrase another female singer-songwriter from a different era, you never know what you’ve got until it’s gone—and with “Babylon,” Swift reminds us to pay attention to our own lives.
If this Encore EP is any indication of Swift’s future musical direction—and who knows if it is given her love of surprises—I’m excited. Swift seems ready to step into her next era with renewed confidence in herself and her abilities, building on her past work while always moving forward.
The future’s still bright—dazzling, even.
