{"id":474859,"date":"2025-10-05T02:07:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T02:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/474859\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T02:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T02:07:13","slug":"taylor-swift-sounds-stuck-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/474859\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift Sounds Stuck | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taylor Swift<\/strong> might not be capable of making a bad record, but \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d is at least a little bit cringe.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Amanda Petrusich reviews the new album<\/a>
\u2022 Why Donald Trump could win the shutdown<\/a>
\u2022 The Democrats\u2019 free speech problem<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Taylor<\/p>\n

Photograph by TAS2024 \/ Getty<\/p>\n

Caroline Mimbs Nyce<\/strong>
Newsletter editor<\/p>\n

Between the Eras Tour,<\/strong> her engagement to the football star Travis Kelce, and now two original albums in less than eighteen months, Taylor Swift has become \u201cfreakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots,\u201d the music critic Amanda Petrusich writes today in her review of \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl.\u201d<\/a> And yet, even amid all this crazy success, the singer has stuck to her underdog mentality. On her latest album, she sings about the struggles of being famous, adopting a tone that\u2019s, at times, more vengeful than tender, Petrusich writes, to mixed results. \u201cSometimes it works; often it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

I caught up with Amanda, as well as the senior editor Tyler Foggatt (who has written about Swift\u2019s rerecording efforts<\/a>), to discuss their initial reactions to the new album. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:<\/strong> O.K., first thoughts?<\/p>\n

Tyler Foggatt:<\/strong> I\u2019m liking it so far, but I\u2019m not really seeing that much of a connection to the showgirl theme! It\u2019s kind of hilarious how she spends so much time crafting and pushing forward a particular aesthetic for each album (like the whole seventies thing she did for \u201cMidnights\u201d) and then the music doesn\u2019t match at all. It would be actively strange to watch her perform some of these songs wearing, like, a sequinned headdress.<\/p>\n

Amanda Petrusich:<\/strong> Totally. It\u2019s funny to think that \u201cThe Tortured Poets Department\u201d is actually the more showgirl-y album\u2014it\u2019s certainly more focussed on the cognitive disconnect of onstage vs. offstage. Given the extremely deliberate marketing rollout here\u2014shout out to the branded briefcase she whipped out on the Kelce brothers\u2019 podcast, \u201cNew Heights\u201d\u2014I was also expecting songs more in the \u201cLights, camera, bitch, smile\u201d vein of \u201cI Can Do It with a Broken Heart.\u201d But I think it\u2019s possible that we\u2019ve reached the point where everything Taylor Swift writes is about being famous\u2014I don\u2019t know. That sort of bums me out?<\/p>\n

Nyce:<\/strong> That\u2019s interesting, Amanda. How are you all thinking about this album in the greater arc of the Swift universe? We know she loves an era.<\/p>\n

Petrusich:<\/strong> Since \u201cevermore,\u201d really, it has felt to me like Swift\u2019s eras are linked more explicitly to some predetermined extra-musical color scheme, rather than the actual content or sound of the record. Which is fine, she\u2019s a multimedia artist, but this one feels especially inscrutable!<\/p>\n

Foggatt:<\/strong> Exactly\u2014take Track 6, \u201cRuin the Friendship.\u201d It\u2019s about an old friend who Swift regrets not pursuing romantically. And then he . . . dies. Now, don\u2019t get me wrong: I liked this song. I was genuinely touched by it. And it\u2019s a return to the kind of storytelling that made me such a big Swift fan in the first place. But it\u2019s followed by what appears to be a diss track aimed at Charli XCX (\u201cActually Romantic\u201d) and then \u201cWi$h Li$t,\u201d in which Swift sings about wanting the simple life: a couple of kids, and \u201ca driveway with a basketball hoop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Petrusich:<\/strong> Life of a showgirl, baby!<\/p>\n

Nyce:<\/strong> I was expecting this to be a big pop album, because of the branding, but also the Max Martin of it all\u2014for this one she partnered with him and Shellback instead of Jack Antonoff. What are you hearing?<\/p>\n

Petrusich:<\/strong> I do not think she delivered the twelve bangers she promised on \u201cNew Heights.\u201d I also think you can still, somehow, hear Antonoff on this thing.<\/p>\n

Foggatt:<\/strong> I think it sounds the way that \u201cMidnights\u201d looks.<\/p>\n

Nyce:<\/strong> How might the sophisticated music consumer think about this album?<\/p>\n

Petrusich:<\/strong> Swift is too practiced and savvy to ever really make a \u201cbad\u201d record. (So is Max Martin, incidentally\u2014they are both virtuosos of the form.) If you are a connoisseur of pop music, you will surely find things to enjoy here; but if, say, Sonic Youth is your favorite band, I\u2019d probably keep it moving. Mostly, I think she sounds stuck. Maybe it\u2019s healthy that Travis Kelce is not proving to be her muse, but I found myself hungry for a new, more mid-thirties-ish point of view. That she calls out his podcast by name in a song about his sexual prowess is hilarious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift might not be capable of making a bad record, but \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[22391,60818,77,269,22723,60819,60817,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-474859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","13":"tag-textabovecentersmallwithrule","14":"tag-the-daily","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}