record-obliterating Eras tour<\/a>, which explains the title even as it begs all sorts of questions about her psychotic work ethic.<\/p>\nAnd let\u2019s be clear: These three can craft a hook as neatly and as skillfully \u2014 as deviously, really \u2014 as anyone in the business. In contrast with the bleary \u201cTortured Poets,\u201d which yielded only one pop-radio monster in the Hot 100-topping \u201cFortnight,\u201d \u201cShowgirl\u201d is likely to spin off several, not least the album\u2019s lead single, \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia,\u201d which rides an irresistible new wave groove that evokes the veteran hookmeisters of Eurythmics. (Look \u2019em up, kids.)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/svcboYY81wU\/hqdefault.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
As a piece of psychological portraiture, though \u2014 the framework, for better or for worse, by which Swift has trained us to interpret her music \u2014 this collection of expertly tailored bops falls well short of its predecessor; \u201cShowgirl\u201d feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of \u201cTortured Poets,\u201d which captured a woman whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to speak certain toxic truths.<\/p>\n
Is that because she\u2019s ended up in a healthy romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, the NFL star whom she\u2019s engaged to marry? One hates to indulge hoary ideas about happiness being bad for songwriters. Yet there\u2019s no denying that Swift\u2019s lyrics about love here lack the kind of depth she\u2019s mined in tunes thought to have been inspired by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot,\u201d she sings, somehow, in the electro-trappy \u201cWish List,\u201d which recounts all the hoping and dreaming she did before she finally met Mr. Right; \u201cWood,\u201d a kind of kiddie-disco number that sounds like Martin was aiming it for the \u201cTrolls\u201d movie franchise, exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing \u201cnew heights of manhood.\u201d (In case you missed it, I\u2019m sorry to say that\u2019s a reference to Kelce\u2019s podcast, on which Swift recently appeared and dropped a bar about her fianc\u00e9 \u2014 \u201cHe may not have read \u2018Hamlet,\u2019 but I explained it to him\u201d \u2014 that she really should have saved for \u201cThe Fate of Ophelia.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, she makes familiar complaints about the punishing experience of celebrity, as in \u201cElizabeth Taylor\u201d \u2014 \u201cOftentimes, it doesn\u2019t feel so glamorous to be me\u201d \u2014 and \u201cCancelled!,\u201d which feels like a goth-Nirvana redo of \u201cLook What You Made Me Do,\u201d from 2017\u2019s genuinely startling \u201cReputation.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the acidic \u201cActually Romantic,\u201d which seems to be a response to Charli XCX\u2019s \u201cSympathy Is a Knife,\u201d in which Charli expressed her anxieties about being compared to Taylor in a zero-sum pop scene; Swift gets off some funny lines about chihuahuas and cocaine but totally forgoes the sense of empathy that made her such an icon to every pop songwriter who\u2019s come up behind her.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s good on \u201cShowgirl\u201d? \u201cOpalite\u201d is a gorgeous soft-rock tune about overcoming old instincts \u2014 \u201cI had a bad habit of missing lovers past \/ My brother used to call it \u2018eating out of the trash\u2019\u201d \u2014 while \u201cRuin the Friendship\u201d looks back at a shoulda-woulda high-school dalliance with the pin-prick precision that Swift has always mustered when writing about her adolescence. Both songs ride coolly laidback Fleetwood Mac-style grooves that feel new for Martin and Shellback, who throughout the album rely more than you\u2019d expect on live instrumentation. (Hang with \u201cWish List,\u201d if you can, for a killer bass line that shows up in the second verse.)<\/p>\n
Swift sings more than once about legacy and inheritance on this album: \u201cFather Figure,\u201d which interpolates George Michael\u2019s late-\u201980s classic of the same name, is narrated by a mentor who\u2019s betrayed by his prot\u00e9g\u00e9; the Broadway-ish title track, which closes the album with a feature from Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>, tracks the aspirations of a showbiz hopeful from fresh-faced naivete to all-knowing cynicism.<\/p>\nMaybe those songs are Swift\u2019s way of telling us that she knows \u201cThe Life of a Showgirl\u201d isn\u2019t as sharp as it could\u2019ve been. We\u2019ll see if it\u2019s as tidy as it needed to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the mess, the mop-up. That\u2019s one way to understand Taylor Swift\u2019s new album, \u201cThe Life of a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":274315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[142022,22779,39148,171,142025,18044,2252,142023,975,142024,86095,19514,3571,142026,3572,67,132,68,11459],"class_list":{"0":"post-274314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-blockbuster-album","9":"tag-charli-xcx","10":"tag-elizabeth-taylor","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-immaculate-damage-control","13":"tag-kind","14":"tag-life","15":"tag-max-martin","16":"tag-music","17":"tag-shellback","18":"tag-showgirl","19":"tag-song","20":"tag-taylor-swift","21":"tag-tortured-poets-department","22":"tag-travis-kelce","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-woman"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115309783696098988","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}