The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore
Artist: Taylor Swift
Label: Republic Records
The Taylor Swift backlash arrived with a vengeance last year when the singer followed up her blockbuster Eras tour with her Life of a Showgirl album. The Irish Times was one of the few not to hate the LP, and if its five-star rating was, with hindsight, a tad too feverishly positive, the record was still a lot better the near-universal thumbs-down suggested.
Now Swift has returned with this expanded Encore edition, featuring four new tracks written with the producers Shellback and Max Martin. The good news for Showgirl cynics – there are a few – is that these new releases put clear water between Swift and the persona she adopted for the original album: a frazzled crowd-pleaser worn down by a life in the spotlight.
If anything, this bonus disc feels like a highlight reel of the past decade of Swift’s career, during which she ascended from arena pop star to stadium-filling cultural mainstay.
The subdued electronica of Midnights, her 2022 album, is the big influence on Patient Zero, which is the best of the new cuts, a tune where she seems to be warning someone off an old love interest (“if you’re sick of him, I got you”), although the lyrics take a back seat to its muted disco beat and keening violin.
Speculation is already raging about the subject of the song, who, she sings, has “the devil on his shoulder underneath the halo”, with her ex Joe Alwyn among the candidates.
There will doubtless be further breadcrumbs when Swift debuts the video for the track at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, with the bad boy to be played by Colin Farrell, who takes up the baton from Domhnall Gleeson, Cillian Murphy and Graham Norton as a random Irishman in a Taylor Swift video.
It’s a high point of this mini-record. The lowest moment comes straight afterwards as Swift goes full Bob Seger/Bruce Springsteen Americana with Cleveland!, a love letter to her husband, Travis Kelce, and his hometown. It’s full of newly-wed cringe, although you have to admire the tune for sticking it to the haters by making it clear that Swift is living her best life.
The final two songs are superb. Pink Clouding – the title suggests an early Tori Amos ballad – has the eerie, diaphanous quality of Evermore, Swift’s lockdown album. Then there is Babylon, a gauzy ballad about chasing fame but forgetting what it is to be happy.
Is it about Swift? The internet has thoughts, with everyone from Alwyn to Sophie Turner and Justin Bieber suggested as an inspiration.
Whoever it’s about, you can’t argue with the verve with which it bathetically bops into the sunset, bringing a satisfyingly Swiftian ending to an expanded edition that will melt the ire of even a dedicated Showgirl hater.