Two Taylor Swift fans wrestle with Taylor Swift’s polarising new album, The Life of a Showgirl.
Alex Casey: Lyric, how are you feeling? Are you out of the woods? Or is it over now?
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith: Help, I’m still at the restaurant … Alex, I have famously never not enjoyed a Taylor Swift album. I stand ten toes down on TTPD being a top five Taylor record. I still listen to Midnights. I never listen to Reputation in full but I have fond feelings. Listening to a Taylor Swift album is like listening to Jesus read the Bible, but The Life of a Showgirl is what I imagine Jesus was feeling on the last day of Lent. Starving, lost, and led astray by the devil (a 6’5 athlete who may or may not be illiterate).
AC: OK first of all, you left your typewriter at my apartment with that one. Second of all, I am extremely with you. Every Taylor Swift album release brings with it this huge swell of not just anticipation but nostalgia for eras gone by. I think about being 16 and dancing to ‘Love Story’ with my friends in front of the mirror. I think about being 22 when Red came out and feeling so totally invincible that I too flirted with wearing a bowler hat. I think about being a tiny baby pop culture critic when 1989 came out, unable to fathom anything as Earth-shattering in the future as a) lockdown, and b) folklore.
As much as her eras capture chapters in Swift’s own life, they also reflect ours. So what chapter does Life of a Showgirl capture, do you reckon? Being a billionaire fiancé with a couple of weird bones to pick?
Us trying to figure out what’s going on here.
LWS: I haaaaaate how bitter she sounds on this record. I get that the life of a showgirl is lonely beneath the lipstick and lace and that the best showgirl is always a diva, but girl, you are literally the richest, most powerful pop star in the world, who wrote this album while on the world’s biggest-ever musical tour. Who cares what C****** x** says about you when she’s had a few lines, you’re literally untouchable! That’s the biggest letdown for me: the number of songs where she’s showing off that Matty Healy-sized chip on her shoulder. I’m gonna just come out and say that ‘CANCELLED!’ is probably one of her worst releases, next to ‘Me!’
AC: Did you girlboss too close to the sun??? Look, to be a Taylor Swift fan is to evolve over many years to be able to swallow the occasional clanger lyric, but that was a test for even the steeliest of Swiftie stomachs. What grated on me too is her oscillating between being a braggadocious big shot who “pays the check before it kisses the mahogany grain” (Quick Eze please!) while also purporting to be a humble basketball-hoop-driveway wanter who sneers at people for coveting “that yacht life” and “Balenci shades”. Girbloss, you just spent a whole song dropping Portofino, Plaza Athénée and “the best booth at Musso and Frank’s”!
Which I think brings me to my central and perhaps extremely obvious gripe: Taylor Swift can no longer hide the fact that she is an out of touch billionaire.
Taylor Swift at night one of the MCG Eras Tour shows (image: Graham Denholm / Getty Images)
LWS: Which is something I never wanted to accept, no matter how many times I see her announce another TLOAS limited edition available for 48 hours at the price of your firstborn child. I think that braggadocious approach works for stars like Ariana Grande (see: ‘7 Rings’), but I pictured Taylor’s take on the excess of showgirl stardom to be a bit more sneering and self-deprecating (see “I can read you like a magazine” from ‘Blank Space’), or a bit disillusioned by it all, like ‘The Lucky One’ or ‘Nothing New’ 2.0.
I think the title track really captured that complexity by way of passing the baton down to Sabrina Carpenter, but why is it the only song that does that, and why is it at the end of the album? It should’ve been the opener for the record, with the rest of the tracks building on that sound and narrative.
AC: 100% agree, Taylor Swift herself said this was going to be an album about “everything that was going on behind the curtain” during the Eras Tour, and I was genuinely excited for that. She had already given us a few morsels of backstage introspection on some of the best songs on TTPD – ‘Clara Bow’, ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ and ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’ – and I thought this would be an extended universe of that world. I was expecting something dramatic, self-reflective, theatrical and narrative-driven, but instead on TLOAS we just got… Travis Kelce’s Wanger: The Musical.
Even if she doesn’t go anywhere near as deep as was promised, I must admit I have caught myself singing “keep it 100 on the land, the sky, the sea” a lot over the last few days. What’s got its hooks in you?
LWS: I am truly sickened by how often I’m finding myself humming the melody to ‘Wood’ already. What a hook: “never did me any good, I ain’t gotta knock on wood”. The production on that song is so great I can almost forgive her for comparing Travis’s penis to a redwood tree. For all of the album’s faults, I think the title track is a new career all-timer for Taylor: incredible narrative, incredible that she’s found her match in Sabrina, thank you for the lovely bouquet. ‘Ruin the Friendship’ is another track that will stand the test of being on TLOAS and become a Taylor classic, and as someone who has a niece called Honey, that was great too. But the thing that really bugs me is that the highs are weighed down by the lows. ‘Father Figure’ is a great concept as a song (love seeing Taylor wave her dick around) but, like ‘Actually Romantic’ (which is actually really growing on me), it’s just too self-pitying for where she is in her career.
AC: I also love ‘Ruin the Friendship’ because it makes me cry every time, but it also feels like it is on the entirely wrong Taylor Swift album – the what-could-have-been wistfulness rings a tad false wedged between so many songs about her loved-up present day. Honestly, I really enjoy the 2000s RnB vibes of ‘Honey’ and the Trolls 2 soundtrack/Christmas song cheer of ‘Opalite’. I went along to The Official Album Release of a Showgirl at Hoyts EntX with my friend and her 12-year-old daughter and I will say that listening to the whole album in cinema surround sound possibly does the production a few more favours (you would have loved the “knock” sound in ‘Wood’ sneaking up behind you).
Was it worth the $23 ticket price to see a music video 48 hours early, some behind-the-scenes stuff, and then wall-to-wall Youtube lyric videos with Taylor blowing a kiss on loop? Possibly not, but there was something moving about all coming together IRL for a big weird moment like this. There were heaps of little girls dressed up in sequins and flapper headdresses, and some people even trading friendship bracelets in the cinema. “I can’t remember the last time I went to the movies,” a frazzled Mum next to me sighed at one point. In classic meek New Zealand style, nobody sung a word but everyone did a polite little golf clap at the end of every song.
Where has this chapter left your Swiftie status, Lyric?
LWS: The last time I truly felt so tested in my identity as a Swiftie was in July 2016, when Kim K forever changed the course of pop culture history. But we survived that and many other scandals together, so I’m sure Taylor and I can survive this too (thank fuck for those 11 other albums). But I feel like the illusion of her genius has been kinda shattered for me, which is maybe ironic for someone who is also constantly writing for their career and knows that you can’t produce your best work when you’re always leaving the tap running.
The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now etc
I really hope that from here, she takes a well-deserved sabbatical, has her dream wedding, pops out a few babies to have the whole block looking like Travis, and comes back to us in 2-4 years with a wisened POV à la Joni Mitchell coming back to ‘Both Sides Now’. From win and lose and still somehow, realise she didn’t really know the career ramifications of singing about Travis’ penis at all.
Which makes me think, can one bad album truly unsettle an entire empire? It’s one thing for me to admit the album is mid, but will the tide turn against Taylor forevermore?
AC: Seems like she’s going to be just fine. On the drive home from the Taylor Swift movie, I turned on the radio and More FM was playing ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ while ZM was blasting ‘Opalite’. Later that night I went out for dinner for a friend’s 40th and absolutely everyone was talking about the new Taylor Swift album. By the end of the day, the album had become Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in 2025, and ‘Ophelia’ the most-streamed song in a single day in Spotify history. Just yesterday, she released four new editions of The Life of a Showgirl CD with different acoustic tracks scattered across each, as well as a limited edition sparkly cardigan boxset thing which sold out instantly.
In the words of Swift herself, this empire belongs to her.