{"id":177887,"date":"2025-10-03T20:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T20:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/177887\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T20:07:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T20:07:07","slug":"taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-review-dull-razzle-dazzle-from-a-star-who-seems-frazzled-taylor-swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/177887\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl review \u2013 dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled | Taylor Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are albums for which vast success seems preordained, and then there is The Life of a Showgirl. The podcast on which Taylor Swift announced the release of her 12th studio album \u2013 her fiance Travis Kelce\u2019s ordinarily sports-focused New Heights \u2013 garnered half a billion views, breaking a record set by Donald Trump\u2019s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in the process. A \u201claunch event\u201d film, featuring the kind of lyric videos and backstage footage that anyone else would release on YouTube, is instead set for a theatrical release in more than 100 countries: in the US alone, it sold $15m worth of tickets<\/a> in 24 hours. The album itself has been pre-saved more than 5m times on Spotify,<\/a> breaking another record in the process. \u201cI\u2019m immortal now,\u201d Swift sings on the title track, which seems less like an extravagant boast than a statement of fact.<\/p>\n

Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl.<\/p>\n

The excitement has been amplified because a new Taylor Swift<\/a> album seemed unlikely. Even given her famously Stakhanovite work rate and her keen understanding of pop\u2019s constant churn and unceasing clamour for content, you might have expected her to take a break after the Eras tour, which lasted nearly two years. But no: not 10 months since it wrapped, here is she again, bearing a new album trumpeted as an artistic handbrake turn.<\/p>\n

In contrast to last year\u2019s The Tortured Poets Department<\/a> \u2013 which by the time she\u2019d finished releasing expanded editions and bonus tracks, was nearly two and half hours long \u2013 it offers a crisp 12 songs in 40 minutes. Her recent collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner are nowhere to be seen. Swift made The Life of a Showgirl in between Eras dates with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish duo who co-wrote and produced her most forthright pop bangers of the 2010s: Shake It Off, Blank Space, Don\u2019t Blame Me, Bad Blood.<\/p>\n

But anyone anticipating something similar from Showgirl is in for a shock: the fizzing electronic pop of Reputation and 1989 is conspicuously absent. Instead, its primary currency is breezy, easy-on-the-ear soft rock: acoustic guitars, misty synth tones, subtle orchestrations and breathy backing vocals. Wood\u2019s laid-back take on disco recalls not the sweaty hedonism of the dancefloor but the late 70s moment where four-to-floor rhythms and chicken-scratch guitar temporarily invaded the oeuvres of west coast singer-songwriters.<\/p>\n

More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There\u2019s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift\u2019s claims of \u201ckeeping the bar really high<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The lyrics \u2013 supposedly inspired by her life on and off-stage on the Eras tour \u2013 occasionally do the stuff one expects a Taylor Swift album to do. Actually Romantic eviscerates a nameless pop rival, dropping enough clues along the way that anyone can work out it\u2019s a response to Charli xcx\u2019s Brat song Sympathy Is a Knife. Cancelled! deals with the Kim-and-Kanye-adjacent controversies that beset Swift in 2015 and 2016, and Father Figure concerns former label boss Scott Borchetta, both in needless-to-say-I-had-the-last-laugh style. There are some spiky lines here and there \u2013 \u201cyou made a deal with this devil \/ turns out my dick\u2019s bigger\u201d snaps Father Figure \u2013 but they don\u2019t really click. Perhaps that\u2019s because Cancelled! and Father Figure revisit very well-trodden ground, while eviscerating a rival when you\u2019re the world\u2019s most successful pop star is, by default, punching down, even if she did apparently call you \u201cboring Barbie\u201d behind your back.<\/p>\n

But the album\u2019s real lyrical thrust is Swift\u2019s relationship with Kelce, which turns out to be very much a mixed blessing. You could claim that Wi$h Li$t\u2019s dreams of suburban domestic contentment reflect Swift growing older alongside her audience \u2013 the high school kids who heard their daily lives reflected in Love Story or Fifteen are now well into their 30s and may also be reflecting on the possibility of \u201ctwo kids\u201d and \u201ca driveway with a basketball hoop\u201d. But despite her estimated personal fortune of $1.6bn she declares herself uninterested in success and materialism \u2013 \u201cthat yacht life under chopper blades \u2026 those bright lights and Balenci\u2019 shades\u201d \u2013 which rings a bit hollow when, minutes previously, she was likening the distinctly five-star circumstances of her fiance\u2019s courtship to the love life of Elizabeth Taylor; dropping in references to the Plaza Ath\u00e9n\u00e9e, a Paris hotel where the cheapest room will set you back \u00a32,000 a night; and singing of getting \u201cthe best booth\u201d at fabled Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Wood, a song that, metaphorically speaking, drunkenly clambers on a table in a Wetherspoons pub with a skew-whiff bridal veil on its head and an L-plate around its neck and favours everyone in earshot with a loud paean to the size of her fiance\u2019s penis, which it variously describes as his \u201cmagic wand\u201d, his \u201credwood tree\u201d and his \u201chard rock\u201d (there is also a regrettable degree of punning on the word \u201ccocky\u201d). Of course, Swift is perfectly entitled to write about whatever she wants, TMI or not, but there\u2019s no escaping the fact that comparing her partner\u2019s knob to a magic wand constitutes weak writing from someone who made her name, at least in part, by being a sharper, wittier, more incisive lyricist than her peers.<\/p>\n

In fairness, Wood is one clanging misstep on an album that isn\u2019t terrible: it\u2019s just nowhere near as good as it should be given Swift\u2019s talents, and it leaves you wondering why. Perhaps romantic contentment simply writes whiter than vengeful post-breakup bitterness, or perhaps it wobbles your judgment. Perhaps it was rushed. Or perhaps its author was just exhausted, which would be entirely understandable. Even the immortal, it seems, sometimes need to take a break from pop\u2019s constant churn and unceasing clamour for content.<\/p>\n

This week Alexis listened to<\/p>\n

Mildred \u2013 Green Car
A beautiful song that might have been designed for autumn: slow-paced, it gradually washes over you, infused with a weary sadness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are albums for which vast success seems preordained, and then there is The Life of a Showgirl.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-177887","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}