*fries flung everywhere* "Different PLACES!" -- Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl

Due later this year, more soon, etc. etc.

https://variety.com/2025/music/news/taylor-swift-announces-album-the-life-of-a-showgirl-1236487135/

https://i.imgur.com/b6CQLfH.png

1. The Fate of Ophelia
2. Elizabeth Taylor
3. Opalite
4. Father Figure
5. Eldest(?) Daughter
6. Ruin the Friendship
7. Actually Romantic
8. Wi$h Li$t
9. Wood
10. CANCELLED!
11. Honey
12. The Life of a Showgirl

this is the apparently leaked tracklist

looks like a redditor might have gotten their wish from 2 years ago?

Anyone think an Ophelia (Hamlet) related Taylor Swift song would be a great idea?

Rhyming "Ophelia" with "I feel ya" would be a great rhyme, especially with the thematic similarities between this character and some experiences seen in Taylor Swift songs

Found that because i could've sworn TS already had a song about Ophelia. Guess it was inevitable.

Looking forward to the late-period Swift album where she's "just like Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf."

Those titles sound like they were created by an LLM trained on Taylor Swift songs.

apparently this marks her return to max martin and shellback as collaborators. *struggles to be optimistic* idk maybe it'll be good?

maybe that means this one will have some melodies

pre-covers?

someone please explain *fries flung everywhere*

someone please explain *fries flung everywhere*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikTo9F5wHAs

Eldest(?) Daughter

I really hope this is the title

tracklist reads like a Lana Del Rey fan-fic

pre-covers?

We've never repeated an artist, but I admit the temptation. (Then again after the effort that went into One More Tune I almost want to give things a little space first.)

Just release the last one again and change the track titles.

Roffle.

There's probably a 50/50 chance "Wood" was written after watching "Ed Wood"

Opalite- another installment in the shiny, sparkly things series?

There's probably a 50/50 chance "Wood" was written after watching "Ed Wood"

A tribute to late singer of Mother Love Bone

or an answer song to "Would?"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/The_Life_of_a_Showgirl_-_Taylor_Swift_album_artwork.png

Plus alternates:
https://preview.redd.it/taylor-swift-has-unveiled-alternate-covers-for-the-life-of-v0-bnytode6nvif1.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=520ec5de82701203d009f5ca4c7175b2d6ce897e

https://preview.redd.it/taylor-swift-has-unveiled-alternate-covers-for-the-life-of-v0-yfesgbl6nvif1.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=75d062cb17f1daa33f1a32a05c68b33753c2f202

https://preview.redd.it/taylor-swift-has-unveiled-alternate-covers-for-the-life-of-v0-7xl2d1r6nvif1.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=14434c90c065e17a2c4f0f68221da0ddec4b7a3a

On the podcast, Swift explained, “This represents the end of my night. So when I’m on tour, I have the same day every single day. ... And my day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress.”

She continued, “I wanted to sort of like glamorize all the different aspects of how that tour felt. And that’s how that felt to like be at the end of the night when all this has gone down. You won’t be able to get to bed till four in the morning after this. But you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show. And you did it. You got two more in a row. But you did it tonight.

“And the reason I wanted to have sort of like an offstage moment as the main album cover is because this album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage. It’s about what I was going through offstage. So I didn’t want to have like the lights are bright, I’m on the stage is the main album cover. It’s just this. This, to me, tells more of what the actual content, lyrically, of the album are.”

graphic design is my passion

lol

every alternate cover is better than the standard one

I wish there was a fifth one with her just sitting on the couch in her jammies watching TV.

*updates tealandorange.xls*

apparently this marks her return to max martin and shellback as collaborators. *struggles to be optimistic* idk maybe it'll be good?

― ivy., Tuesday, August 12, 2025 9:48 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Weren't we all complaining about Antonoff six months ago? Would be nice for her to go a different direction entirely, but I won't be mad if this sounds anything like Reputation.

i for one was not complaining about antonoff

i mean i do love reputation, it's just that her martin/shellback era coincides with her worst lyricism, and i think (to the staggered disbelief of many ppl here) the lyrics were one of ttpd's major strengths, particularly the "observing myself/my fame through a hall of mirrors" quality of "clara bow"

TTPD is the only Swift album I haven't played since the week after its release, so I'm looking forward to this.

i do love the recurring phenomenon of reading a leaked taylor swift tracklist and thinking "these are the worst song titles i've ever seen" and they're all real

I think these are going to be love songs written about her Masters.

Was hoping for a Fifteen sequel called Thirty-Five about how she went ahead and conquered the world and then got around to dating the boy on the football team.

I'm dreading hearing a song titled "CANCELLED!" for some reason

for some reason?

i appreciate her hitting pause on the dynamic she created where each release is her backing up a cement truck and burying the listener in a deluge of music. i barely gave TTPD a real listen because i just became alienated by the sheer amount of music she has released in the last five years, i lost my ability to have an entry point to her as a person and celebrity and thus to her music. she became more of a cult leader to me than an artist, so the framing of "these are 12 pop songs and there is nothing else" is like letting air into a stifling hot room, personally speaking

however, max martin isn't a producer who has ever helmed a great (or even good?) front to back album. just not his thing. ariana grande just did this and made her worst album, just a completely bland vision for what a break up album should be. so that aspect of it i'm like, idk girl. reputation has some stinkers that are somewhat buoyed by antonoff's contributions (tho some of his also stink... ok who is the common denominator... wait...)

i appreciate her hitting pause on the dynamic she created where each release is her backing up a cement truck and burying the listener in a deluge of music

girl, it's not even out yet, who knows what bonus tracks we're getting

midnights was 13 tracks 44 minutes!!! just a recent example

we're the old romantics

I'm dreading hearing a song titled "CANCELLED!" for some reason

It'll just be a skit with an old Scooter Braun voicemail.

girl, it's not even out yet, who knows what bonus tracks we're getting

― ivy., Thursday, August 14, 2025 12:04 PM (seven minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

midnights was 13 tracks 44 minutes!!! just a recent example

― ivy., Thursday, August 14, 2025 12:07 PM (five minutes ago)

am i hallucinating that she said there would be no bonus tracks? i thought she said that on the podcast (which i did not listen to). midnights has (at least?) three different deluxe editions w/ bonus tracks totaling like 25+ originals, so if that happens w/ this one then feel free to strike my statement from the record

There will be no bonus tracks because she'll release two more records next year.

And then she'll tour with King Gizzard.

It seems unlikely she's not going release different versions using all of those alternate album covers

oh yeah i did not listen to that podcast either. and won't be

xxxpost

"This new album is called 'Mornings of a Black Rose.' It's about how I wake up and eat breakfast and then get my make-up done."

It seems unlikely she's not going release different versions using all of those alternate album covers

― New Jack Cutie (President Keyes), Thursday, August 14, 2025 12:44 PM (thirty-seven seconds ago)

well, she's already selling "limited edition deluxe CDs" of each different cover but if you go on her store and look what the deluxe CDs contain, it's a bunch of extra musical shit but says nothing about new or extra tracks

the quote that i'm referencing is this. it seems pretty definitive but maybe there will be some rug pull, idk

“There’s no other songs coming,” she emphasized. “This is 12. There’s not a 13th … there’s not other songs coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time.”

Hard to believe this is likely to be her third best-selling album ever, at least according to that chart.

I put it on yesterday for the first time since my initial listen, specifically looking for bright spots I might have missed. Regret to inform that my impression remained the same. There are some pretty good songs, a lot of bad ones, and I really do feel like her writing standards slipped on this one. Someone was comparing this to Speak Now upthread, on the ground that that album also had some waspy stinger, but Speak Now has some of her best melodies and bridges, and also some of her best lyrics. There's nothing on the new one that gets close to the emotional nuance of "Back to December," "Never Grow Up" or "Last Kiss." Even the Kanye song makes room for empathy.

I don't think she was a wiser person at 20 than she is at 35, but I do think she was a much more careful and thoughtful artist in the making of that album than this one.

That distinction is OTM.

People keep framing their critiques around what this album tells us about TS as a person. The real issue is what it tells us about her a songwriter.

She's entered that sacred place inhabited by multimillionaires like Ye, Jagger, Drake, you name'em, where writing about relationships has the distanced quality of a subtitled film and/or writing about their fame and its discontents is what comes most naturally. Even the songs putatively based on experience on Fearless, Speak Now, and Red had the precision of fiction, graced by melodies that sharpened the lyrical details. Since 2022 (for me) her talent for good melodies and lyrics has ebbed, and without those talents she turns to objects of scorn to excite her. I mean, jeez, even Dylan got less mean-spirited as he got older.

I dunno, I think she wrote with precision and grace on the best songs of TTPD (people’s issues with that album seems to come down to the saminess of Antonoff’s production and the sheer length of it). Songs like “But Daddy I Love Him”, “Guilty as Sin”, “I Can Do It With A Briken Heart” (one of her funniest self-jabs, almost as good as “Long Story Short”) and “Clara Bow” managed the rare feat of being both explicitly rooted in her personal experience and effortlessly transcending the limitations of that experience through craft and acuity.

*broken. Writing on my phone here

But look, my views are obviously distorted by thinking that at her best TS is one of the best songwriters we have, and I find myself becoming unduly impatient with critics, fans and Taylor herself when any of them adopt a different frame for considering her work.

Good posts -- thanks for elevating the discussion -- and the four best songs on TTPD by a long shot.

I dunno, I think she wrote with precision and grace on the best songs of TTPD (people’s issues with that album seems to come down to the saminess of Antonoff’s production and the sheer length of it). Songs like “But Daddy I Love Him”, “Guilty as Sin”, “I Can Do It With A Briken Heart” (one of her funniest self-jabs, almost as good as “Long Story Short”) and “Clara Bow” managed the rare feat of being both explicitly rooted in her personal experience and effortlessly transcending the limitations of that experience through craft and acuity.

With an artist of her caliber the waning happens slowly.

I had assumed Taylor was on a wane path circa ‘Lover’ - still some great songs but a creeping sense that she both had to stretch harder to reach previous heights and also had less and less incentive to bother doing so.

The weaknesses of that album and this one are extremely similar (though I think more concentrated here) - so I’m reluctant to adopt any firm conclusions re overall career trajectory

She'll still write good songs -- the artists I mentioned (Kanye West excepted) still write the occasional keeper.

Wonder what was going on in 2021 that might have affected sales numbers of things

/2020

Haha yeah that was my immediate thought

Folklore in particular was crucial in setting up Taylor to seem like a world striding behemoth circa Midnights - its relatively lower sales in part reflect that by that point TS hadn’t had a proper hit since 1989 (which the later success of “Cruel Summer” obscures).

I guess there's no non-COVID counterfactual, but when I talk to Swifties about my love for Folklore/Evermore, they give me the side eye. I thought they were widely considered "down" albums. Doesn't she even say something about Evermore being the one her fans don't like in the Eras film?

i'm trying to think of how to properly articulate this but -- is taylor swift the biggest pop star of all time who has essentially never had a new vision for how pop music should sound? the biggest pop star of all time who will leave behind no sonic fingerprint?

This was a very interesting question, and it raised another question in my mind, which is: are Taylor Swift songs un-coverable? I mean, yeah, there was the Ryan Adams thing but that came off more petulant and look-at-me than respectful. Like, has she pushed the fictionalized-autobiography/personal-lore thing so far at this point that no one else can sing the songs without seeming insane?

xpost That’s weird. I thought Folklore/Evermore was a particularly beloved period. Just didn’t have big pop singles.

I thought it was more beloved too; wasn't aware of a backlash.

A lot of the fans love Folklore but dislike Evermore - in which the songwriting is (for the most part) even more (relatively) obtuse.

It is important, though, to always keep in mind that a lot of the fans are extremely stupid.

One very telling hot take I have seen on the new album was a viral Facebook post where the writer said something like "I got into Taylor with "Love Story". It broke at the same time as Kings of Leon's "Sex On Fire", and all the cool girls liked that song and poked fun at me for preferring "Love Story". I don't care. "Shake It Off" is my spiritual anthem. I'm so glad that Taylor has made a whole album for people like me which all the cool girls who jumped on board with Folklore and Evermore don't understand."

It is important, though, to always keep in mind that a lot of the fans are extremely stupid.

Wow, poptimism IS dead.

A lot of fans of any artist are extremely stupid. Hell is other people etc.

Trudat.

People like Coldplay and Nazis

This was a very interesting question, and it raised another question in my mind, which is: are Taylor Swift songs un-coverable? I mean, yeah, there was the Ryan Adams thing but that came off more petulant and look-at-me than respectful. Like, has she pushed the fictionalized-autobiography/personal-lore thing so far at this point that no one else can sing the songs without seeming insane?

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, October 8, 2025 4:19 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe different, but reminds me a bit of Neil Tennant's criticism of Swift that she doesn't have a "Billie Jean."

She does have story songs like ‘Getaway Car’ or ‘Style’ that don’t rely so much on being “about Taylor Swift.”

albeit the market is very small in comparison to other formats, but just learned that Taylor accounts for about a third of all new cassettes sold.

Hard to believe this is likely to be her third best-selling album ever, at least according to that chart.

that's the bent reality of equating streaming plays- might as well check out the new Taylor on the way to work- with actual sales.

so, I was on vacation when this album came out and didn't have a chance to actually listen to it until yesterday. i did, however, read a lot of the discourse, which had prepared me to dislike it. surprisingly, though, i find that I am connecting with it more than the last couple of albums on a purely musical level. and I am realizing that the discourse is getting in the way of my enjoyment of songs like "Actually Romantic" and "Wood" because knowing who they are about makes me feel more uncomfortable and ambivalent about them. yes, there are a bunch of clunky/cringy lyrics on this album that would be noticeable even if I didn't know all the metatextual stuff, but I can easily forgive that if the songs are catchy, which they mostly are.

that said, one of the standouts for me is "Ruin the Friendship," which feels more classically Swiftian in both structure and theme and which I found quite emotionally affecting while listening this afternoon. (a coincidence, perhaps, that Taylor's friend Abigail is mentioned both in that song and in "Fifteen," the first of her songs to really move me.)

If I was to attempt to answer the question “how has Taylor changed our sense of how pop music can sound” I would probably point to a song like “Fifteen”, but reframe the proposition as “how has Taylor changed our sense of what a pop song can do while remaining a pop song”.

Taylor isn’t the first pop star to truck in “confessional” songwriting and she’s not the first to signpost that confessional approach with lyrical specificity (Vanessa Carlton’s “White Houses” was a great example of an archetypal Taylor song avant la lettre in its combination of Fleetwood Mac and Billy Joel), but I think she may well be the first pop star to do it consistently across her career and to train such a broad swathe of listeners to approach her music applying that as a key frame for understanding what she is doing.

“Ruin The Friendship” is the album’s best song for the way in which (like much of her previous work, with “Fifteen” being a prime example), its specificity and universality do not exist in tension but reinforce one another.

Surprisingly, I've really come around on this album. My initial knee-jerk reaction was that it was terrible and her worst to date. I think I was bringing a lot of negative vibes into that first listen, mainly because I think I'm probably a bit exhausted with Taylor Swift and feel a lot anger of about some of her business and PR practices. On top of that, the first listen of a Taylor album is usually based around absorbing the lyrics, which I still don't think are particularly profound or interesting here (aside from a couple of small moments). But the album has been on high rotation at home this week (gf is a Taylor obsessive) and there's so many satisfying vocal and instrumental hooks from this thing that have been rattling around in my head all week. I think the return to Max Martin has been good for Taylor - there are so many little production and vocal melodies and flourishes that she just wasn't putting into her music as much when she was mainly working with Jack. Basically, it's just a fun, light, catchy pop album. I like it.

The one lyric I really like:
We lie back
A beautiful, beautiful time-lapse
Ferris wheels, kisses, and lilacs
And things I said were dumb
'Cause I thought that I'd never find that
Beautiful, beautiful life that
Shimmers that innocent light back
Like when we were young

How do you rate and consider "Marjorie" in this context? It'd make my top 5 Taylor songs and is one of the few that really moves me specifically because of who it's about and the words Taylor uses to eulogize her.

In case it isn't clear, I'd put "Marjorie" in the same category as "Ruin The Friendship" and "Fifteen" in this regard. The song works because the specificity with which the relationship is framed reinforces, rather than undercuts, its universality.

Nice, jaymc and triggercut, and +1 on finding "Ruin the Friendship" emotionally affecting -- only other songs in her catalogue that have ever made me misty eyed were "The Best Day" and "Marjorie" but the way she sings "When I left school, I lost track of you...goodbye" it's a gut punch; feels genuine and is very relatable. I like how she sings "My advice is always ruin the friendship" in the last chorus, too; not sure she's ever given direct advice (to younger fans?) like this in a lyric before.

I agree, Tim F.

Agreed that "Ruin the Friendship" is an obvious highlight (especially if you have a relatable set of regrets, which whomst among us ...)

Decided to write about this one after all. (All the songs I disliked the most on first listen are now stuck in my head, so mission accomplished, I guess she knows what she's doing.)

https://www.otherdavemoore.com/p/how-you-get-the-world-reflections-4f3

Greil Marcus:

1 Taylor Swift, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, AMC Theaters, Southdale, Edina, Minnesota (October 5). Her narration in this film on the songs from The Life of a Showgirl is interesting, especially when reasonable commentary doesn’t begin to enclose the anger in the songs. As the bile rose in “Father Figure,” “Actually Romantic,” and “Cancelled!” I thought, Lou Reed would like this music. He’d appreciate the way roles inside a song shift so that while no one may be innocent, some are more guilty than others: that, as on Reed’s New York, for a lot of people the exercise of cruelty, dominating the news of the world as well as enforcing the ordinary humiliations of any everyday transaction, is its own reward. He’d appreciate the wit in the way the person pushed to the side can see herself in every role in turn, like the person telling the story in “Positively 4th Street.” Part of the pleasure of this hour and a half is in seeing someone navigate a life, sometimes fictional, sometimes not, without, it can seem, missing a thing. A favorite moment, Swift on Shakespeare, delivered in a way that can make you think, hey, maybe I should check this out: “He really holds up.”...

This is funny because a friend posted earlier this week about the Halloween lineup he's part of, with one band doing Lou Reed and another doing Taylor Swift, and I suggested a set of Lou Reed doing Taylor Swift songs, like "Jackie wears short skirts / I wear t-shirts / Oh baby, oh baby" and he replied "We are never never NEVER oh yeah NEVER NEVER never getting back together."

Some great mashup potential there: "I'm Waiting for the Better Man"; "The Best Perfect Day"; "Coney Island (Baby)"

(Hey)I believe there's got to be some retribution
(Hey)I believe an eye for an eye is elemental
(Hey)I believe that something's wrong if she's alive right now

Decided to write about this one after all. (All the songs I disliked the most on first listen are now stuck in my head, so mission accomplished, I guess she knows what she's doing.)

https://www.otherdavemoore.com/p/how-you-get-the-world-reflections-4f3

― cr4bdbgs, Friday, October 10, 2025 10:52 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I very much enjoyed this essay. Thank you for writing and sharing it.

there's this one part of "life of ophelia" that sounds exactly like the sort of melody billy corgan was writing around the time of adore and i wish she'd commit to that more

Washington Post classical music critic (who also likes PJ Harvey and other non-classical music) isn't crazy about Taylor Swift voice memo demos that he listened to (on certain versions of the album and then some pulled I think)

The memos certainly highlight Swift’s lyrical tendencies in a wilder state: She pens lyrics the way I repack a suitcase at the airport when I’ve been told I’m over the weight limit — a hurried and haphazardly edited attempt to make everything fit where it does not.

They also seem to confirm a suspicion I’ve long had about Swift’s songs — that they often spring entirely from individual words or shiny phrases, the way an interior decorator might design a whole room around a statement lamp. One memo charting the progress of “The Fate of Ophelia” makes clear that Swift is far more attached to the sound of the title than the spirit of the character.

More than anything — and perhaps this is why these memos feel like a letdown — there’s nothing surprising to be found behind this curtain. The life of “The Life of a Showgirl” sure sounds like business as usual at the Swift mill. Each memo seems to tell a story about filling in a predetermined shape with stray ideas and lightly tweaked clichés. Sometimes the recordings expose the songs as little more than syllabic puzzles or unfinished pictures in a coloring book.

In this way, the demo-memos reveal less about Swift’s process than her product — a brand of pop that has a lot more to do with formulas than chemistry. The next time Swift decides to take us behind the scenes, I hope she’s also willing to take us below the surface.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2025/10/17/taylor-swift-life-showgirl-voice-memos-outtakes/

unfrozen caveman classical music critic discovers songwriting

LOL

I mean lol here is a good extremely recent omar little post about John Woo that’s probably closer to realistic quote about how great art is made?

“this sort of go for broke creativity and utilizing everything available to you, and finding a way to incorporate every idea that's possessed you into the story narrative.”

Thx Indexed!

Taylor Swift does use formulas -- but they're for her melodies, not her writing, and they seem pretty intuitive as "formulas" go. You'd think the classical music guy would have at least figured out that "Fate of Ophelia" has Dorian verses so that she can stay in the same scale the whole time. (Is that the part like Smashing Pumpkins? Where she sings "if you ever called for me" in the pre-chorus.)

Also not sure why everyone wants to find a "curtain" for the most What You See Is What You Get superstar of all time.

It was quite interesting to be able to avoid this until now and watch the initial reactions.

Anyway, definitely not top tier Taylor and probably would land in the lower half of my rankings. But this isn't the trainwreck I expected. If she just had to put out one so soon after the tour, at least this is slight (though unfortunately that also extends to the pretty weak lyrics). I like that it's not Antonoff and, as others upthread have mentioned, the bass on here is pretty good!

Keepers - "Ophelia", "Elizabeth Taylor", "Opalite" (clearly the opening run had my hopes higher!), "Honey" (it and "Opalite" are by far the highlights), I also hear some Thompson Twins in "Opalite" and it's a banger even with all the bites of older songs

Meh to decent - "Eldest Daughter", "Ruin the Friendship" (I actually don't hate the high school era Taylor vibe), "Actually Romantic", "Wishlist", "Showgirl"

Terrible - "Father Figure", "Wood" (she just can't pull off Sabrina dirty), "Cancelled"

https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/

It's this kind of thing that makes me hate the Billboard rules these days. The top 14 is just every song from the TS album plus two other songs.

Are the other two Morgan Wallen?

K-Pop Demon Hunters and Alex Warren