*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.”

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

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/nov/15/taylor-swift-silence-trump-administration-speaks-volumes

Trump administration has used Swift music from Showgirl in 3 recent social media posts yet “ Swift, however, has said nothing in public. The silence is surprising from an artist known to be litigious over unsanctioned use of her music or likeness”

Rolling Stone on Operation Nazi Tradwife:

What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.

That’s according to new research from GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks how such reputation-damaging claims emerge and go viral on the internet. In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

Once the provocations were injected into the Swift discourse — often they appeared in edgier online forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before migrating to popular social apps — they were organically sustained by the people challenging them on mainstream platforms. This, in turn, algorithmically reinforced their visibility. “The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West,” the researchers wrote. “This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJXikN_4wA

she should make an album that sounds like this

It's ok? It has that Raye thing for me, it sounds like it's in a rush to finish and the balances are off.

has she used horns before?

One of the guests at her wedding being the executive director of a company with a multibillion dollar ICE contract isn’t gonna help make me a fan

She doesn't need defending, but I saw this:

The reason why Steven J. Demetriou was invited to the wedding was because he is Reggie King’s father. Reggie basically grew up with Travis and is one of his closest childhood friends. Steven adopted Reggie when he was 14 years old.

Brad Pitt was there too, as in, celebrity wife-abuser Brad Pitt

Unclear why Mike Vrabel was there. I assumed some football connection but it doesn't seem like there's any known crossover between him and Kelce. Speculation that it's from his time coaching the Titans in Nashville, so he knows Swift somehow? Anyway, an awkward outing for him.

The guest list seems to comprise a large percentage of ppl Kelce has met shaken hands w once & said “you should come to my wedding” or dudes he’s met who’s kids are Swifties. plus (and for the record I cannot stand him)- he sounds like he is just terminally hospitable. like, invites the opposing team’s trainer’s family for dinner & goes to the supermarket checker’s daughter’s christening.
Like he’s constantly running for mayor.

I guess I just don't understand why you rent an arena that can hold 20,000 people and then only invite 1000.

mr burns 'i like to put my feet up' dot jpg

Yeah it’s all really weird & gaudy. seems like a wedding that doubled as a networking event

Taylor spent most of the last four years in 70,000-plus arenas, MSG registers as small and intimate to her at this point.

same for trav!

ten years ago I'd have gleefully defended Swift as a popstar and a public figure. All the lazy assumptions about her being a Republican and conservative were based in her being from a country music background, and I'd have happily pointed out that her music and lyrics suggested a personal politics that, even at their clumsiest, still supported women's rights and sexual freedom. Of course it was very Yassified GirlBoss but it was still good to see the biggest contemporary popstar use their platform to do things like a lead single that was a riposte to homophobic bigots (and that song is a terrible song but for other reasons).

I've pretty much jumped off the Swift bus at this stage. It isn't just that the last album was terrible, or that the Eras tour show I attended was one of the most boring, disappointing, unimaginative wastes of money I've ever seen. It's that the public persona of Swift 2026 is so unlikeable. It doesn't really matter if she is privately MAGA or not - personally I think she probably just loves money and breaking records more than any political or social beliefs - the fact she's built a career on being likeable and relatable and then chosen to release and record songs about liking her friends #cancelled and inviting ICE officials and domestic abusers to her wedding, it just makes everything prior seem so disingenuous and insincere.

it's incredibly easy to not invite the parents of your friend to your wedding, even if your friend is coming, ime

can't wait until her song about inviting the ED of a company with an ICE contract to her wedding comes out

I don’t think they gave a second thought about how any rich person at their wedding made their money. When you’re a billionaire you hang with criminals.

Do you think she made her surprised face when Travis said "I do"?

I think maybe Travis broke a one-wish-willow and said "Make Taylor Swift love me more than anyone else in the world" and this is the fallout. Explains how a pop star who was always so savvy about how she was perceived became so blatantly coded as a rich out of touch asshole overnight. And the awful album.

I saw someone on Bluesky note that she picked July 3rd as her wedding day specifically so the inevitable divorce record can be called "Independence Day".

she sucks so much and is an easy contender for worst pop superstar of all time. it was heartening to see zero votes for her in the nyt songwriter poll here in that even this place, despite its inordinate early role in bolstering her critical #reputation that by now is so obviously overblown (i wonder if lex loses sleep over it), can see the reality of her talent in this area

I personally have had total ambivalence about her for most of her career and probably considered her “not bad”, but I suppose this wedding bs and being worn down by her boring music and my son making a lot of compelling anti-TS arguments has sent me over the edge.

ooh what are your son's arguments?

i think he just generally finds her music really, really dull and without much to hang onto, he just finds nothing melodically interesting, he'll explain all this to me in terms that w/my limited understanding of music on a technical level are all over my head, but he composes his own music and gets really precise about these things. i tried to explain what her appeal might be, beyond the music itself, and how i thought her "Taylor's Version" stuff was really unprecedented and interesting and i think he thought that was all insane.

i worry sometimes i've raised a Hongro, but he really digs rap and techno and music from Africa and the middle east and atonal weird music, so i don't think that's the case...

your son is rick beato????

my daughter and her friends (14-15 year olds) don't seem to be much interested in her, probably a Gen Z/millennial divide thing

Divide probably should have happened earlier tbh

my poor son catching strays!

Beato has celebrated Swift's brilliant decision to re-record her catalog in order to regain control of her masters. He famously collaborated with legal expert Devin Stone (Legal Eagle) to analyze the brilliant legal and business maneuvering behind her "Taylor's Version" project.

Beato probably into TS more than omar jr. though.

Beato from what I can tell is a lot more positive on stuff than people assume, just in general