Taylor Swift is newly married, nearing 40 and a billionaire—an artist who appears to have conquered nearly every corner of modern celebrity. Yet on her latest release, she still sounds trapped in the emotional world of a high school cafeteria.
Her 16-track album, The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, arrived Friday with just four genuinely new songs. The remaining tracks are recycled from her 12th studio album.
Consider “Cleveland!”, which begins with a roll call of imagined put-downs. Swift sings that she is no longer as attractive as she once was—or perhaps never was attractive at all—that she is not a “girls’ girl,” dresses poorly despite her wealth and cannot dance.
“She’s not as hot as she was,” she sings.
Then comes the question: “Why’s she dressed like trash?”
The answer arrives as a supposed triumph: “But my baby likes what he likes.”
Newly married, nearing 40 and a billionaire, Taylor Swift has seemingly mastered almost every aspect of celebrity
“Cleveland!” opens with a catalogue of imagined insults (Pictured: Screengrab from the “Cleveland!” music video)
Good Lord.
“Pink Clouding” hints at a more mature subject—the remorse that follows hurting an ex—but the idea is buried beneath chirpy vocals and relentlessly sugary production. The meaning is difficult to hear through all the confectionery noise.
There are “Pr-pr-promises,” tiny “Pink, ha-ha-ha” asides and the line, “Met the magenta sunrise / Fuchsia forever intertwined.”
The emotion may be adult. The presentation is anything but.
Swift’s new material is not a disaster. Its problem is more frustrating: it is painfully ordinary. The songs are glossy, lavishly produced and technically assured, yet they leave little impression once they are over.
Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder and famously devoted Swiftie, offered a restrained verdict: “Overall decent. No smash hits.”
For an artist of Swift’s stature, “decent” ought to be a starting point, not a conclusion. With roughly 101 million monthly Spotify listeners and almost limitless creative freedom, she has the opportunity—and arguably the artistic responsibility—to push herself beyond music that is merely serviceable, predictable and formulaic.
It seems fame has done more than shield Swift from ordinary life. It may also have kept her emotionally stuck in childhood.
There is something faintly Baby Jane about these songs—not because Swift is fading, obviously, but because she appears unwilling to leave behind the character that first made her famous: the misunderstood girl, the unfaithful boyfriend, the cruel popular girl, the betrayal and the carefully delivered revenge.
On 2008’s Fearless, Swift imagined a Romeo and Juliet romance in “Love Story” while presenting herself in “You Belong With Me” as the overlooked outsider.
“She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers,” she sang.
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Should Taylor Swift evolve her music to reflect her age and life experiences?
Swift’s latest 16-track album The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, released on Friday, features only four new offerings
Author, Link Lauren
Well, the girl from the bleachers got the jock. Swift married Travis Kelce, the 6-foot-5 Kansas City Chiefs star.
The fantasy came true. Still, she won’t let it go.
Perhaps the problem is: Who, at this point, tells Taylor Swift no?
Even her mediocre albums sell. Her fans will buy the record, the vinyl, the alternate vinyl and the collector’s edition.
Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys once called her ‘a sort of Mrs Thatcher of pop music’ because of her fascination with the economics of the industry. A decade later, the comparison feels even more apt. Her business is formidable. Her art increasingly feels like product.
But Swift’s fans have aged too. Many of the girls who heard ‘Love Story’ in high school are now women with marriages, children, careers, divorces and mortgages. Perhaps they would like Swift to grow up alongside them. I won’t hold my breath.
This is frustrating because Swift has greatness in her. 1989 felt like genuine evolution: New York, adulthood, reinvention, an artist shedding one identity and moving confidently into another.
Michael Jackson famously named his home Neverland after Peter Pan’s kingdom, where children never grow up, yet even his music evolved dramatically from the Jackson 5 through Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous.
Swift married Travis Kelce, the 6-foot-5 Kansas City Chiefs star. The fantasy came true. Still, she won’t let it go
Swift’s problem isn’t lack of talent. It’s, perhaps, a fear of being forgotten.
She has effectively admitted as much. In Miss Americana, she said women in entertainment are ‘discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,’ as she argued that female artists must constantly reinvent themselves ‘or else you’re out of a job.’
That anxiety may explain the relentless output, but it doesn’t excuse the puerility.
Take a note from Adele: She disappears, lives, matures and comes back when she has something worth saying. She has written about motherhood, divorce, guilt and the pain of explaining a broken marriage to her son. Her album 30 could not have been made by the woman who recorded 21.
Swift has the opposite problem: oversaturation.
So, here’s some advice from a fan: Let us miss you. Leave Neverland and the high-school cafeteria. Then come back with something truly new.
