The biggest album of the year – that much can be assumed by default – deals with Taylor Swift’s life on her record-breaking Eras tour. The 21-month global jaunt became not just the first $1bn tour but the first $2bn tour. Meanwhile, she found love with the American football player Travis Kelce, who proposed to her this summer.
The album going behind the scenes of it all, The Life of a Showgirl, promised glamour and glitter. But Swift’s 12th record made its way into the world on Friday morning in the rather less ritzy environs of British breakfast radio, a surprisingly low-key debut, and more surprising still given Swift’s resistance to doing interviews in recent years.
Part of that, she told Hits Radio, was that it was difficult to talk about her previous album, last year’s The Tortured Poets Department. By the time it came out, the turmoil it documented – a brief fling with Matty Healy, frontman of the 1975 – had long since passed. “I was at a completely different point in my life,” Swift said.
With The Life of a Showgirl, she continued, “the coolest part is that it is absolutely the place that I still am in my life” – namely in love with Kelce, whose virtues she seemed equally keen to impress on the public on Friday morning as the merits of her new album. “He’s the most fun person,” she told Hits Radio. “The life of any party, even when it’s just us.”
The newly engaged couple’s love affair is the inspiration behind much of the record. The song Wi$h Li$t, which Swift repeatedly said was her favourite new song, and the last to be completed, details her dreams of “a couple kids … a driveway with a basketball hoop” with Kelce. “We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do, wow,” she sings.
That said, their relationship has been a reasonably public affair. Having failed to meet Swift backstage on an Eras tour date, Kelce said on his podcast New Heights, which he presents with his older brother Jason, that he wanted to date her. Intrigued, she took him up on it, Swift revealed when she made her podcast debut on the show in August, bringing the story full circle.
Swift told BBC Radio 1’s Greg James she had worried about what being in love would do to her creativity. “What if writing is directly tied to my torment and pain?” she said. Fortunately, she said, the process was more akin to “capturing lightning in a bottle”.
She also told James she had no plans to tour the record, which arrives just 10 months after the Eras tour concluded.
As well as showing the various radio hosts her massive engagement ring – and sharing a sweet interaction with Heart’s Emma Bunton about what Swift learned from the Spice Girls’ fan engagement as a kid – Swift also revealed new details about the album’s creation.
Fans already knew she wrote and recorded Showgirl in Stockholm with the producer/songwriters Max Martin and Shellback between dates on the European run of the Eras tour in spring 2024. She told Heart that in part it was to keep her brain active when the tour was running like clockwork.
“I was getting sick a lot, I was always physically sore, but I had reached the point in the show where I could do it muscle memory, so I needed something to wake my brain back up,” she said.
“It felt like I was so physically exhausted from the shows but being mentally and emotionally stimulated by making this music got me to the point where I was so excited to step back onstage because I knew there was this secret project I was working on.”
She also revealed some hidden references. The song Opalite, she told Capital FM, references Kelce’s birthstone, opal. Swift was also taken by the fact that the stone is human-made: “Happiness can also be man-made,” she said.
She told James that the lyric “keep it 100 on the land, the sea, the sky” on the opening track, The Fate of Ophelia, was the latest extension of her famous taste for numerology: the total of her favourite number, 13, and Kelce’s jersey number, 87.
Fans cracked other codes behind the record. The disco song Wood is a fairly explicit song in which Swift likens her fiance’s penis to, among other things, a redwood tree. Internet sleuths worked out that it appeared to draw from a 2021 meme about Swifties’ prudish reactions to her peer Ariana Grande’s more straightforward libidinal lyricism: “Swifties when Ariana sings about sex and doesn’t write it like ‘he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.’”
If she has been surveying the memes, it would slightly counter Swift’s claims that she isn’t very online, made both in the song Eldest Daughter, which laments internet snark and apathy, and to Hits Radio. She told the station she maintained “a real priority on being peaceful and happy all the time”, which meant deleting social media apps on her phone to focus on hobbies such as baking.
The Life of a Showgirl has received mixed reviews from critics. Rolling Stone rated it five stars, the Guardian two and the Standard one. Many fans posted about their adoration, and how moved they were by Swift’s songs about finding true love. Disappointed listeners rued having preordered five different physical variants of the record without hearing a note, or questioned the wisdom of writing a diss song about Charli xcx.
If Swift had taken notice of the mixed reception, she betrayed no sign of it in her cheerful appearances at the outset of a busy weekend. On Friday night she will appear on Graham Norton’s BBC chatshow (filmed on Thursday) and The Official Release Party of a Showgirl will begin showing in cinemas worldwide, premiering her self-directed video for The Fate of Ophelia alongside other behind-the-scenes footage and lyric videos.
