Knock, knock. Taylor Swift is serving BDE on her new track “Wood.” You could call it “big dance energy.”
The singer turns superstitions — stepping on a crack, watching a black cat walk in front of you — and flips them into sexual celebration in her funky and playful song sure to get the grandparents blushing. Heck, anyone blushing.
“Taylor knows what she’s doing,” says Stephanie Burt, a Harvard University professor who has taught a Taylor Swift English class. Burt authored a book, out Oct. 7, on Swift’s “poetic and musical genius.” Burt dissects every era and ties the albums to work by literary greats.
“She would have grown up listening to raunchy men in country and rock describing the appetizing parts of women they were attracted to, and that can be done in a way that is complicit with depression or in a way that is sex positive,” Burt said. “ Women have grown up thinking that they shouldn’t talk about sexual pleasure, and it would be great for more people to talk about how our bodies feel and about sexual pleasure. Especially a woman in her mid 30s, who is going to get married soon. I think that’s cool.”
The song is clearly about Swift’s fiancé, Travis Kelce, with mentions of his podcast “New Heights” and getting a “hard rock,” presumably her engagement ring.
Swift waited until her sixth album to release her first explicit track, “I Did Something Bad,” which included curse words. That same album, “Reputation,” included the provocative track “Dress,” about buying a garment so a lover could take it off. She’s only used the phallic term d— once before, on her “Midnight” track “Question…?” On her new album “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift uses it again in “Father Figure.”
Swift’s turns superstitions on their head in “Wood” with the line: “Seems to me that / you and me, we / make our own luck,” before rounding out the bumping beat with “his love was the key that opened my thighs.”
“This topic is also super racialized, because it is not new for female rappers and female R&B artists to describe sex,” Burt said. “It sounds like Swift is trying to embody joy, undo the desexualization and avoid the idea that you have to be a child forever.”
It’s a vibe that has extended to the album art and promotional photos for her new era, with Swift revealing more skin than ever before. The singer who once said she didn’t like revealing her belly button seems to have left that philosophy on the dressing room floor.
As for the track’s size, “Wood” is the shortest “Showgirl” song at 2:30.
‘And baby, that’s show business’
If Swift turned heartbreak into “The Tortured Poets Department,” she’s turning the spotlight on glamour, glitz and full-on showbiz for her 12th era, “The Life of a Showgirl.” The pop superstar dropped the album announcement on Aug. 13 while on Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast, surprising fans as her website simultaneously updated with a sparkling cover image of her submerged in bathwater donning a bedazzled corset.
“My day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress,” Swift told Jason Kelce during the podcast on the inspiration behind her opulent and vivacious era. “I wanted to glamorize all the different aspects of how (the Eras Tour) felt.”
Blistered heels and sore joints from her three hour concert didn’t slow her down as she flew in and out of Sweden between European stops to collaborate with longtime producers Max Martin and Shellback on the 12 tracks. The trio worked together on her “1989” and “Reputation” albums along with some “Red” songs.
Travis couldn’t hide his excitement on the podcast.
“That’s a banger,” he said of “Cancelled!,” later adding that the entire album is filled with “banger after banger.”
The other 11 tracks are “The Fate of Ophelia,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” “Opalite,” “Father Figure,” “Eldest Daughter,” “Ruin the Friendship,” “Actually Romantic,” “Wi$h Li$T,” “Wood,” “Honey” and the title track.
“This album is going to make you dance,” Travis told Jason. Swift described her fiancé as a “human exclamation point.”
“The Life of a Showgirl” is Swift’s first chapter since she bought her masters. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me,” she said in a letter posted to her website after fully acquiring her catalog from Shamrock Capital in May.
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