Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, has received more than five million “pre-saves” on Spotify, making it the most in-demand new album of the streaming era. So let’s get the basics over first. It is a fine album – a witty, literate, mellifluous collection of overwhelmingly romantic singer-songwriter-style pop songs about the triumph of love, almost certainly spelled L-U-R-V-E. But for all its sophistication, Showgirl showcases Swift at her least dramatically intense.
Swift, 35, is newly engaged to her American football star boyfriend Travis Kelce, and she wants everyone to know it, tossing out images of her beau “dancing through the lightning strikes” (Opalite) to rescue her from “the melancholy” (The Fate of Ophelia), breaking her spinster curse with his “magic wand” (Wood), wrapping around her like “a chain, a crown, a vine” in a world of super-rich brand name luxury (Elizabeth Taylor).
It is not for the cynical, but before you can say “pass the sick bag”, its 12 songs are all perfectly formed, smoothly sung and sweetly delivered in pastel musical shades, elegant melodies perked up by clever turns of phrase, with a tang of spikiness and raunch occasionally breaking through to remind us Swift is a 21st-century woman and not a superannuated Disney princess.
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Parents of young Swifties might be alert to Father Figure, one of the album’s four interesting outliers (which bears only a tangential relationship to George Michael’s far superior song of the same name), on which she takes on the character of a sinister Svengali and boasts “I can make deals with the devil / Cause my d—’s bigger” – not something I ever thought I’d hear Swift sing.
On the tart pop punk of Actually Romantic, she sarcastically puts someone down who we can guess is probably fellow pop star Charli XCX. Swift claims the song’s subject calls her “boring Barbie” when made brave from drug use, then gleefully proclaims the insult “Adorable / Like a toy Chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts”.
On the boldest song, CANCELLED!, Swift delivers her smartest satirical lyrics, cautioning her showbiz peers to “beware the wrath of masked crusaders”, and identifying herself with the “cancelled” because “we’re the ones with matching scars”.
The closing title track, a duet with fellow pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter, is a witty portrait of the against-the-odds rise of a hard-working showgirl (“sequins are forever”) that aspires to the epic but could really do with a dash of Queen-style panache to rise above the level of Broadway pastiche.
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Indeed, that’s what I feel about the whole production. Showgirl was written and recorded during Swift’s world conquering Eras tour, in sessions with Swedish super producers Max Martin (who worked with Swift on her poppiest albums, 1989 and Reputation) and his colleague Karl Johan Schuster (AKA Shellback). So I am surprised at how lacking in earworm hooks and edgy pop flourishes it is. Built around pianos and acoustic guitars, with lots of strings and harmonious backing vocals, it feels sleek but self-contained, akin to a Carole King album glossed up for modern listeners.
The overwhelming emotional mood is relief. It pervades the songs, a self-soothing blanket of gratitude that she has been rescued from solitude by a man characterised with all the depth of a cartoon fairy tale Prince Charming.
After 13 very public romances and 11 albums about her turbulent love life, Showgirl represents 35-year-old Swift’s happy ending. It is a long way from her persona as a modern everywoman, forensically dissecting the affairs of her battered heart. No one could begrudge her happiness, but Swift’s new album has all the bite, realism and piercing psychological acuity of a Barbara Cartland fever dream.
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