I am a self-proclaimed “Swiftie”— a fan of all things Taylor Swift. She’s consistently my number one artist on Spotify and was quoted in my high school graduation speech. When I heard the news she was engaged, I blurted it out to the first person I saw (the Marshall’s cashier). I was equally thrilled when she announced her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” in August on her now-fiancé Travis Kelce’s podcast.

Nothing is better than a Taylor release, and “Showgirl” was promised to be one of her best ones yet. She partnered with Max Martin and Shellback, who collaborated in the past on some of her most popular hits, including “22,” “…Ready For It?” and “Blank Space.” “Showgirl” promised dance-worthy pop accompanied by Swift’s hyper-specific yet relatable lyricism and clever literary illusions. It was a “tight album,” she said, with twelve solid tracks meticulously chosen, unlike her last two albums, “Midnights” and “The Tortured Poets Department,” which had 24 and 31 songs in their total expanded editions, respectively. What Swift delivered was not “tight.” It was an album of catchy beats atop lyrics that felt unedited, scattered and lyrically shallow — as if she became too big for anyone to tell her “no.” 

There are certainly songs on this album that I enjoyed. In “Elizabeth Taylor,” Swift revisits a familiar theme in her work of looking to women of the past, wondering if their stories hold the answer to the one question she’s never stopped asking: What does it mean to be happy when the whole world is watching? 

“Ruin the Friendship” surprised me as the tear-jerker of the album. In it, she reminisces on a love that ended before it could fully begin, which has many fans speculating it’s about the same young man as “Forever Winter” from “Red: Taylor’s Version.” 

“Father Figure” finds Swift in storyteller mode, dissecting a mentor and their perhaps parasitic relationship with their mentee. “Actually Romantic” is a sassy rebuttal to someone who is so obsessed with her that their disdain feels more like a kid picking on their playground crush. I liked these songs. They were fun, emotional and good to sing along to.

However, most tracks took time to win me over because they just felt so shallow. I can enjoy a fun and carefree album, but Swift has always written with depth and promised as much with this project. On the “New Heights” podcast, she said Showgirl would reveal “everything that was going on behind the curtain,” so I anticipated a lot of nuance. 

“The Life of a Showgirl”

In many of her past albums, Swift has expressed the idea of “getting out” of show business, the public eye or society in general — as she and producer Jack Antonoff discussed in regards to “the lakes” on “folklore.” With this image in mind, I anticipated her titular track to echo “The Lucky One” from “Red” where Swift examines a former starlet who disappeared from the public eye in her prime. Now that her “name is up in lights,” Swift sings, she thinks the past woman “got it right” by escaping. However, she took a different approach.

 In this duet with Sabrina Carpenter, the women are fascinated by a showgirl named Kitty who expresses how unglamorous and undesirable the life she leads truly is, urging the women not to seek it.  Yet Swift and Carpenter end the song embracing the showgirl life anyway, being “married to the hustle” and seemingly proving to Kitty that they were tough enough to do it. 

At first, this change in tone shocked me. However, subsequent listens revealed a parallel to Swift’s song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” from “Tortured Poets.” Swift is not mocking Kitty’s pain in her lyrics but acknowledging that, despite all of the tragedy of “the life of a showgirl,” she and Carpenter have found ways to make do with the bad because show business is now an integral part of them.

“The Fate of Ophelia”

As a fan of Shakespeare, I found “The Fate of Ophelia” challenging. Ophelia is my favorite literary character ever. She is extremely complex! For those of you unfamiliar with the plot of Hamlet, Ophelia is a young noblewoman loved by Hamlet, but as he pretends to be insane in his pursuit of revenge for his father’s death, he wounds her with his words — and even more so by killing her father. She then confronts the court, calling them out via Elizabethan flower language. Seeming to have lost her sanity, she then dies by drowning in the river. It is left unclear as to whether or not this was an accident or intentional suicide. In Taylor’s song, however, she recasts Ophelia as a damsel in distress, “drown[ing] in the melancholy” of heartbreak until she is saved by a man who shows her love again. While the song is not a negative message and certainly incorporates clever literary illusions from Hamlet, it fails to cover the breadth of Ophelia as a character and recenters a man in the plot of the story. Perhaps I am too critical, however, for “The Fate of Ophelia” holds as much nuance in regards to  Hamlet as “Love Story” does for Romeo and Juliet off her “Fearless” album, and it is a phenomenal song. After her handling of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in her song “The Albatross” on “Tortured Poets,” however, I confess I expected more from this literary illusion.

Some of the songs on Showgirl were just simply bad — a sentiment I have never directed towards Taylor Swift. A woman whose lyricism has caused top universities like Harvard to form classes around her has now delivered one of the worst writing performances of her life in the songs “Wood,” “Eldest Daughter,” and “CANCELLED!”

“Wood”

The track “Wood” begins with a great concept! Swift plays with the idea of jinxes and luck, specifically the act of knocking on wood to secure good fortune in love, just to find someone whom she makes her “own luck” with. It has a fun, 70s energy, complete with the actual sound of knocking on wood. It is this strong start that makes this song the best representation of the album: She took something good, and then she ruined it. What was originally a play on fate became riddled with a horde of innuendos that changed “Wood” into a song about her fiancé’s “redwood.” It became incohesive, separating the first half and the second into two separate songs thematically. I am not against a silly, sexy song. Sabrina Carpenter is a master of this style, and I adore her for it. Swift, however, is not. She abandoned her own brand to imitate her protegee, but with failing results.

“Eldest Daughter”

“Eldest Daughter” is rough from the get-go, mentioning the ruthlessness of the internet’s “trolling and memes.” As the fifth track on the album, per Swift tradition, this was supposed to be the saddest song on “Showgirl.” It succeeded in making me sad, so I’ll give her that, but not for the reasons she intended. One of her prettiest, most heartfelt bridges was ruined with the chorus—“I’m not a bad b*tch / and this isn’t savage”— set to a solemn piano. 

“CANCELLED!”

Of all of the Showgirl tracks, “CANCELLED!” is her most egregious sin. Upsettingly catchy — like a disease — this song has a message that is either extremely misconstrued or just as extremely out of touch. What do you mean by liking your friends cancelled, covered in “Gucci and in scandal?” Using more internet phrases like “girlboss too close to the sun,” the writing is cheesy and lazy. It is an incredible stain on the album. 

If “Eldest Daughter” and “Wood” were extremely edited and if “CANCELLED!” didn’t exist, I’d have liked the album well enough. “Showgirl” is still the weakest in Swift’s discography of exemplary work, but it isn’t bad. However, I think that it leaves room for constructive criticism. She is getting  that criticism from social media, but not from the charts. 

Since “Showgirl’s” release, Swift has released over 30 variants of the album with different covers, vinyl colors, the special releases of her songwriting process — recorded as memos — or the acoustic versions of her songs. “US Weekly” reports that she has taken the title for the most first-week sales for a single album in U.S. history, with 3.5 million units sold, and claimed the title of most-streamed album of 2025 on Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music. Further, she received a five-star rating from “Rolling Stone.” 

Despite its lackluster, “Showgirl” is still a Taylor Swift album, and Taylor Swift is still the music industry — it was always bound to succeed. I hope, however, that commercial success doesn’t cause her to ruin her artistry. That being said, Swift has been down this road before, facing critics whose voices loom larger than mine. She remains the world’s most formidable pop star for a reason: Taylor Swift is good at what she does. While I may not have cared for this album, I know myself well enough to acknowledge that I will be singing along to all of the songs in a month or two (well, maybe not “CANCELLED!”).  Three stars. ★★★☆☆