Taylor Swift - The Life of a Showgirl (October 3, 2025) • Page 68

Yeah the music itself would not be that bad if it weren’t for the terrible, terrible lyrics

 

I am very much with Craig in the belief that, sonically, these newest three are drastically more similar than the oldest three (or even four.)

Debut wasn't even on my radar. The evolution on Fearless made me turn my head, but I wasn't fully on board yet. Speak Now captured me. Red blew me away.

 

welcome to my underworld, where it gets quite dark

indeed

 

yeah i mean when i found out speak now was written alone, i was super on board. red and 1989 both worked for me to various degrees then reputation lost me aggressively and i never came back...

 

I don't think I know what people mean anymore when they say music sounds like AI. I get a lot of the criticisms about this album, but I don't get that one. For better and for worse, this album is extremely, EXTREMELY her.

 

Reputation and Lover are cringe but have some serious bangers, Folklore and Evermore are like the only good art explicitly pandemic inspired, and then Midnights Tortured Poets and Showgirl all felt like she wrote these songs and needed to release them

 

second listen around, I’m becoming more jaded by the lyricism. a lot of the songs are juvenile and/or redundant when compared to the rest of her catalog. i know music doesn’t necessarily need a “reason” to exist, but i feel kind of glum about how these are the topics we’re choosing to sing about twelve albums in to a career. the lyrics feel like surface level industry gossip with a ton of “look at me now! i’m so cool!” and/or “fuck yall haters” sprinkled in.

Wishlist’s “We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone and they do” would be a lot more tolerable as like a second or third album tongue and cheek jab but i cannot take it seriously on the twelfth. why are we still entertaining the concept of haters when you’re the biggest artist in the world!

the critical praise feels off to me too. i cant be convinced that, if this was an artist’s debut, it would get the same score. there’s no way.

 

The gall to invoke Emily Dickinson was bad enough on the last album. These lyrics are even worse.

 

the opening track's verse melody reminds me so much of lana del ray's "summertime sadness." i don't like that song and i don't like this "ophelia" song.

 

Yes, oh man thank you. There definitely is something there.

 

A big chunk of Reddit comments I've seen are people not super stoked on the album, which is kind of surprising since they seem to drool over every single thing she does.

Obviously first week sales numbers are gonna be fucking massive for this, but it'll be interesting to see if next week's sales are a huge drop-off or not.

I also wonder if those who pre-ordered multiple copies, who are letdown, are going to reconsider doing that again for TS13, without hearing a single first at least.

 

if some of these choruses were as huge and punchy as "22" or "new romantics" or some other Max/Taylor songs, that would make me way more excited about this album. i'm not only letdown by the songs, but mostly i'm letdown by the production because Max is Max and this just feels like it could be anyone. it's severely lacking any of the Max Martin/Shellback magic.

 

In addition to Sabrina Taylor really should have gotten a bunch of other friends to each sing the showgirls outro like TWY did with Bar Bands

 

i guess what i meant by that was that all the songs seem like they were built off of existing frameworks of hers but feel hollowed or emptied out in some way. then lyrically, it all feels heavy-handed in this manner where she's like hitting these themes or motifs so hard but in a way that a human would like never actually talk. Again, i haven't listened in some time so maybe this is a true distillation of her recent schtick to the point of self-parody and i'm just missing the references. to me it feels written by a computer lol

 

I think there’s clearly fatigue of being the vanguard of pop music for well over a decade. A giant 2 year tour. And tbf the young female pop stars she inspired earlier in her career have come into their own and are making fresher and better music than her. So now she’s chasing them and spinning her tires and that’s what it feels like. She may be a billionaire, an entire industry and a legacy but….she’s not the buzzy act anymore. As big as she is….ERAS feels more like the end to me rather than a fresh start. Acts like Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter have more juice right now.

she’s going to make records for a long time and there will probably be some very bright comebacks but as of right now I kind of doubt how consistent she can be.

 

yeah that all feels real and right

 

The Tom Breihan review of this is so funny.

 

Me wife and daughter are at the theater.
25 mins in “we’re bored. How long is this?”

 

Unironically depending on the implementation this could have been really cute compared to some of the lyrics on the album lol

 

Do any of these songs really feel like they'll be a big radio hit? I kinda don't think so...

 

one of my favorite writers

 

with how bad radio hits are right now this is a compliment

 

"More juice" by what metric, exactly? I mean, you can like their music more, but you are living in your own little world if you think that's true. This album might do 3x Sabrina Carpenter's first week sales, and that album did really fucking well! There is still no one in the industry who has "more juice" than Taylor Swift. That's just how it is. We can all write her career obituaries prematurely, but she's still the biggest artist on the planet by orders of magnitude.