The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, is now out into the world. With a splashy (and occasionally confusing) marketing campaign, and the return of 1989 producers Max Martin and Shellback, fans had hoped that these new songs would become a new sort of pop bible.
Time will only tell if that is the case, in part because each track on The Life of a Showgirl has a lot to unpack. Swift experiments with new genres and types of sound, presents some glorious double-entendres, and even literally folds a piece of her worldwide Eras Tour into the album. (As someone who attended the tour’s closing night, I am never going to shut up about that.)
