With the red and blue lights shining in my rearview mirror, the officer asked me and my friends where we were going at nearly midnight on a Thursday night. I debated explaining that we were listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, in hopes that I might get more sympathy for driving a little too speedily.
Good thing I didn’t — none of the songs are good enough to excuse speeding.
On Oct. 3, Taylor Swift released her 16th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Swift said she wrote the album while performing the Eras Tour — the biggest world tour in history with 149 shows in total. During the tour, Swift went through a breakup, wrote a new album, began dating after heartbreak and balanced a lot of intense controversy. It wasn’t hard to assume that the album would delve into the harder issues, as is common in Swift’s albums. I was expecting meaningful lyrics, ones to match the superb songwriting in “The Tortured Poets Department.”
After my first listen, I was left with a speeding ticket and confusion. Where was the passion and talent that I’ve always heard in Swift’s work? The album felt like a huge step down in quality. Notably, Swift had different producers on this album than on her last few. Swift worked with Max Martin and Shellback, whom she hasn’t worked with since her “Reputation” album. But the producers cannot be blamed for the lack of quality in the lyricism.
The album as a whole seems to be mostly about Swift’s new relationship with her now fiancé, Travis Kelce. The first song on the album, “The Fate of Ophelia,” likens Swift to Ophelia, the fictional character who was said to drown herself after being driven to madness by continual losses and distress in her life.
The chorus says, “All that time / I sat alone in my tower / You were just honing your powers / Now I can see it all / Late one night / You dug me out of my grave and / Saved my heart from the fate of / Ophelia.”
As the first track, this song made me excited for what the rest of the album might hold. It’s a good example of what Swift does well — metaphorical writing with a fun beat.
The rest of the album was a letdown.
The first song that made my stomach churn was “Father Figure.” The song is obviously about Scooter Braun. Braun and Swift have had a long-time feud over the ownership of her first six albums after Scooter’s company took possession and profited from Swift’s success. At the end of May, Swift announced that she had bought all her albums back and now had full ownership again. I thought a song about this would be meaningful and touching.
It was not.
The title, “Father Figure,” described how Swift felt towards Braun, guiding him and leading him to success, before he turned on her. I wanted to feel the anger and distress she felt, but the chorus made me lose respect for the song. Swift is known for being one of the best songwriters of our time, but she leaned on a cheap chorus for shock value instead of real, good writing.
Much of the album was unnecessarily explicit or tackily written. Again and again, Swift uses catchy beats to hide weak or edgy writing. “Eldest Daughter” has much potential to be a strong song, but the chorus falls flat, using more slang instead of a more poetic style that she’s accustomed to. “Wood,” later in the album, shows Swift’s newfound love for tacky, inappropriate jokes. The song is reminiscent of Sabrina Carpenter’s newer music that has been widely disputed for being needlessly sexual, causing Carpenter lots of negative feedback.
But when Taylor Swift does it, suddenly it’s cute again.
Right.
Now, having listened to the album for an entire weekend, I can admit that it’s an okay album. For a pop album, it has catchy beats and some cute love songs, but for a Taylor Swift album, it feels flat. In a world where artists are chasing the next trending audio instead of meaning, Taylor Swift has just proved that even the best of the craft can lose their spark in the never-ending pursuit of success.
