Taylor Swift has run out of things to say

Taylor Swift has finally released a bad album.

After the end of the Eras Tour, with Taylor Swift on top of the world, it seemed like she could do no wrong. She was coming off one of the greatest concert runs of all time and had risen to record-breaking heights. In her personal life, too, she seemed to have gotten everything she has ever wanted. Following a string of strained relationships, she finally found love, and it was something out of a fairy tale: A three-time Super Bowl winner romances the most famous singer on the planet. It’s the dream she always had: Taylor is finally dating the guy on the football team.

So what happens when the person who’s been yearning for the whole nine yards finally gets everything she wanted? As it turns out, some not very good art.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious. The primary motivator for what produced some of Swift’s best content has been conflict: her various breakups, fighting against artists like Kanye West who belittled her, losing the rights to her own music. So much of this adversity has been resolved in her favor. She’s now engaged to the Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce and en route to the closest thing America is going to have to a royal wedding; West’s various controversial statements have turned him into a pariah; and Swift has even managed to get the rights to her original masters back, ending the joyous experiment that was the Taylor’s Version re-recordings.

Taylor Swift, for all intents and purposes, has won.

And what’s so interesting about a winner?

That’s the existential question at the core of why “The Life of a Showgirl” feels so poorly conceived. Because Swift has overcome these crises, it feels as if she has very little to write about—which begs the question, what exactly is the point of this album?

The issues start with the first song, “The Fate of Ophelia,” in reference to the character from “Hamlet.” This is far from the first time that Swift based a song off Shakespeare’s work; she did so most famously in the song “Love Story,” from the 2008 album “Fearless,” which asks, “What if everything worked out between Romeo and Juliet?” That kind of storybook, post hoc Disneyfication of Shakespeare works better when the person writing it is still a teenager, as Swift was when “Love Story” came out. But when she does the exact same thing as a 35-year-old billionaire, now far from the mawkish ingenue she was two decades ago, it comes off as a total misreading of the bard.

Shakespeare’s Ophelia was a woman driven to madness due to the whims of the men in her life. Swift’s Ophelia is a woman who is saved by men from the fate of her own madness. It is at best a shallow misinterpretation of Shakespeare and at worst an irresponsible recontextualization of one of the English literary canon’s most iconic female figures.

This kind of shallowness continues throughout the album—which can often feel like reheated leftovers of topics that Swift had addressed many times before. There are only so many times that she can talk about her longtime mentor Scott Borchetta, as she does in the song “Father Figure,” a topic she tackled better in previous albums “Folklore” and “Midnights.” And there’s only so much inter-artist feuding, as Swift engages in with “Actually Romantic,” a song about Charli XCX (notably now on the rise after the release of the seminal album “Brat” and good friends with Swift’s ex Matty Healy) that we can tolerate before people start asking, “Why is the biggest popstar in the world picking a fight with another female artist?” as she had done before with Katy Perry. It makes the listener ask: After having fought all these fights and won, what did Swift learn from any of this?

Not helping is her reteam with former producers Max Martin and Karl Johan Schuster (professionally known as Shellback). This duo helped her make “1989,” which won Swift her second Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards. But there is a dullness to the musical composition of “The Life of a Showgirl.” It is a lot of the same synth-infused pop that we’ve heard many times before from Swift, and there’s a roteness and blandness to this one that can make the beats feel indistinct and not particularly memorable. For an album whose aesthetic exemplifies maximalism—it is based on the exuberant showgirl culture of the 1920s—the music is anything but. There is nothing new here.

That is the disquieting conclusion I reached after listening to these songs: a sense of a lack of growth. It makes one nervous about what this means for Swift’s music going forward. What’s even more worrying is the degradation of her prose style, which has often been one of her most lauded attributes. The lyricism and poetry of “Folklore” and “Evermore” are nowhere to be found here. Instead, Taylor seems to be aping the lyrical style of collaborator Sabrina Carpenter (featured in the title track “The Life of a Showgirl”) whose brand is focused on being overly sexual to the point of comedy, though with no appreciation for whether or not that approach works with Swift’s own voice. Many of the songs on the album are very sexually charged, especially the song “Wood” (to call its suggestive lyrics innuendo would be giving it too much credit). Swift’s rather liberal use of vulgarities throughout mostly just serves to make the lyrics feel cheap and not very well considered.

All this is best exemplified in the song “Wi$h Li$t,” a maudlin and contrarian song about how reaching for more is actually bad. Swift is certainly not reaching for more with this album.

Here’s the thing: I love Taylor Swift. I have loved Taylor Swift for a long time. Since “Evermore” in 2020, I have reviewed every new Taylor Swift album for this publication. I have written about the Eras Tour as a deeply spiritual experience for me. So when I say this album is bad, I say it with a heavy heart. When I wrote my review of her last album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” which I liked despite some reservations, I ended it by saying that the next time she released a record, I hoped that she would be more careful about how she presented her poetry. It is to my great dismay to see that she was even less careful. 

Now, with a genuine failure on her hands, one can now only hope that some sense is knocked into Swift—and that the artist I know and love will come back with fewer half-baked ideas and more of the complexity I know she is capable of.

Correction, Oct. 14: “1989” was the second Taylor Swift album to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, not the first. “Fearless” won the award in 2010.

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