Taylor Swift’s joyful, lusty new album starts off shouting out the Kelce brothers podcast and ends with the Berks County-born pop star sharing the spotlight with Bucks County-born sister in song Sabrina Carpenter.
The New Heights reference comes at the start of “The Fate of Ophelia,” the William Shakespeare-inspired lead track on The Life of a Showgirl, the 12-song collection that was released at midnight Thursday.
Ophelia’s fate, as every Swiftie surely knows by now, was death by drowning. The Showgirl album cover pictures Swift dressed in sparkly garb, mostly submerged in a bathtub.
Mostly, but not entirely. Because Swift’s 12th album — her first since demonstrating her global dominance on 149 Eras Tour dates, including three at Lincoln Financial Field in 2023 in which she uttered the immortal words, “I’m from Philly,” — is about emerging from a slough of despond, not wallowing in it. Mostly, but not entirely.
The catalyst for her rebirth is fiancé Travis Kelce, the gym teacher to her English teacher in their August engagement announcement.
The shout to New Heights, the podcast Kelce hosts with his former Eagles brother Jason, which Swift used to announce The Life of a Showgirl, comes in the album’s very first lyric.
“I heard you calling on the megaphone, you wanna see me all alone,” Swift sings at the start of “Ophelia.” Its video was set to premiere in The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, the Swift movie playing at 3,500 theaters in the U.S. and Canada through the weekend.
The megaphone is New Heights, where Kelce first made public overtures to the pop star. “Ophelia,” and much of the Showgirl album, is about how her tight end in Kansas City red saved her from a fate at least metaphorically akin to Shakespeare’s tragic heroine.
“If you’d never come for me,” Swift sings as the music gathers momentum, “I might have drowned in melancholy.”
And if Travis be the catalyst, we have him to thank. Melancholy did in fact dampen if not drown Swift’s previous two albums, Midnights in 2022 and last year’s the Tortured Poets Department.
On the latter in particular, her work with ubiquitous pop producer Jack Antonoff no longer sounded fresh. Taken together with songs produced by her other, more folk-oriented collaborator Aaron Dessner, Tortured’s Anthology version was an unfocused two-hour, 31-song slog.
By contrast, the 41-minute Showgirl is a taut, perky exercise in self-discipline. Neither Antonoff or Dessner are anywhere to be found. Instead, the collaborators are Swedish hitmaker Max Martin and Shellback — the pseudonym of songwriter-producer Karl Johan Schuster.
Swift has worked with the duo before, most extensively on her first overt pop album, 1989, in 2014, and also on 2017’s Reputation. The duo are behind many of her most recognizable hits, including “Shake It Off,” “Bad Blood” and “Blank Space.”
The Showgirl strategy is to mirror Swift’s often euphoric Engagement Era mood with an album full of bangers.
Topping that list is the unabashedly grabby “Opalite,” which is sure to be one of her biggest hits. Swift told British TV host Graham Norton on Thursday it’s named after his birthstone.
Swift has two American TV interviews coming up next week, and they’re both on Comcast-owned NBC.
On Monday, she’ll be a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. How about a couple of songs with The Roots? Not likely — the Format is the musical guest.
Then she’ll take over Late Night With Seth Meyers on Wednesday for a “TAY/kover.” Will she also be a surprise guest on Saturday’s Bad Bunny-hosted Saturday Night Live season premiere? Many fans think so.
The almost-all-bangers-all-the-time Showgirl approach is mostly well executed, though things get cringey on “Wood,” an innuendo laden ode to Kelce’s manhood that also shouts out New Heights. It rhapsodizes his “magic wand” and she sings “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see” and “his love was the key to open my thighs.”
The song, which also nods to Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” is built on a guitar riff that owes so much to the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” that it’s a surprise it wasn’t credited.
The other Showgirl song that calls back to a vintage hit is “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s 1987 R&B ballad of the same name.
It’s one of two songs that target unnamed adversaries, because what would a Taylor Swift album be without a diss track or two?
“Father Figure” seems aimed at Scott Borchetta, the head of Swift’s former label Big Machine who sold the label to Scooter Braun, and her master recordings along with it, in 2019.
That led to her re-recording her first four albums in a dispute which ended happily when she reacquired her masters this year.
Swift’s “Father Figure” works a slightly sinister mid-tempo groove depicting a music industry mahoff who behaves like a mafioso, demanding loyalty and promising protection, only to betray his oaths.
The upstart star in the song gets her measure of revenge against her macho antagonist, boasting “you made a deal with this Devil — turns out my dick’s bigger.”
The other confrontational Showgirl song is “Actually Romantic,” which an army of Swift sleuths confidently decided is about Charli XCX before the sun had risen on Friday.
Is Swift going to war with the Brat electro-pop star? It seems so. Charli’s husband George Daniel plays drums for the 1975, the band whose singer Matty Healy Swift was in a relationship in 2023, with their breakup providing fodder for many Tortured Poets’ songs.
Charli seemed to refer to Swift in “Sympathy Is Knife” when she sang “Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show.”
“Actually Romantic” seems to respond to Charli — who opened for Swift at the Linc on the Reputation tour in 2018 — with a stinging opening salvo: “I heard you called me ‘Boring Barbi’ when the coke’s got you brave.” It goes on to relish living rent free in a rival’s head.
Other Showgirl songs of note: “Eldest Daughter” is a tender love song about giving up trying to seem cool and escaping internet meanness, either through nostalgia for an untroubled Wyomissing, Pa., childhood or in the arms of a football-playing fiance.
“Ruin the Friendship,” is the tear jerker, a narrative song of the type Swift has always excelled. It’s about a high school crush that never even led to a kiss with a boy who’s now dead. Beneath Showgirl’s confident sheen, Swift is still apt to get up in her feelings.
Swift brings on Carpenter, who opened many Eras concerts, for a show of strength in the title song.
It’s a team effort: Carpenter receives the ultimate Swift seal of approval with her own verse, and the duo blend voices in solidarity.
“The Life of a Showgirl” strikes a similar chord to the Tortured highlight “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” It’s about losing the naive belief that show business is all about glamour and glory, and realizing the nitty-gritty is “pain hidden by lipstick and lace.”
That’s not the cheeriest message to send as the curtain falls on an album that has the most consistently sunniest disposition of any that Swift has released.
But ultimately, it’s not presented as a bummer because, as Swift and Carpenter, lifelong entertainers with decades of experience, freely admit while singing in unison: “I’m married to the hustle.”
Even on a happy-ever-after album about impending nuptials, Swift needs to acknowledge that she soon will be betrothed twice. Both to her podcast hosting football player, and to the fans she needs to keep satisfying. That’s the life of a showgirl.