Prof. Sara Baker Bailey was up at midnight Thursday night doing crucial prep for a course she’s teaching later this month. Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” had just dropped, and the Southern Connecticut State University professor needed to know how it might suit her curriculum.
She couldn’t believe her good fortune.
“I did not expect as many ‘Travis I love you’ songs as I got,” she said.
Bailey saw in previous albums how Swift’s relationship songs would be about “anxiety, conflict and turbulence. Here she’s happy, blissfully in love. I must have been foolish not to realize. She’s engaged! They’re in love, love, love. We should be grateful she can put it on an album. It’s here. It’s a reality for her. These are messages of what a healthy supportive relationship looks like.”
Class-wise, though, “the curriculum up to this point has included only the first 11 Eras. Now I need to retool things.”
Music Review: On Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ love and reputation are on the line
Bailey teaches in the Communications, Media and Screen Studies department at SCSU. She studies Swift for examples she can use to instruct her students in interpersonal communications theory. “It’s about how we come together in our closest interpersonal relationships, from butterflies in your stomach to breaking up,” she said.
“I learned in the first couple of iterations of the class that relying on just personal experience is not helpful. Some of the students would come to me and say they hadn’t had any relationships yet like the ones described in the textbook,” she added. The great equalizer is pop culture. There are things that exist in the world that we can tap into any time.”
Using Swift as her subject matter helps Bailey unify the discussion of relationships.
Bailey has taught at SCSU for nine years and started the Swift course just last year. This iteration, which starts on Oct. 22, runs for half a term. Each student picks a Swift album that they focus on throughout the course. Bailey expects that “The Life of a Showgirl” will be the most popular choice this term.
“It’s been a banner year for Taylor Swift fans. She got her masters back and then there was the engagement,” she said, noting that Swift finally regained legal ownership of the master recordings of some of her earlier albums. “That was a whirlwind end of summer, and now there’s a new album.”
Bailey’s first impressions of “The Life of a Showgirl” was that the album is “so different from her other records. It has little notes, callbacks to ‘Reputation’ and ‘1989’ but it’s unlike anything else she’s done.”
Bailey’s homework didn’t end with that midnight listening session. On Friday afternoon, she was heading out to see the film “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” which is in cinemas for three days only Oct. 3-5. The promotional film features Taylor discussing the album, the debut of the first video from the opening track “The Fate of Ophelia” and clips from behind the scenes.
Bailey is a Swift scholar, but she is also a fan who enjoyed the music and got further engaged when learning about the singer’s struggle to control her own recordings and image. Thanks to a friend who scored tickets, she saw two stops on Swift’s “Eras Tour” in 2023 and 2024.
“Going to see the ‘Eras Tour,’ being in a giant football stadium with 60,000 other people, I thought ‘How do I put this feeling in a little bottle and let bits of it out in my everyday real world?’” Bailey said.
She sees the community that forms not just at concerts but at listening parties, cinemas and even small family gatherings as one of the most important part of the Swift phenomenon. “We can use it to try to build up our own community,” she said.
Decoding Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life a Showgirl’: A guide to her references
Bailey describes how her husband stayed up to listen to the new album with her, how talking about the new songs led to her calling her 25-year-old niece and how she’ll be talking to friends around the country about “The Life of a Showgirl” this weekend. “This has allowed us to have a space in this community, to be together.”
Bailey sees her college teaching as an another way of building community, especially in the area of interpersonal communications. “I tell my students, ‘I don’t care if you don’t remember anything from the textbook, but if you walk out of this classroom having made one friend here, this course has succeeded.’”
Besides the Swift interpersonal communications course, Bailey also teaches about crisis communications, public relations and an introductory course in public speaking. She has often accessed pop culture in her academic work. She’s planning a course now on media messaging using examples from TV’s “Love Island.”
Bailey course is not the only college class in the state using Swift as the basis for academic enlightenment. Eastern Connecticut State University offers “The Power of Taylor Swift” taught by the chair of the history department, Caitlin Carenen. Last summer an online women’s and gender studies course at Quinnipiac University also examined Swift’s life and work.
Bailey said “The Life of a Showgirl” shows a maturity in Swift’s work and in the artist herself.
“Before Thursday night, we had just the artwork — different showgirl-style photos — and the announcement that ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ was the first single,” she said. “Social media was critiquing the artwork as scandalous, risqué. There was time when we thought we’d never see Taylor Swift’s belly button but now this. I loved that. As aggressive and bold and provocative as those images were, she is a 35-year-old woman saying ‘I’m mature. I’m grounded. I’m not going to tone myself down.’
“Every time we think we cracked the code of what Taylor Swift is going to do on an album, she does something new,” Bailey added. “I was just in shock. People are always trying to see if she’ll do ‘Reputation 2,’ but they should have learned by now that she’s never going to do the same thing twice.”