53 Lyric References, Meanings, And Easter Eggs From Taylor Swift’s “The Life Of A Showgirl”
I have a theory that “Actually Romantic” contains a Mean Girls reference!
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Taylor Swift dropped The Life of a Showgirl at midnight last night, offering fans a “peek behind the curtain” into her life during The Eras Tour (and her relationship with Travis Kelce). Like every other Swiftie, I’ve been analyzing and decoding her new lyrics.
So, here are 53 references you may have missed in The Life of a Showgirl:
Also, remember, this is all just one person’s speculation, so don’t take my word as gospel, and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments!
1. “The Fate of Ophelia” is a reference to the character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ophelia’s father and brother don’t think she should trust Hamlet’s romantic interest in her. After her father’s death, she goes mad, and, unable to free herself from other people’s expectations, she tragically drowns. To me, this somewhat parallels Taylor’s previous album, The Tortured Poets Department, particularly the songs “But Daddy I Love Him” (which is about other people judging her relationship) and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” (which is about how trying to meet other people’s expectations and “at all costs keep your good name” made her “mean”).
2. The line, “I heard you calling on the megaphone / you wanna see me all alone” seems to be a direct reference to Travis Kelce publicly shooting his shot with Taylor on his podcast, New Heights.
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In a July 2023 episode, he said, “I was disappointed that she doesn’t talk before or after her shows because she has to save her voice for the 44 songs that she sings. So, I was a little butt-hurt I didn’t get to hand her one of the bracelets I made for her… If you’re up on Taylor Swift concerts, there are friendship bracelets, and I received a bunch of them being there, but I wanted to give Taylor Swift one with my [phone] number on it… She doesn’t meet anybody — or at least she didn’t want to meet me, so I took it personal.”
When she made her New Heights debut in August, she said, “This podcast has done a lot for me. I owe a lot to this podcast. This podcast got me a boyfriend ever since Travis decided to use it as his personal dating app about two years ago… It was such a wild, romantic gesture to just be like, ‘I WANNA DATE YOU!’ At first, when I looked at it, I was like, ‘This dude didn’t get a meet-and-greet, and he’s making it everyone’s problem.’ That’s what I thought at first, and then… You realize he didn’t even reach out to our management. When this podcast came out, I was like, ‘Did he ever reach out to be, like, in the tents, or did we know he was in the building?’ He came with Pat [Mahomes], and he thought that ’cause he knows the elevator lady, that he could talk her to her about just getting down in my dressing room.”
She explained that she’s not on the internet very much and doesn’t even look at her DMs. She continued, “This kind of felt more like I was in an ’80s John Hughes movie, and he was, like, standing outside of my window with a boombox being like, ‘I WANNA DATE YOU! DO YOU WANNA GO ON A DATE WITH ME? I MADE YOU FRIENDSHIP BRACELETS? DO YOU WANNA DATE ME?’ I was like, ‘If this guy isn’t crazy, which is a big if, this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”
3. “If you never called for me, I might’ve drowned in the melancholy” calls to mind the TTPD track “The Prophecy,” in which Taylor sang about her fears she was “cursed” to end up alone with lines like, “Don’t want money / Just someone who wants my company / Let it once be me.”
4. “I swore my loyalty to me, myself, and I” seemingly references her plans to have a “single girl summer” after ending her long-term relationship with Joe Alwyn and her short-term relationship with Matty Healy. On July 7, 2023, she shared a picture with some of her friends to Instagram, writing, “Happy belated Independence Day from your local neighborhood independent girlies 😎 See you tonight Kansas Cityyy.”
Of course, the ironic part is that Travis Kelce attended that very Kansas City show, striking the match that would end Taylor’s singleness once and for all.
5. “You dug me out of my grave” feels like a callback to “So Long, London,” where she described the end of a relationship (seemingly with Joe Alwyn) as “Two graves, one gun.”
6. “Keep it 100” is a reference to the connection to Taylor’s favorite number and Travis’s jersey number. On New Heights, she said, “Do you not keep it 100 ever? 13 plus 87 equals 100. That’s numerology.”
7. “Pledge allegiance to your team” seemingly references how Travis turned Taylor, a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, into a Kansas City Chiefs fan.
8. “The venom stole her sanity” calls to mind the snake imagery in Reputation as well as this line from “Cassandra”: “So they filled my cell with snakes / I regret to say / do you believe me now”?
9. “And if you never called for me, I might’ve lingered in purgatory,” made me think of all of the Christian religious imagery she used when seemingly writing about her relationship with Matty Healy on TTPD. For example, in “Guilty as Sin?”, she wrote, “What if I roll the stone away? / They’re gonna crucify me anyway / What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy? / If long-suffering propriety is what they want from me / They don’t know how you’ve haunted me so stunningly / I choose you and me religiously.”
10. Ophelia’s fate is drowning, which called to mind another line from “Guilty As Sin?”: “Drowning in the Blue Nile / He sent me ‘Downtown Lights.'”
11. “Elizabeth Taylor” is an obvious reference to the legendary violet-eyed actor. Taylor writes, “All the rights guys promised they’d stay.” Taylor may relate to Elizabeth’s reputation for having a lot of relationships. She was famously married eight times (twice to Richard Burton).
12. The next line, “Under bright lights, they withered away,” could be a reference to how private Taylor became during her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn.
13. Of course, this song isn’t Taylor’s first reference to Elizabeth Taylor. On the Reputation track “…Ready For It?”, she wrote, “He can be my jailer / Burton to this Taylor.”
14. “Be my NY when Hollywood hates me” seemingly equates Travis to her beloved Big Apple, which she’d called home since the 1989 era. The city famously got its own song, “Welcome to New York.”
15. “Opalite” is possibly a nod to Travis Kelce’s birthstone, opal.
16. Taylor told Hits Radio, “‘Opalite’ is a song about, like, kind of forgiving yourself for having gone through something that didn’t pan out the way you wanted it to… It’s giving yourself permission to, like, not have it all figured out or not marry the first person you ever dated.”
17. The line “I thought my house was haunted” calls to mind two of Taylor’s past songs. In the Speak Now track “Haunted,” she wrote about feeling haunted by a past love, writing, “Can’t breathe whenever you’re gone / Can’t turn back now, I’m haunted.” Then, on the Folklore track “Seven,” which is about childhood, she wrote, “I think your house is haunted / Your dad is always mad, and that must be why.”
18. The next line, “I used to live with ghosts,” seemingly references Matty Healy allegedly ghosting her. On the TTPD track “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she wrote, “They just ghosted you / Now you know what it feels like.”
19. “You were dancing through the lightning strikes” called to mind her “Delicate” choreography from The Eras Tour, when lightning struck across the stage in time with her steps.
20. “This is just a storm inside a teacup / But shelter here with me” made me think of this line from Folklore’s “Peace”: “This is just a storm inside a teacup / But shelter here with me.”
21. “Father Figure” seemingly references Taylor Swift’s business relationship with Scott Borchetta, the CEO of her previous label, Big Machine Records. At 14 years old, she was the first artist he ever signed. Scott recently told Forbes, “We wanted to take over the world. That was the mission.”
However, they had a very famous falling out. In 2019, Scooter Braun purchased Taylor’s masters from Scott for $300 million. Taylor called out the deal in a Tumblr post, writing, “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future.”
In response, Scott made a post titled “So, It’s Time For Some Truth” on the Big Machine website. He wrote that Taylor’s father, Scott Swift, was a shareholder in the label and was therefore “made aware of the pending deal with Ithaca Holdings and had 3 days to go over all of the details of the proposed transaction.” He claimed the “transaction passed with a majority vote and 3 of the 5 shareholders voting ‘yes’ with 92% of the shareholder’s vote.”
In November 2020, Taylor became eligible to rerecord her first five albums. Of course, she famously decided to rerecord and release her “Taylor’s Versions,” leading to her highly successful The Eras Tour. Six years after her masters were sold, Taylor was finally able to buy them back.
22. “Eldest Daughter” makes reference to social media (“Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered ’til they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot”). It made me think of what Taylor said about social media on New Heights: “I don’t see a lot of things. I’m of the first belief that… if you’re getting your feedback from the internet or from comments and stuff, like, I just really think that, like, anything you feed your brain, it will internalize. Anything you feed the internet, it will kill. I’ve been in the music industry for 20 years. It’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings at this point.”
23. “I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool” seemingly alludes to Taylor’s long-held belief she isn’t “cool.” In 2014, she told CBS Mornings, “I don’t feel great when I’m fed messages and when I was fed messages as a young girl that it’s more important to be edgy and sexy and cool than anything else. I don’t think that those are the right messages to feed girls, and I think they’re being given those messages by the popular cliques in their school, which is all kind of cascading down from the media and what we seem to prioritize in women.”
24. The “so many traitors” have been referenced multiple times in her music over the years. For example, in “Dear John,” she wrote, “You’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand.” Then, in “Getaway Car,” she wrote, “Us traitors never win.” And on “Is It Over Now?”, she wrote, “You dream of my mouth before it called you a lying traitor.” Similarly, her Reputation era comeback singe, “Look What You Made Me Do,” was all about feeling betrayed (“I got a list of names, and yours is in red, underlined”).
25. “When I said I don’t believe in marriage / That was a lie” calls to mind the times she’s referenced her desire for marriage over the years, especially recently. Seemingly alluding to Joe Alwyn in “Paper Rings,” she wrote, “I’d marry you with paper rings,” and in “You’re Losing Me,” she wrote, “I wouldn’t marry me either.” Then, seemingly referencing Matty Healy in “The Tortured Poets Department,” she wrote, “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on.” And alluding to Travis Kelce, her now-fiancé, in “So High School,” she wrote, “Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me? / It’s just a game, but really / I’m bettin’ on all three for us two.”
26. “I thought that I’d never find that beautiful, beautiful life” seemingly references the same fears she sang about in “The Prophecy.”
27. “Every youngest child felt / They were raised up in the wild / But now you’re home” seemingly juxtaposes her position as the eldest daughter in her family to Travis’s position as the youngest child in his family.
28. On “Ruin the Friendship,” Taylor sings, “Abigail called me with the bad news,’ referring to her longtime best friend, Abigail Anderson.
29. She previously sang about Abigail in “Fifteen,” writing, “You sit in class next to a red-head named Abigail / And soon enough you’re best friends.”
30. In the song, Taylor expresses regret over not pursuing a relationship with a friend in high school who later died. It may be about her late friend, Jeff Lang, who died in 2010. He’s also thought to be the subject of “Forever Winter.” After his funeral, she won the BMI Country Songwriter of the Year award. In her acceptance speech, she said, “It’s been a really emotional week for me. He was 21, and I used to play my songs for him first. So I would like to thank Jeff Lang.”
31. “Actually Romantic” is widely speculated to be about her former Reputation tour opener, Charli XCX. You can read a full explainer here. Many fans theorized that the song “Sympathy Is a Knife” from Charli’s iconic 2024 album Brat was about Taylor.
32. The line “High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me” seemingly alludes to Charli’s friendship with Taylor’s ex, Matty Healy, who allegedly ghosted her.
33. This is probably a coincidence, but “Actually Romantic” coming out on Mean Girls Day (October 3rd) brought to mind Cady Heron’s famous line: “It’s not my fault you’re, like, in love with me or something!” Similarly, in the song, Taylor writes, “All the effort you’ve put in / It’s actually romantic / I really gotta hand it to you, ooh / No man has ever loved me like you do.”
34. “Wi$h Li$t” is seemingly about her desire to start a family with Travis. She writes, “I just want you, huh / Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you.”
35. The line “I thought I had it right once, twice” again seemingly alludes to how she thought about marriage with Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy, as I previously mentioned when discussing “Eldest Daughter.”
36. The opening line of “Wood” (“Daisy’s bare naked, I was distraught / He loves me not, he loves me not”) again seems to reference her two breakups before meeting Travis.
37. “I’ve been a little superstitious” calls to mind “The Prophecy,” where Taylor sings, “I look unstable / Gathered with a coven round a sorceress’ table.”
38. As many fans have pointed out, the line “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was thе key that opened my thighs” appears to reference this viral tweet from four years ago.
39. “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand” appears to be another callback to “The Prophecy,” where Taylor wrote “I got cursed like Eve got bitten.”
40. “CANCELLED!” using the British spelling, which is either an interesting choice or another instance similar to her mispelling the secret code “Hyannis Port” in the liner notes for “Everything Has Changed.”
41. “Did they catch you having far too much fun?” seemingly alludes to the opening of “Nothing New”: “They tell you while you’re young / Girls, go out and have your fun / Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it.”
42. The line “Good thing I like my friends canceled / I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal” called to mind two of Taylor’s friends who’ve recently been “canceled” for very different reasons. You can read a full breakdown here.
After accusing her It Ends With Us director and costar Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment, Blake Lively was allegedly targeted with a smear campaign.
Brittany Mahomes was criticized for reportedly liking (and later unliking) an Instagram post from Donald Trump sharing his “2024 GOP Platform,” which involved several bigoted talking points. You can read a full breakdown here.
43. “At least you know exactly who your friends are” seemingly alludes to how Taylor’s friendship circle shifted during the time she was “canceled” amidst of her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
44. It also calls to mind this line from “It’s Time To Go”: “When the words of a sister come back in whispers / That prove she was not / In fact what she seemed, not a twin from your dreams / She’s a crook who was caught.” That’s widely speculated to be about her former friend, Karli Kloss.
45. “Honey” is a pretty obvious reference to how her relationship with Travis changed her feelings towards certain terms of endearment.
46. “Redefined all of those blues” calls to mind the chorus of “Red”: “Losing him was blue like I’ve never known.” It also seemingly alludes to this line from “So Long, London”: “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days.”
47. In the bridge, “When anyone called me late night / He was screwin’ around with my mind / Askin’, ‘What are you wearin’?’ / Too high to remember in the morning” seemingly alludes to Matty Healy, whose weed smoking she previously appeared to reference on the TTPD title track. She wrote, “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate.”
48. In “The Life of a Showgirl,” the line “They said she didn’t do it legitly” called to mind the accusations Taylor’s faced about her dad, Scott Swift, “buying” her career because he was a shareholder in Big Machine Records.
49. The bridge (“I took her pearls of wisdom / Hung them from my neck / I paid my dues with every bruise / I knew what to expect”) is potentially a callback to “The Lucky One”: “It was a few years later, I showed up here / And they still tell the legend of how you disappeared / How you took the money and your dignity and got the hell out / They say you bought a bunch of land somewhere / Chose the Rose Garden over Madison Square / And it took some time, but I understand it now / ‘Cause now my name is up in lights / But I think you got it right.”
50. The line “And all the headshots on the walls / Of the dance hall are of the bitches / Who wish I’d hurry up and die / But I’m immortal now, baby dolls / I couldn’t if I tried” seemingly alludes to how Taylor overcame her fears about aging in the music industry.
In her 2019 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, she said, “We do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35… As I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.”
Of course, at 35, she’s more popular and successful than she’s ever been.
51. At the end of the song, we hear audio from The Eras Tour, with Taylor thanking her band, dancers, and collaborator/former opener Sabrina Carpenter.
52. The overall “showgirl” branding was foreshadowed in the skit she added to The Eras Tour after releasing TTPD. In the bit, Taylor played a showgirl who protested as dancers Kameron Saunders and Jan Ravnik (and in London, special guest Travis Kelce) tried to get her ready for the show.
53. And finally, there was another Easter egg all the way back in 2022 in the “Bejeweled” music video, which featured burlesque icon Dita Von Teese.
What did you think of The Life of a Showgirl? Are there any other references you think I missed, or ones you disagreed with? Let me know in the comments!