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The Life of a Showgirl; High Expectations?
- Joey Gilbertson
- Sep 5
- 3 min read
Hi everyone!! It's been a few months but Earworm is back for another year of great music blogs. 🥹🥹 Over the summer, a lot of news has come out about a number of projects. But there's one that everyone's talking about- Taylor Swifts newest album "The Life of a Showgirl". I wanted to dig deeper and make some predictions before the album releases, so that's exactly what we're doing today! Let's get into it!!
Thoughts and Expectations
If you told me a couple weeks ago that Taylor would appear on the New Heights podcast and announce TS12 with Travis Kelce and his brother, I would have probably laughed in your face. But here we are, and I couldn't be more excited. While I did love her last album "The Tortured Poets Department", I was starting to get tired of the dreariness of it all. I was looking for some pop bangers, especially in a year like 2025 where we don't even have an actual song of the summer yet. Needless to say, Taylor is (hopefully) coming to save us! She's made a couple of comments about what can be expected from this album. First of all, it's being produced by both Max Martin and Shellback, who are responsibly for some of her biggest hits. Notably, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner are missing from the roster this time. There have been a lot of debates about whether or not these two are preventing Taylor from exploring more production styles. I go back on forth on that idea, but I think those two are a net-positive for Taylor's music more often than not.
Despite that, I do think that these two producers she did choose are going to do a way better job at completing the vision for this album. It seems that, based on what
Taylor and Travis have said about this album, that it's going to another bulletproof pop album. Some are speculating that it'll be mix of both "1989" and "reputation". As a huge fan of reputation, I would be so happy if that were the case. While I do think this could be a possibility, I think it will be more complicated than just a simple hybrid of the two. Based on the visuals and theming of this album, I think she's going in a direction similar to her songs "Bejeweled" or "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart". Especially since she's revealed that this album will focus on her experience on The Eras Tour. Regardless, I'm pretty excited to see what this album has to offer in terms of production and overall sound. I wanted to try and claim some songs off of the tracklist, just to see how good my intuition is. I think the title track has the best chance of being really good, especially because it's featuring Sabrina Carpenter. My hopes are really high for that one. I also feel like 'The Fate of Ophelia' could be interesting, because it has a reference point and could show off Taylor's ability to explore a specific concept and apply it to herself. She did this on 'Clara Bow', and I actually found it pretty interesting and insightful in that song. The last song I really think I'll enjoy is "WI$H LI$T". While the dollar signs do seem kind of corny, I can't help but think of Kesha when I see that. With that in mind, I really hope she has a fun little girlboss moment with this song.
Conclusion
With all that said, I'm really looking forward to giving this album a spin. It releases on October 3rd of this year, so a little under a month at this point. Right now, I'm feeling pretty good about this album. The fact it's only 12 tracks is hopefully a sign that she was more selective with her songs for this album, which should lead to a higher quality album. Here's to hoping its front to back. If not, then... we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, all we have to do is wait. Thanks for sticking around and reading my thoughts! I'm excited to be back and posting for UIC Radio! Have a good rest of your day!
Earworm ~-~-~o
Thanks for reading!
-Joey :)
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