Taylor Needs to Let the Showgirl Era Go

Adding more songs to an album with a deluxe rerelease months later can either refuel the project’s commercial potential or weigh it down with leftovers once deemed inessential. Not everyone scores their “Super Bass” or “Hips Don’t Lie,” the post-album single that outshines the preceding hit parade. Taylor Swift, queen of alternate versions, married NFL tight end Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden in July while running a merch-and-extras campaign that made her feel almost ever-present since last October’s divisive The Life of a Showgirl. She dropped over three dozen variants of the album, enough for fans to track via a spreadsheet. Her career is an industry bellwether: Swift’s propensity for clearing her musical vaults answers to a more-is-better audience ethos. It also feeds the Billboard charts enough to keep justifying her and her peers pushing out more deluxes. Today’s The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore keeps that era going with four new original tracks Swift made during a recent trip to Sweden to reflect on the original album with its co-writers and co-producers Shellback and Max Martin. Encore shares Showgirl’s points of interest and irritation: She’s madly in love but fixated on external stressors and back with the co-authors of her blockbuster 1989 but restrained by the neatness of their production.

Showgirl explored Swift’s hunger for romance and revenge while folding multiple genres into a manicured mid-tempo groove. The mix of drums informed by rap and R&B, strings and guitars gesturing to rock and country, and pop-radio confetti resulted in a grab bag of both great and grating quality. Elegant, quiet songs about prickly situations, like “Ruin the Friendship,” were edged out by stormy adult-contemporary chaff. The rock moments could’ve been exhilarating for her catalogue, but they landed in songs seemingly absorbed by drama with Charli XCX and Blake Lively, zeroing any sense of nonchalance or danger because Swift comes across as too bothered. Encore revisits that album’s musical ingredients and amorous but intermittently cantankerous spirit. It’s another balance of eye-popping frankness and heart-on-the-sleeve awkwardness. On “Patient Zero,” the single whose trebly violin implies it’ll be a Celtic folk jam until hip-hop percussion drops, Swift gabs with an ex’s more recent ex about his social-climber shtick. The core metaphor is English-major clever — “If he’s killing you, I see you, I was patient zero” — and going for a This man is literally medically poisonous vibe, like Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” But her use of that term is awkward. The concept of a “patient zero” comes from early HIV research in the 1980s but has since been debunked, and, for decades, the term was used to demonize queer sex. Swift’s bookishness seems to reach its limit here.

After “Patient Zero” comes “Cleveland!,” a sedate piano-rock stomper about locking down a partner for life while being spectated by people who aren’t necessarily happy for her and Kelce. It’s honest about the fractious reaction to the power couple’s media ever-presence, which draws as much excited attention as eye-rolling. The verses parrot Swift’s haters: “She’s not as hot as she was, but she was only a four / She was never a girls’ girl, she was just a—.” “The taste of me is acquired, but it’s his favorite dish / He says I look like an angel, they say, ‘I hate that—.’” It’s odd for her first song explicitly about the celebrity wedding of the year to linger on what’s being said about it on the apps. But frankly, “Cleveland!” is a more realistic assessment of the joys and pains of cohabitation as one of Earth’s most famous humans than recent happy-go-lucky fluff from other stars headed to the altar.

“Pink Clouding” takes after “Maroon” from 2022’s Midnights in painting a scene of regret in hues of red over a hip-hop-adjacent pop arrangement. In the song, Swift apologizes to an ex for neglecting his feelings, comparing the bliss of a rebound relationship to the excitement of drug users post-withdrawal in recovery, where the term in the title originates. Like “The Fate of Ophelia” and “Patient Zero,” “Pink Clouding” is plagued by a metaphor that frames its romantic pining as a much more serious scenario. Encore likens bad breakups to immunocompromisation and kicking opiates. The writer of “Wood,” Showgirl’s forest of brittle dick puns, is doubling down on the surprising defensiveness of last year’s engagement album and also its millennial cringe. She’s logged in enough to know what naysayers think, but as was the case with The Tortured Poets Department’s “I Hate It Here” wishing for a return to the 1830s, she doesn’t realize which references are radioactive.

It’s a thrill to see Swift engage with critics of her wedding, bop on an ex-boyfriend by showing sympathy for his next partner, and fess up to some responsibility for her own recklessness. But the pervasive tackiness suggests it’s time to move on from this Shellback and Martin reunion. She doesn’t seem as engaged in the material that focuses on past unpleasantry and brisk dance-pop. She sounds rejuvenated in the wistful, rustic closer “Babylon,” where she reflects on the lost simplicity of her childhood from the purview of an adult people pleaser, and elsewhere in “I Knew It, I Knew You,” the Americana/R&B meet-cute from the summer’s Toy Story 5 soundtrack, which is better than anything here. The mid-tempo, post-genre angst of Encore feels old hat when she did it more brashly on Reputation, like a long-overdue exhalation of thoughts the singer has held onto most of a year. It tries harder than the average deluxe edition is likely to, going back to the producers for new material, but it doesn’t upstage the best of what we’ve already heard. The job of an encore is to jump back out of the shadows and deliver the greatest moment of the night just when everyone thought it was over. This one makes you excited for a new dawn.