On October 3rd, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released one of her most anticipated albums to date, The Life of a Showgirl. This is her twelfth album–not including her re-recordings – which would make this album her sixteenth. The Life of a Showgirl consists of 12 songs, overall lasting around 42 minutes. In just one week, the release sold over four million copies, surpassing Adele’s decade-long record.

Swift’s inspiration for the album is drawn from The Eras Tour, which grossed over $2 billion. She pulls the curtain and gives her fans an inside look into what it truly means to be a showgirl. 

Speculation regarding the new album started when her tour ended.  An “easter egg,” the singer’s clues she gives to fans, was on the last show of the tour in Vancouver on December 8th, 2024. Normally towards the end of her performances, Swift takes a final bow and then the stage lowers as the fireworks send her out. However, in Vancouver, she walked through an orange door – which is also the central color for her new album – located toward the back of the stage. Fans suspect that Swift went through the door to hint to her fans that she was entering a new era: the “Showgirl” era. 

For the past six albums, Swift co-produced with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. Those albums have been great successes, two of which won Best Album Grammy Awards. Even so, Swift switched it up and had Max Martin and Shellback as co-producers of TLOAS. Fans will recognize these producers from several of Swift’s earlier songs, such as “Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” “…Ready for It?” and more. While on The Eras Tour, which covered 21 countries in total, Swift would fly from to Stockholm, Sweden to meet with the producers and ultimately record the new album. 

“Being in the studio and creating these songs was an unforgettable experience,” Swift wrote on Instagram, “but luckily I don’t ever have to forget it because I was recording while we were writing–and now it’s a way to look back on the process and gives you guys a glimpse into how we wrote these songs.”

The joyful lyrics and upbeat production that retell her experience on The Eras Tour differ from her more recent albums, where the production and lyrics took more of a sorrowful approach to where she was in life. Swift’s previous album, The Tortured Poets Department, was folk-pop with an underlying tone of darkness and grief. The singer’s new album, while not the complete opposite, contains true pop music with a sassy and lively tone.

Swift announced this album to the fans in a peculiar way. While normally the singer makes an Instagram post or a Good Morning America feature to announce an album, The Life of a Showgirl was announced on her now fiancé’s podcast, New Heights. Hosted alongside his brother Jason Kelce, Travis Kelce – a football player for the Kansas City Chiefs – and Swift had been seeing each other for a little over two years. Fans were shocked not only to see Swift on a sports podcast but to see her announce her new album on the show. 

While Swifties are known to be very loyal fans of everything Taylor Swift, this latest album has caused some heated debates throughout the fandom. 

TLOAS, to some, has not been universally seen as her best work. Critics of the album believe that its aesthetic and promo photoshoot provided a false sense of  how the album was going to sound. While some thought this record would have a more jazzy, burlesque feel, the album sounded similar to other albums produced by Martin and Shellback such as 1989.  The songs written and produced on The Life of a Showgirl also seem lackluster when compared to her previous work. The song titled “CANCELLED!,” the tenth track, has been criticized for what some think as cringy lyrics. The lyric  “Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?” had fans shocked by her surface-level lyricism.

However, any album written by Swift comes with die-hard fans who defend every second of the recording. What fans seemed to appreciate the most about TLOAS is that it simply is a fun album. Is it some of her best lyricism? Most agree that it’s not, but that does not hinder the playfulness of the album. When listening to The Life of a Showgirl, fans also get a glimpse of Swift’s relationship with Kelce. On the song “Wi$h Li$t,” Swift writes, “I just want you / Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.” Fans who have stuck by her side for decades truly appreciate her happiness, and songs on the album prove just that.

“I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art,” Swift said during an interview promoting the album. “I’m not the art police. Everybody is allowed to feel what they want.”

Since the release of the album, Swift has made the effort to make this album an interactive experience. “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” which played in cinemas earlier this month, showed lyric videos to her songs, behind-the-scenes content to her new music video, and the release of that same music video, “The Fate of Ophelia.”  On October 13, ten days after her album released, Swift also announced a six part docu-series of footage that covers the inner-workings of the tour. Swift’s ability to pull back the curtain and let fans see what the ground-breaking tour felt like to the pop star allows for even more appreciation of the singer’s hard work. 

Swift also went to Instagram on October 13, thanking the fans for listening to her album.

“Thank you for going out to celebrate this project in the movie theaters, investing in vinyl, streaming, watching the video, buying CDs, reading the poems I wrote inside the packaging, and immersing yourselves in The Life of a Showgirl,” she wrote. “I’ll cherish this feeling forever. Just wow. Thank you for the lovely bouquet.”