Taylor Swift Loses Touch with Lyricism on The Life of a Showgirl

As a longtime Swiftie, I just want to ask her why...

I just don’t understand Taylor Swift anymore. If I was the most rich, famous, lauded pop star on the planet, I wouldn’t still be doing Target deals, twenty versions of the same vinyl, a seventy-fifth cardigan. I also wouldn’t release an album that comes off on close listen like a word jumble of the 2025 internet buzzwords that could’ve been spat out of, I truly hate to say this, AI. And I don’t say this as a Taylor Swift hater.

This woman shaped my worldview, my sensibilities as a writer, as a woman. As a kid who never quite fit in and had major beliefs she’d go on to do big things, Taylor Swift was my Laurette. I still sleep in the Reputation tour shirt that I bought in one of those “dump the warehouse” sales from nearly a decade ago. There are Taylor Swift songs that are among the best songs that will ever be written, and that’s a hill I’ll gladly die on. She deserves her flowers, but she has severely lost her way in a fashion that leaves me less convinced than ever she’ll find her way back. The utter lack of substance on The Life of a Showgirl makes it the first time I’ve ever said, “Well, it’s decent if you don’t listen to the words.”

When you have all the money, time, creative power, discretion, and control in the world, I cannot fathom why this is what you choose to put out. What Taylor did at her peak was craft incredible, all-encompassing eras that could be lived in and through, fully inhabited, marking a clear span of time. It was communicated through outfits, haircuts, aesthetic choices, color, performances. There was lore, some of which came from gossip and tabloids, but that wasn’t the whole thing, that engined a universe. And they had a start, a middle, an end, and a break between to reset. The albums themselves were the core of this, a fully inhabited universe in the songs, presented on a highly edited, thought-through, tight record that tells a story. Usually, they also came with some particular creative goal (On Speak Now, it was to prove the haters who said she couldn’t have actually written Fearless wrong by doing an entirely self-written record. On 1989, it was proving she could create a fully sonically cohesive record after the pop-rock-country blend of Red.) The last time Taylor did this was with Folklore, which was really the beginning of the end as Evermore is truly just an appendix (that doesn’t mean it’s not great), just on a longer-term delay in release than what came later. Then we have Midnights and Tortured Poets getting lengthy second albums worth of bonus tracks—the data dump as people have come to call it. They were a pain to sift through, overwhelming, gems getting lost in the sheer volume. But there were gems! And the albums offered rewards—across lyricism, drama, pop songs, images, mined personal moments—if you spent the time to crack it.

Sadly, my first impression of Life of a Showgirl was that Taylor’s taken all of the more unfortunate ticks of her later work—the awkward shoehorning of hyper-modern vocabulary, a cloying wordiness, an inability to couch experiences beyond her famous person lens—and lost the qualities that still made the records worth listening to. This was further highlighted by listening to the Pop Pantheon episode on Speak Now last night where Louis repeatedly made the point that one of Taylor’s best gifts in the early days was her ability to universalize her famous person experiences into feelings and images that anyone could relate to. Even in certain songs directly about being famous, she managed to invite you into the world, communicate the feeling directly enough to find universality.

Now, you need the latest tabloid to parse half of what she’s talking about. She’s abandoned storytelling for a direct accounting of scores and an assurance that everything will be fine now that she’s found someone who wants to get married. I wanted to see if this album, promised to be a love story, could make me see what’s so great about Travis Kelce, what made this love finally the one. According to Taylor, this love is empty platitudes and vacant space, and I’m still confused.

That’s probably mean, but whatever.

I never thought that I’d say the saving grace of a Taylor Swift album would be the production, but I’m going to say it now. I’ve listened to the album a few times, and I enjoyed it vastly more when I had it on in the background than on my first listen that I spent locked into every word she said. If I could tune out the lyrics, I found I started to feel less depressed and started bopping along. So props to Max Martin and Shellback.

It would be wrong to say all the sonic credit goes to them, though, considering Max Martin has been the main producer behind some of the most misguided pop records of recent years (looking at you, Found Heaven). He needs to be paired with the right collaborators, and Taylor has always been one of the best accompaniments for Max, asserting her own voice and creative instincts into his mathematical genius. Is this showcased far better on the entirety of 1989 and Reputation? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t create a sonically interesting record that’s a total vibe from a distance this time around.

I think, as a writer, though, and a writer who has spent so much of my life looking up to the way that Taylor can craft an image, tell an entire story in a three minute song, this album feels like a complete letdown. There’s no “Black Dog” on this record that made me gulp air and stare at a wall in shock when it was over. There’s nothing remotely close. It feels almost offensive to “Me!,” the last Taylor Swift song that almost made me entirely lose faith in her judgement, to say this is a record where the song would finally feel at home, red herring as it was on Lover. And some people will say that this is just hating on fun, happy, pop songs. But it’s not. There’s nothing more impressive than an upbeat song that is still deeply fulfilling. “Silk Chiffon” is an all time favorite song of mine. “Style” and “Wildest Dreams” and “Gorgeous” are great. “Cruel Summer”! “Bejeweled” and “Karma” at least have a wink to them. Hell, I found “So High School” on the weaker side of TPD, but it’s better than all of these songs, with two exceptions.

I think it’s the opening question I posed that I just keep coming back to. Why release this record? She’s under no obligation to, has put out more music in the last 5 years than anyone could’ve hoped to ask for, just got off a massive world tour, and apparently has a wedding to plan. It’s not her best work. And that would be understandable from an artist early in their career, under pressure by the label to produce, produce, produce. But she might be one of five artists who doesn’t face that pressure. This record is not adding to her legacy of being one of the best songwriters of her generation. She has to know that.

The only conceivable answer is money. Which is its whole own thing.

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So, let’s get into the tracks…

The Fate of Ophelia

This one sits somewhere between middle of the road to good in the scheme of the album. There’s a concept to it as Taylor likens herself to Ophelia and being saved from her fate. To be exceptionally clear that this is Kelce we’re talking about as the love interest, she tells the listener, “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,” which is a line that doesn’t quite sit right with me, especially in what images like Pledging to the American flag and NFL teams evoke at the present moment. In these songs, she’s often the damsel being saved, departing from self-conscious lines like, “I want to wear is initial on a chain round my neck/not because he owns me/but cause he really knows me.” The construction here is solid, though, and I do appreciate the link this creates between Tortured Poets and the new record picking up where Kelce is riding in, knight in shining armor style, to save her from the madness she descended into because of her last break-up. But the content makes me a little weary of what’s coming next.

Elizabeth Taylor

This chorus drop was the first thing that really caught my attention on the record. This song treads on familiar Taylor topics—men can’t handle my fame. Also the well trod idea of trading material things for a true love. I will say, there’s more name dropping of designer brands on this record I’ve ever heard from Taylor or really any pop star. Cartier, Balenciaga, Gucci, etc. The awkward line that sticks out to me on this song is by far not the most offensive thing happening on the record but just rings false: “what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?” She likes to fancy herself an underdog or, less charitably, a victim, and for a long time, she played this off as relatable, a shockingly long time. But it’s gotten old. By every conceivable metric, Taylor Swift does not have “nothing at all.”

Opalite

This is one of those songs I found myself bopping to when I wasn’t paying as much attention. It’s genuinely groovy. I guess what she’s trying to express here is that life and love is much more simple and straightforward than she ever believed it to be, but the lyrics are just a bunch of empty contradictions. “All of the foes and all of the friends / Have messed up before, they’ll mess up again,” “life is a song, it ends when it ends,” “All the perfect couples said, ‘When you know, you know’/And, ‘When you don’t, you don’t.’” Let’s repeat words until they become meaningless? The rest of the song, like the first verse line, “I thought my house was haunted / I used to live with ghost,” just prove the necessity of a good editor to say, “Hey! You don’t need both those parts!" She just seems to be digging around a lot of cliches in the chorus images and hollow sayings through the rest of it, leading me to wonder why the song needed to exist.

Father Figure

It feels like since “Mad Woman” on Folklore, or maybe more notably, “no body, no crime,” she has to pretend to be some kind of mobster on one song per album. I don’t really get it, and I don’t tend to love these songs. The end of the song where she flips on the person she’s offering to be a father figure for is some of the more interesting lyrical work on the record, but it comes so far out of left field where I haven’t quite nailed down who she’s speaking to in the song that it doesn’t fully hit. Also, I can get down with “The Man” all day long and Taylor’s heavy gestures towards her personal brand of feminism, but I really did not need, “You made a deal with the devil, turns out my dick’s bigger.”

I don’t think this is actually true, but this concept of seeing yourself in a younger artist and then turning on them and becoming determined to bury them feels oddly reminiscent of the Olivia Rodrigo dust-up. But she wouldn’t go there, right? I don’t know anymore, and that makes me, parasocial as it is, sad.

Eldest Daughter

This song makes me want to SCREAM in frustration on multiple layers. I mean, for starters, opening a song with, “Everybody’s so punk on the internet,” and then following it up with lines that include “unbothered,” “memes,” “cutthroat in the comments,” “hot take,” is somewhere between “how goes it fellow kids” and “pack it up, grandma.” Also, the fact these lines are delivered with burning sincerity over a piano ballad makes my skin crawl all the more. Like someone is writing a parody of a Taylor Swift song. I want extreme realism in my fiction, but in a song, I’d love for you to find a way to artfully couch your haters on the internet trauma into something more poetic.

Which brings me to what infuriates me most, which is that there are really good, incisive lines and moments in here. That atrocious verse ends with, “When you found me, I said I was busy / That was a lie.” The delivery is fascinating, the hints of story this introduces makes me want more of that so badly. And then she follows it up with the best line on the whole album, one that fits in the vein of “This is Me Trying”: “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness.” But instead of diving deeper there, giving more thoughts on “sometimes growing up precocious means not growing up at all,” we get another horribly mortifying line featuring the words “bad bitch” and “savage.” Who let her do this?! And then instead of a chorus about the flaws of being an eldest daughter that she brings up offhandedly throughout or what being the eldest daughter means for approaching love, we get a Kleenex-thin chorus about how she’ll never leave this guy’s side, which feels almost besides the point of the song? So many songs on this record play with other topics and ideas and then for some reason have to loop back around to “I pledge undying allegiance to my man.” I still don’t know what makes him so great other than that he chose her, and we’re on track 5. Also, how was this worthy of being track 5 when “Ruin the Friendship” was right there.

But then she makes it worse by giving us a second verse that has some of the most compelling imagery on the record. Finally, something real! She says the last time she laughed this hard she must have been an eight year old playing on the trampoline in someone’s yard, which is just such a rooted image in the utter abyss of this album. It sticks out. She goes on to say that later that day she broke her arm and then likens it to other loss of innocence moments in childhood—when your crush doesn’t like you back, when you learn to be careful what you share out loud. She ends this off saying that it was a lie when she said she didn’t believe in marriage, which honestly tracks with teenage, Southern Bell Taylor. But as someone who found it very cool when she was in her era of stop asking me when I’m going to get married, I can do long-term relationships on my own terms and in my own way and that doesn’t define me, this was disappointing. I think it’s just emblematic of everything that’s happened to Taylor’s public image since breaking up with Matty and starting up with Travis. She’s used the relationship to become queen of the WAG/tradwife universe, and I just find that to be such a sad, depressing, bleak final form for who Taylor Swift has been and everything she’s accomplished.

But this insistence of ruining good ideas with bad internet speak persists. She comes up with an interesting concept of eldest daughters being the first lambs taken to slaughter so we dress up in wolves clothes as a means of over-self-protection, but then she destroys the line by ending it with “and we looked fire.” Why!

Ruin The Friendship

This is the only song on the record I couldn’t have lived without, and I won’t say it doesn’t have its clunky moments, but this is the kind of stuff I want from Taylor at this phase in her life. For a minute, I was like why are we setting this so firmly in high school, since Taylor does have a tendency to often dip back to that spot, but then the final payoff was immense. It strikes me that this is the only song that feels truly personal on the record and like it’s letting the listener into something vulnerable and real. It delivers what I go to music to hear, and it tells a full, well developed story and then has a reversal at the end that adds additional weight, and then she closes with a bit of the big sister advice that so many of us grew up listening to her songs for as she implores the listener, “My advice is to ruin the friendship / Better that than regret it for all time… My advice is to answer the question / Better that than to ask it all your life.”

In the first verse alone, she proves that she can still tell a story like no other. She gets specific, setting this highway scene, driving with this guy, going 85, looking at the graffiti, naming specific places in Tennessee, watching the game from his brother’s Jeep. She does a similar thing describing a scene at prom. She talks about these little glances they shared and moments she could’ve gone for it but describes all the voices in her head holding her back, telling her to not make it weird. Then it’s revealed, by way of a phone call from Abagail years later, long after they’d lost touch, that this teenage crush had passed away. So Taylor describes showing up at the funeral, still feeling so many unresolved things for this man. Even at his grave, she’s still saying, “Should’ve kissed you anyway.” Then the song turns out to address the listener, harnessing a tool she used so effectively in “You’re on Your Own Kid,” to give her advice on ruining the friendship. This song is probably uniquely gut-punching to me for personal reasons, and I’m a bit dismayed to find out that I’m never gonna get over it, but this is also exactly what I come to Taylor Swift songs for.

And, as an aside, it uses the perspective she’s gained through her adulthood to great effect, and I wish she’d lean into that more.

Actually Romantic

“Ruin the Friendship” starts a stronger run of songs for a wobbly album. I’m of two minds about “Actually Romantic” because as a song, I think it’s pretty hilarious and well constructed. As an offensive on the part of Taylor against Charli XCX, I have more negative feelings.

But let’s start with the good stuff since there hasn’t bee much of that! Taylor is at her best when she’s in attack mode going after someone she believes wronged her. The legacy started with “Mean,” and there’s just about one song on every album that totally obliterates someone who’s wronged her in a way that’s not romantic. They’re usually cutting and vengeful and fairly brutal, but they work because they get so granularly specific. This is no exception. Over a slinky, cool guitar track, Taylor spins the idea that hearing this person (who is undeniably Charli) say bad things about her doesn’t hurt. In fact, it’s kind of funny, almost like a romantic obsession that this person can’t stop talking about her. Devoid of context, it’s a great anthem for reframing bullying and realizing that usually when people say bad things about you, it’s more their own problem than yours. Classic Swiftian material.

Taylor goes right for the throat opening with, “I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave.” Then she goes on to list Charli’s other offenses: high fiving Matty for ghosting Taylor, writing “Sympathy is a Knife,” etc. At one point, she compares Charli to a teacup chihuahua yapping from someone’s purse. The best line is probably, “How many times has your boyfriend said / Why are we talking bout her?” She’s fairly brutal and also desperate to make the point that she finds the attention deeply flattering, sometimes taking it inelegantly far like when she says it “makes her wet,” to which I wrote in my notes app “Calm Down, Sabrina Carpenter.”

But the context has shifted since she wrote “Mean.”

And this feels different than the constant jabs at Kim and Kanye who are very much close enough to her level to have petty arguments with or Scooter Braun who’s an asshole. Going after Charli in this way just feels… low. “Sympathy is a Knife” is far more about Charli’s own insecurities and the difficulty of being told “why can’t you just be Taylor Swift?” than it is about Taylor personally. On Brat, Charli is extremely candid about her less flattering impulses, and I think she wants to explore those in an honest way. This feels like ripping someone’s head off over what should register to Taylor as nothing. And the more Taylor tries to tell us she’s unbothered by this, the less believable that is. Nobody writes a whole song to tell someone how little they care about their opinion if they truly don’t care. Which, I’m sorry that Taylor was hurt by Charli’s words and actions, but bringing it into the realm of public opinion, she just looks petty, sad, and like she’s running with the chance to punch down. No matter how big of an era Brat was, Charli has nowhere near the same amount of power, and no matter how Taylor wants to sell this story, she is not the underdog.

She’s doing exactly what she vowed to stop doing in the Lover era’s big, make up with Katy Perry music video rainbow barf moment—attacking another successful woman over perceived slights. It’s not becoming. What happened to “we all got crowns?”

And, if we’re being honest, Boring Barbie is not an unfair swipe at what Taylor has chosen to do with her public image of late.

It’s a good song. It’s a particularly bad song when you think about other responses to Charli’s complicated Brat feelings. I mean, look at “Girl So Confusing” and how it managed to become a dialogue about the murky, confusing nature of girls’ relationships with one another in the way Lorde handled responding to being written about.

Wi$h Li$t

Add this to the list of songs that I can really bop my head to if I don’t listen to the words but the second I start paying attention I feel genuinely ill. The entire concept of the song is Taylor listing off all these materialist things that people desire like yachts and helicopters and designer sunglasses and a “fat ass with a baby face” and three dogs they pretend are their kids (a weird diss coming from a once proud cat mom…), and an Oscar and then saying that she doesn’t care about any of that. No, what does Taylor Swift want? She wants a to be left the fuck alone (her words not mine) in a big suburban house with a basketball hoop out front and a whole football team of kids. She literally says, “Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.” At one point, she directly contradicts herself by listing one of the supposed airhead’s wants “they want freedom, living off the grid” before going on to announce that’s exactly what she wants for herself. And, at this point, I wonder why she doesn’t just get on with doing that!

I try really hard to interrogate what is genuinely disconcerting and what is someone wanting something different from me, but it does feel a little sinister how Taylor has gone from her post supporting Kamala as a proud cat lady, focused on her career and her own life and reclaiming her life’s work to this—romance was always there; she’s Taylor Swift. She’s always had a traditional twinge to her, though that lessened over the years for a while. But there’s something painful to me about the most successful woman on the planet announcing that her highest form in life is to be a wife and a mother with a basketball hoop. Parenthood and family and all of these things can be deeply fulfilling, sure, but I think it’s the way she talks about it that gets me. The promotional aspect of the way she’s conducted this relationship with Travis Kelce and the heel turn away from I’m a happy and fulfilled person to wait now I’m whole because I’m getting married and going to have this traditional life, is a bit icky. Doing it quietly, for personal reasons is one thing. Grandstanding about it in a song as an aspirational life direction is another. This isn’t “Lucky Ones”’s dreams of fleeing the spotlight for normality. The fact that this album exists negates that as an honest desire.

In the context of this political time, especially, it’s just… gross feeling.

Also, Taylor has already written a much better song about forsaking material things for love. It was for Joe Alwyn, and it’s called “Paper Rings.”

Wood

This song is my hard and fast skip on the record. I’m shocked there’s no writing credit for interpolation here cause it starts out sounding like a Hansen song and then has clear nods to a Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” in vibe. She credited George Michael when she took his “Father Figure” concept. Also, this song is just useless. It’s not witty; she’s trying to play with innuendo to disastrous effect, I guess cause she’s seen Sabrina Carpenter’s success with it? But Sabrina understands the art of the wink, and she’s so popular right now because she pulls off something possibly no one else could. That’s what makes her noteworthy. Taylor only serves to prove that here. “His love was the key that opened my thighs,” pardon me?

CANCELLED!

Is she taking up for Blake Lively? That’s the only friend I can think of that’s been cancelled lately. But then it’s strange that Taylor seems to intentionally distancing herself from Blake publicly. Or could it, more sinisterly, be about Brittney Mahomes and the flack she’s gotten for her political opinions? But I wouldn’t call her a girl boss. I’m just going to say it, say it as someone whose OG Stan album is Reputation: I’m so fucking tired of hearing from Taylor about her cancellation in *checks notes* 2016. For a long time, I defended it. That was a major trauma for her. It would be scary to have the entire world, that built you up and put you on a pedestal, rip you down over something you didn’t actually do. Totally understand. Probably something you never get over. And she’s written some songs that are quite moving about it, usually when she’s in a less ham-fisted mode. But these songs that are almost whiny, reminding us every five seconds about it, are getting old. I’m losing sympathy. Because, truly, Taylor didn’t lose anything materially from the cancellation. She only got bigger from there. She always uses these songs too to make proto-feminist type statements, and I’ve always kind of shied away from the Taylor/white, wealthy feminism discourse, but it’s getting glaring at this point. Taylor’s feminism does operate purely for herself, and there’s not much wiggle room to give her benefit of the doubt anymore. She’s worried about it so far as it extends to herself and her famous friends who can afford to be cloaked in “Gucci and in scandal.”

Honey

What a relief to be able to say nice things again! This is my second favorite song on the album and what I was hoping this whole return to pop and in love record would be. It’s the only good love song Kelce has managed to inspire, and it does what I was hoping to get, a glimmer of insight into what makes him compelling. The song is kind of funny cause she’s giving these examples of being called “honey” and “sweetheart” in these really demeaning, classically Southern, put-down ways, and then in the chorus, she describes how he calls her these names and it redefines the words for her. It’s really very sweet and is a unique bend on a love song. Why couldn’t there have been more of this?

The Life of a Showgirl ft. Sabrina Carpenter

It’s funny she tries out Sabrina’s shtick on this album and then literally invites her to be on the record. This is kind of a “Clara Bow” type song but less elegant. It feels like a repeat, and the chorus sounds so much like a song I’ve heard before, but I can’t put my finger on which one. This just feels like a deeply inessential song beyond trying to make the title make sense because the rest of the album has very little to do with being a showgirl, performing, or the Era’s Tour. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” would make more sense for this record. Why couldn’t we have gotten something more in that vein? Really, most of the songs aren’t specifically about anything. This song doesn’t make it better. The feather boa to top it all off. I had the same response to this song as her duet with Gracie, that kind of “but why?” feeling.

Conclusion:

To anyone who made it this far, thank you for listening to me rant on my soapbox. I’ll get down now (not really). I think that my faith and perception of Taylor has wavered as I’ve gotten older, as the world has gotten politically bleaker, as she’s grown astronomically more famous and the meaning of being a “Swiftie” warped into being a label I no longer want to claim. And I think that, before, I might have struggled to get into an album, but they ultimately pulled me back in to her universe, her lore, my faith in her artistic integrity and her as a person. Tortured Poets was interesting because it came out at the fresh beginning of the Kelce relationship and the PR moves that were making me uneasy, but the record wasn’t about all of that. TPD was a world in itself and a throwback to a relationship that everyone else hated but I thought said something interesting and compelling about Taylor. As a personal aside, I think the long bending road of time will reveal which relationship truly had more insidious undertones. But TPD told a story of love and passion and reunion years down the line coming to a dramatic and earth shattering end that yanked me back in. Reminded me why I identified with Taylor all these years. Reminded me why I was a fan. Made me dig back into the back catalog and see things in a different light.

I’ve lost enthusiasm in the year since then as Taylor has boiled herself down to some tradwife, WAG representative. How her life’s mission is talking about her sourdough, which there’s nothing wrong with. Taylor’s always been a devout baker. But something about the flavor of it in context with everything else hasn’t sat right. How she’s dumbed herself down for a man who seems to struggle to rub two braincells together. I’m sure there are smarter men in the NFL if a football player was what her heart desired. (I once had a friend tell me I deserved intellectual chemistry, and if I could give BFF advice to Taylor, that’s what I’d say). And I wanted the music to pull me back in desperately. I didn’t have much faith it would, but it’s still crushing to realize it won’t. Instead, it’s doubled down on the undertones that I’ve tried to ignore for the sake of my twelve-year-old self.

There’s a lot to be said about the turn towards domesticity in popular media, the pushing of the tradwife type content. People have said that even Sally Rooney is contributing to this by having characters get married at the end of her novels. The marriage plot. I don’t, actually, find fault with this in Rooney’s case and in the context of the characters. She’s writing about older characters than she used to, and sometimes the end of the story at middle age is marriage. I might have my quibbles with the institution, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it as an individual choice. Just like there’s nothing wrong with Taylor Swift getting married, throwing herself a big wedding. I’ve found Charli’s series of weddings over the course of the summer to be deeply cool. I was so happy for Selena and Benny. What I take issue with is Taylor branding the fact that she’s bagged a husband as her biggest life achievement. That, forget everything else we used to entertain ourselves with in this pre-marriage era, none of it matters because I finally get to wear a white dress and become a wife and have 2.5 kids.

If Taylor wants to feel that way personally, if she wants to dismiss everything before for this new beginning with a man that’s falling over his feet for her, go right ahead. That is her right. Maybe it’s healing to her soul. In certain readings, it’s what Taylor’s been after through her entire narrative arc. It tracks because she is truly a very traditional Southern girl at heart. There is a reason people thought she could be a Trump supporter. I don’t begrudge Taylor personally. What feels wrong, especially in this moment when fascism and conservatism is on the rise in the country she’s decided to blend into her brand as the leading All American Girl, is that she’s promoting it to her audience as such. And while fairytales were sweet at one time, ‘life is okay now because Prince Charming saved me’ feels reductive and somewhat dangerous, at least not without some kind of caveat, clunky as it was, a “not because he owns me”. Paired with the ruthless attempts to part fans from their dollars with poorly made merch and dominate album sales by shilling as many variants possible when she’d have the number 1 album regardless, this doesn’t paint a great picture of the values she holds. The optics of sitting in that box week after week with Brittney Mahomes. That this is the peak and final form, reinforced now by the music. This is the first time I haven’t been able to love a Taylor Swift love story.

It’s hard. That’s what I’ll say, having grown up a Swiftie. It’s really hard to accept that that’s all there is, but I am losing hope here.