Do We Nonetheless Like Taylor Swift When She’s Completely happy?

If I have been writing a track about Travis Kelce, a person I’ve by no means met, I might point out that he performs soccer, and that he has a podcast. I’d level out that he’s about to marry Taylor Swift, and that the 2 of them seem like very comfortable collectively. I may additionally embrace a line about how Kelce appears enjoyable; he has good vibes. If I have been actually reaching—and I virtually actually could be, as a result of, once more, I don’t know him—I’d resort to fundamental bodily descriptions. He’s tall, and has noticeably massive palms (nice for catching balls). Additionally, he’s fairly sizzling.

These points, and seemingly these alone, are those that Swift dwells on in “The Lifetime of a Showgirl,” her twelfth studio album, which got here out on Friday. “Pledge allegiance to your palms, your group, your vibes,” she sings in “The Destiny of Ophelia,” which additionally features a passing reference to Kelce utilizing his “megaphone”—a.ok.a. his podcast, “New Heights”—to publicly categorical his curiosity in her, after he had attended one among her Eras Tour reveals in 2023. In “Wi$h Li$t,” Swift says she “made needs on the entire stars” for somebody like Kelce: “Please, God, carry me a finest buddy who I feel is sizzling.” The subsequent track, “Wooden”—Sabrina Carpenter-esque in content material and Jackson 5-like in sound—is actually one lengthy dick joke. (Effectively, not that lengthy: at two minutes and thirty seconds, “Wooden” is technically the shortest monitor on the album.) “Redwood tree, it ain’t arduous to see / His love was the important thing that opened my thighs,” she sings. At one level, she means that Kelce has reached “New Heights of manhood.” (“Singing about travis kelce’s penis over a Jackson 5 pattern ought to get you taken out again like a rabid canine,” one individual wrote on X.)

When Swift first introduced that she had made a brand new album—in a visitor look on Kelce’s podcast, which he co-hosts along with his brother, again in August—she mentioned that the music got here from the “most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic” interval of her life. Profession-wise, she was at a peak: she’d begun writing the file whereas she was nonetheless on the Eras Tour. However she was additionally alluding to her relationship with Kelce. Swift described his public makes an attempt to courtroom her, including “That is type of what I’ve been writing songs about eager to occur to me since I used to be a teen-ager.” After they completed recording the podcast, Kelce proposed to Swift in his again yard.

I have to admit that, once I heard concerning the engagement, I instantly questioned what it will imply for her music. I totally settle for that this can be a prime instance of how we consider artists much less as actual folks than as leisure. And that’s the type of factor that I anticipated Swift to spend extra time grappling with on “Showgirl,” which she billed as a behind-the-scenes take a look at the pressures of being a performer. Swift is essentially the most commercially profitable musician alive, and it may appear, at finest, reductive, and, at worst, misogynistic, to recommend that her love life would have any bearing on the standard of her work. She had spent the early years of her profession contending with a “boy-crazy” picture, largely pushed by the media and her detractors, which she would go on to satirize in “Clean House,” her track about her “lengthy checklist of ex-lovers.” And but these males haven’t simply been her boyfriends; they’ve been her muses. She is a grasp of telling private tales, making them sound compelling and, most impressively, making them really feel relatable. That is usually achieved by means of the heavy use of metaphor: an individual who is gorgeous inside and outside is “a mansion with a view” (“Delicate”); a decaying long-distance relationship is captured by means of “the rust that grew between telephones” (“Maroon”). Some have speculated that “Wooden” is a riff on a viral 2021 tweet lampooning Swift’s songwriting fashion, during which a consumer joked that Swifties should be horrified when Ariana Grande “sings about intercourse and doesn’t write it like ‘he caught his lengthy wooden into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.’ ”

She has all the time had an intuition for narrative, so it’s putting that, as Swift’s relationship with Kelce has grown extra critical, the story she’s instructed about him has largely remained the identical. On “So Excessive College,” one among her first songs about him, she sings, “You understand how to ball, I do know Aristotle.” Just a little greater than a yr later, when she posted about their engagement on Instagram, she captioned the submit “Your English instructor and your health club instructor are getting married.” These are the roles they adopted, too, when Swift went on Kelce’s podcast. At one level, Swift described a few of her music as “esoteric.” “She’s so sizzling when she says these huge phrases,” Kelce mentioned. Swift gave him a barely exasperated look: “You realize what esoteric means!”

Previous to Kelce, Swift’s muse was Joe Alwyn, a British actor who’s seemingly so variety and unassuming in actual life that he retains getting typecast in movies as a sexual predator. (“Boy Erased,” “Sorts of Kindness,” and, relying in your interpretation of a scene that occurs offscreen, “The Brutalist.”) Alwyn is the presumptive inspiration for “Delicate,” “Attractive,” and the opposite love songs on “fame”—which, regardless of being framed as a revenge album, might be Swift’s most romantic file—in addition to many tracks on her subsequent album, “Lover.” (“I’ve cherished you three summers now, honey, however I need ’em all,” she sings, on the title monitor.) Alwyn and Swift have been nonetheless courting when she made “folklore” and “evermore,” the indie, lyrical masterpieces that she launched in the course of the pandemic, and he even helped write just a few of the songs. (“I simply heard Joe singing your complete totally fashioned refrain of ‘betty’ from one other room,” Swift defined in her documentary-style live performance movie, “folklore: the lengthy pond studio periods.”) Alwyn can be credited as a songwriter on “Candy Nothing,” one of many loveliest songs in Swift’s discography, a couple of associate who desires nothing however your organization—in a world that calls for every thing else—on the “Midnights” album.

Swift and Alwyn broke up in 2023, and, roughly a yr later, she put out “The Tortured Poets Division,” an album that coated three muses: Alwyn, the 1975’s entrance man Matty Healy, and Kelce. Healy and Swift’s relationship could have been controversial and short-lived, however I’ll all the time be glad about it, as a result of it resulted in “Responsible as Sin?,” which may be the one really erotic track that Swift has ever written. (The monitor, which is concerning the thrill of fantasizing about somebody who you’re not with, means that Swift is healthier at writing concerning the fantasy of intercourse than concerning the precise act of it.) Kelce, in the meantime, bought the aforementioned “So Excessive College” (“Model new, full throttle / Contact me whereas your bros play Grand Theft Auto”) and “The Alchemy” (“So once I contact down / Name the amateurs and lower ’em from the group / Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Child, I’m the one to beat”).