Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ proves she’s always listening — both to her fans and harshest critics

Taylor Swift once quipped, “Anything I do is polarizing.” But with her much-hyped 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” the global superstar is trying hard to be anything but.

Like a personification of the eternally people-pleasing “millennial boss” meme, Taylor Swift is taking fans’ feedback to heart on “Showgirl.” So much so that the key pillars of the album — the creative process, the length, the structure — seem deliberately developed in response to the critiques of its predecessor, 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”

That album, despite its astonishing run atop the charts, quickly became one of the most divisive of Swift’s two-decade career. Critics balked at the 31-song, two-hour runtime and Swift’s wordy lyricism. She faced accusations of “quality-control issues” and a kind of comfort-zone hubris in her continued collaborations with go-to producer Jack Antonoff. Fans lamented that “Poets” was too morose and boasted no pop bangers or obvious hits, undermining Swift’s cultural impact. In the wake of all this discourse, Swift went home empty-handed from the Grammys in February, despite netting six nominations.

But Swift is nothing if not a proudly Type-A striver. So when she returned to the fray this summer ready to promote her “Poets” follow-up, she plastered her social media pages with a new mantra: “Baby, that’s show business for you.”

And what is show business? It’s knowing the crowd is king. It’s adjusting to their whims to keep them clapping and buying tickets. It’s offering an extra wink, a bit of razzle-dazzle, maybe even a heel-turn, when you can sense boredom creeping in.

That’s exactly what Swift has done.

‘Showgirl’ is everything that ‘Poets’ was not

There are only 12 songs on “Showgirl,” making it the shortest tracklist in Swift’s entire discography. In an appearance on her now-fiancé Travis Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” Swift made it clear that was a deliberate choice born out of a desire for creative cohesion.

“Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons. You couldn’t take one out and it be the same album. You couldn’t add one,” she said. “I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle.”

Swift also insisted that, unlike with “Poets” and “Midnights” before it, this time around, there would be no double album surprise-released in the middle of the night — no spaghetti thrown at the wall in hopes of getting something to stick.

“There’s no other songs coming,” she said. “With ‘Tortured Poets Department,’ I was like, ‘Here’s a data dump of everything I thought, felt, and experienced in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12. There’s not a 13th.”

Within its concise tracklist, “Showgirl” is noticeably short on the elegiac, self-referential songwriting that defined “Poets,” the kind that critics said made that album difficult to enjoy for those who aren’t engrossed in Swiftian lore.

Was “Fortnight” too abstract and somber for you? Did you post on X that Swift should make bangers again? Congratulations, she heard you, and now you’ve got 12 of them.

By contrast, the storytelling in “Showgirl” is emphatically simple, often delighting in the use of millennial internet slang like “keep it 100,” “bad bitch,” “lit,” and “girlboss.” These songs are far more focused on melody than vocabulary by design, their hooks engineered to get stuck in your head. Was the “Poets” single “Fortnight” too abstract and somber for you? Did you post on X that Swift should put down the feather quill and make bangers again? Congratulations, she heard you, and now you’ve got 12 of them.

Most interestingly, for the first time in over a decade, Antonoff is nowhere to be found in the credits of Swift’s new album. Instead, she reunited with famed pop producers Max Martin and Shellback, who helped create some of her biggest hits in the 2010s on “Red,” “1989,” and “Reputation.”

Martin is renowned for making maximalist, melodic, structurally clean pop hits — the very thing Swift was lectured for lacking on “Poets.” Who better, then, to summon for her course correction?

During Swift’s appearance on “New Heights,” Kelce all but confirmed this thesis, describing “Showgirl” as “a complete 180 from a lot of the songs on ‘Tortured Poets.'” Swift replied, “Oh yeah.”

That could be a risky move for a star on top of her game, but with largely positive reviews for “Showgirl” pouring in, it looks like Swift’s gambit is already paying off.

In fact, a precedent for her triumphant pivot already exists: Eleven years ago, Swift reaped rewards for pulling off the very same maneuver.

Swift’s blockbuster album ‘1989’ was partially inspired by criticism of ‘Red’

Critics had similar gripes about Swift’s fourth album, “Red,” when it was originally released in 2012. Reviews described the album as unfocused, scattered, and indecisive, with Swift torn between making country and pop. It failed to win album of the year at the Grammy Awards, which Swift openly admitted was devastating. Instead of going to after-parties that night, Swift said she went home, cried, and ate takeout from In-N-Out Burger.

Mere hours later, Swift settled on the idea for her next album: “I woke up at 4 in the morning, and I’m like, it’s called ‘1989,’” she later said in a Grammy Pro interview.

With “1989,” Swift committed fully to her pop-star ambitions for the first time, ignoring execs at her label who wanted her to keep one foot in her country lane. “You have a few options when you don’t win an award: You can decide like, ‘Oh, they’re wrong,'” she recalled. “Or… you can say, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe I did not make the record of my career. Maybe I need to fix the problem, which is that I have not made sonically cohesive albums.'”

“1989” remains one of the most thematically and sonically focused albums of Swift’s career, and it achieved exactly what she hoped: near-universal acclaim, three No. 1 singles, and album of the year at the 2016 Grammys.

“We don’t make music so that we can win a lot of awards,” Swift continued in her Grammy Pro interview. “But you have to take your cues from somewhere if you’re going to evolve.”

Swift takes her cues from both harsh critics and loyal fans

Swift is very aware of how she is perceived by the press and the public; that much is clear from listening to “Blank Space,” which satirizes the “maneater” reputation that Swift was saddled with at the time, or watching the Netflix documentary “Miss Americana,” which lays bare how motivated she is by approval and applause.

But casual consumers of Swift’s career likely don’t realize how tuned-in she really is. It may seem strange for someone with a billion-dollar net worth, a star athlete fiancé, and the kind of success that puts her in conversation with legends like Madonna and The Beatles to care what people say about her and her work.

But the truth is, Taylor Swift reached this level of celebrity because she cares what people say. Swift describes herself as a “pathological people pleaser” in her 2022 track “Hits Different,” and many of her collaborators have reinforced that narrative.

“She was very particular about how she said certain things. It was a really interesting experience. She gets her audience,” Diane Warren, who cowrote Swift’s song, “Say Don’t Go,” said in 2023. “She’s deeply aware of how her fans want to hear something. I can’t explain it, but that’s probably why she’s the biggest fucking star in the world.”

“Showgirl” is further proof of that awareness. Even for someone who is proudly selective with her social media diet, whose Instagram comments have been turned off for years, Swift is always open to changing her tune for the sake of growth — whether that growth is artistic, commercial, or both.

“Give me constructive criticism all day,” Swift said on “New Heights.” “It’ll fuel me.”

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