“I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” an 18-year-old Taylor Swift told The New York Times in 2008. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”
After a dozen albums spent examining the idea of “happily ever after,” Swift arrives at her answer on The Life of a Showgirl, a 12-track snapshot of her love story with now fiancé, Travis Kelce. Given the album’s pre-release visuals, some anticipated more of a straightforward showgirl narrative—a gritty, but glamorous peek behind the curtain of the blockbuster Eras tour. Perhaps that’s why there has been mixed reception among critics and fans alike to her latest collaboration with Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, who helped Swift make the defiant Reputation in 2017. Instead of snakes and barbed wire, Showgirl uses rhinestones and feathers to lure listeners into a lush, fizzy romantic comedy that coincides with one of the most pivotal professional chapters of Swift’s life.
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The undercurrent of anxiety present in some love songs on Reputation, Lover (2019), and Midnights is gone (“I thought I had it right, once, twice, but I did not,” Swift sings on “Wi$hli$t,” track eight on Showgirl)—replaced with the kind of buoyant hope only found in romantic comedies. In the weeks before Showgirl’s release, Kelce joked that he and Swift were living out the Cinderella-style plot of Pretty Woman (1990)—which “has been on [his] and Tay’s movie list for a while.” Actually, he and his brother Jason Kelce agreed on their New Heights podcast that it was more of a “reverse Pretty Woman” with Travis “wearing nothing but a tie when Taylor comes home.” The younger Kelce then made a point of advocating for a twist on the film called Pretty Man, a concept that is semi-realized on the Showgirl track “Father Figure.” “We need to have a CEO billionaire woman be so high-class that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She doesn’t know how to drive a car,” Kelce said.
The ending of Pretty Woman and all its talk of saving princesses from towers is invoked in lead single “The Fate of Ophelia” with lyrics like, “I sat alone in my tower / You were just honing your powers.” Kelce publicly shooting his shot with Swift “felt more like I was in an ‘80s John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside of my window with a boombox saying, ‘I want to date you! Do you want to go on a date with me? I made you a friendship bracelet!’” she said while appearing on New Heights, referencing Cameron Crowe’s ‘80s coming of age film Say Anything. This song nods to that meet-cute with the album-opening line, “I heard you calling / On the megaphone.”
On “Opalite,” named for the manmade version of Kelce’s opal birthstone, there’s a hint of spirited doo-wopping reminiscent of Grease’s “Summer Nights.” But given the fact that Swift and Kelce’s relationship has already inspired a few Christmas movies, it’s hard to ignore that this song feels like an homage to that twinkly, festive way of falling in love on film.
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Some on the internet have compared Kelce’s on-the-field dancing to Hugh Grant busting a move in the Christmas classic Love Actually. And the film did play a part in the couple’s courtship: Swift once called Love Actually one of her favorite films, presumably leading Kelce to watch it for a holiday-themed episode of New Heights. Kelce called the movie “far-fetched,” adding that he “couldn’t relate to anybody onscreen.” But all seems to be forgiven by Grant, who last June tweeted about attending one of her Eras Tour shows in London—and doing tequila shots with Kelce. “As a long time Hugh Grant stan this tweet is very important to my culture,” Swift replied via X.
On Showgirl, Swift concludes that true love has a clarifying effect on her business dealings in songs like “Actually Romantic” and “Father Figure.” Both reframe professional feuds in a glossier light—the mean girl talking behind our heroine’s back (Judy Greer’s character in 13 Going on 30 meets Selma Blair in Legally Blonde) is actually a secret admirer. And betrayal in business (think You’ve Got Mail’s Meg Ryan) only leads to power—the kind amassed by Succession’s Logan Roy (Swift’s on-the-record inspo) or Tony Soprano.
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Romantic comedies are stories of transformation—and expressing that blossoming love onscreen often meant two things. One is an upbeat montage—think Anne Hathaway waltzing into work to K.T. Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See” and Jennifer Garner falling for Mark Ruffalo as Liz Phair’s “Why Can’t I?” plays. The other is a grand gesture—Heath Ledger leading a marching band through the bleachers in 10 Things I Hate About You, Katherine Heigl belting “Bennie and the Jets” atop a dive bar in 27 Dresses, Adam Sandler serenading Drew Barrymore in The Wedding Singer—a moment best described, and demonstrated, by Emma Stone, who maligns the loss of “a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason” in Easy A.
It’s easy to draw a line between those movies and swoony, proudly corny songs like the hopelessly romantic “Wi$hli$t,” which Swift has said was inspired by Happy Gilmore with Kelce starring in the recent sequel because, like the titular character, Swift has found her version of utopia imagining kids with her fiancé, “Honey,” and even the innuendo-laden “Wood,” a presumed ode to Kelce’s manhood that Nicki Minaj says is “exactly what meeting your soulmate sounds like.”
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An album’s fifth track is a historically weighty one for Swift. And “Eldest Daughter,” feels like the race to an airport, run through the rain, and stop traffic moment of this love story. Swift is Julia Roberts in Notting Hill—a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her. Like Kate Hudson’s character in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Swift has given up on “trying to seem cool” and wants to drop her defenses in the pursuit of real love, a key realization in recent Netflix rom-com hits Too Much and Nobody Wants This. Swift sings of having a hopeless romanticism before she learned “cautious discretion,” with age—a habit that stuck. “When your first crush crushes something kind,” she says. “When I said I don’t believe in marriage / That was a lie.”
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It all leads to a bridge with soaring momentum that revels in the idea of being loved, as Bridget Jones might put it, “just as she is.” Swift sings:
We lie back
A beautiful, beautiful time lapse
Ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs
And things I said were dumb
‘Cause I thought that I’d never find that beautiful, beautiful life that
Shimmers that innocent light back
Like when we were young
She spoke of the freedom in “allowing yourself to be soft and sincere” during The Life of a Showgirl’s corresponding release party. “People have always wanted to look sexy and powerful and unbothered,” Swift explains. “But I’m not all those things that we aspire to be culturally, and that we’re told we have to be in order to find love—you have to act like you never wanted in the first place.”
Swift has long reflected on the virtues of being cringe, and in this song she seems to embrace every era that helped lead to the current one. “I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17, I wish I hadn’t gone through that fairy-tale phase where I just wanted to wear princess dresses to awards shows every single time,’” Swift told Elle magazine in 2015. “It was part of me growing up.”
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Swift has continued to evolve on a public stage through each era, working out her feelings about love in real-time. “Every song before was just a prayer,” she writes in one of the poems featured on a vinyl variant of her latest studio album. But now, after meeting Kelce, Swift, “started to feel a little bit like I could be a person who could have these romantic whims and dreams,” she told Apple’s Zane Lowe in an interview published Tuesday.
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Indeed, each track on Showgirl feels like a sequel to an earlier record’s song. Seventeen years after reimagining the tragic end for Romeo & Juliet with “Love Story,” Swift posits on Showgirl’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” that she could’ve been driven to madness over love like another of Shakespeare’s characters—Hamlet’s doomed lover Ophelia—had Kelce never shown up. The album’s fifth track “Eldest Daughter,” about packing away the armor of being a first-born for love nods towards previous track fives like “You’re on Your Own Kid,” from Midnights (2022) and “White Horse” on Fearless (2008).
It’s a far cry from her last album The Tortured Poets Department, which called to mind feel-bad movies like Blue Valentine and Midsommar—sung by a Swift who was “dying on the altar” of splits from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy and wondering aloud to her fans “if all you want is gray for me” across 31 unwieldy songs. Amid moodier Swift offerings eras Folklore, Evermore (both 2020), and Midnights (2022), some no longer expect straightforward pop confections from the Grammy Award winner. Within a taut 40ish-minutes (that also mimics a breezy 90-minute rom-com), Showgirl proves that Swift can not only do it with a broken heart—but also a healed one.
But like the romantic comedies Showgirl mirrors, the album has already faced criticism, in part for its so-called tradwife energy that anyone who likes to bake bread and loves their boyfriend now apparently emits. “The genre has been so degraded in the past 20 years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity,” Mindy Kaling wrote in her 2011 memoir, tracing the rom-com’s demise in some way to the unrealistic standards to which the genre is held. “I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world,” Kaling writes.
Like much of Swift’s more energetic pop, Y2K-era romantic comedies were often met with derision, then later embraced in the mainstream. Like Nancy Meyers’s The Holiday, now a mainstay on TBS come Christmastime that took 13 years to find an audience after a middling box office bow. The story follows two women played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet who take their destiny into their own hands by swapping homes on the other side of the world—only to find love in the process. Asked why the film eventually gained popularity, Diaz told Vulture that it’s the story of “the fully capable princess who could have whatever she wants, but she can’t have it until she breaks open her heart and is vulnerable, and lets in the right man,” she said, “And not just Prince Charming, but the guy who’s actually capable of showing up in all the ways she needs him to.” As Swift sings on “Elizabeth Taylor,” “All the right guys / Promised they’d stay / Under bright lights / They withered away / But you bloom.”
Now Swift seems ready to leave the cautious discretion behind and promote the music she’s always wanted to make, maybe because she’s living the life that she’s always wanted. And that’s the unabashedly hopeful, sometimes cringey, often edgy music Swift has been making all along—from her days on a bleacher in “Fifteen” to “Ruin the Friendship,” where she says, “My advice is always answer the question / Better that than to ask it all your life.”
A representative for Taylor Swift did not immediately return a request for comment.
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