“The Life of a Showgirl” Album & Era Deep Dive
Podcast Episode: December 10, 2025
Episode Description
Taylor Swift didn’t arrive at her Life of a Showgirl era by accident. In this deep dive, we trace the character development, storytelling evolution, and emotional arc that led her here – across albums, eras, and narrative shifts.
Then we break down the major themes of The Life of a Showgirl and compare them to the way Taylor has explored fame, fate, identity, and love throughout her career. What changes? What deepens? And what has she been telling us all along?
The story inside Showgirl isn’t new – it’s the culmination of a character journey she’s been writing for years.
In this video, we explore how this album fits into the larger narrative of Taylor Swift’s artistry, mythology, and storytelling universe. Join me to break down the Showgirl album and era, song by song, line by line, and story by story.
Listen to the Episode
Episode Transcript
“Hey everyone, welcome back to the Swiftly Sung Stories podcast, I’m Jen, your Swiftie English teacher, and today we’re wrapping up our coverage of The Life of a Showgirl by looking at the album as a whole. Over the past month, I’ve gone track by track, line by line through each song, and now we’re going to take all of these puzzle pieces of the album, lay them out, and see what they look like and see what they mean.
I have a lot of thoughts on this album, so I’m going to try to lay this out as clearly as I can, but this is probably going to be a longer episode because I think Showgirl is not what it seems on the surface. There’s a whole lot going on behind the curtain, and there’s a lot to talk about.
If you are a major Swiftie (of course you are, because you’re here), and if you’ve been paying attention to what Taylor’s larger story has been for a while, you know that one era doesn’t just end and another begins. There are breadcrumbs, or narrative threads, that lead from one album to the next.
So before we look at Showgirl as a whole, I want to see where Taylor was before Showgirl came out. We have to look at her larger character arc, and see what was happening in her writing and her career before this new chapter was released and added to the story. The first rule of storytelling is that you have to develop your characters and give them backstory, and we can’t understand where she is and where she’s going if we don’t understand where she’s been. So we’ll do a very quick recap of the larger story that’s led up to The Life of a Showgirl.
Then after our recap slash prelude, I’m going to pick apart the major themes of the album, compare them to how she discussed these themes before, and really just try to see what new elements are being added to the conversation of Taylor Swift. How has her thinking changed on fame, and love, and her career, and what pieces of past songs and albums are evidence of that, and what pieces of this album are evidence of that? These ideas didn’t just drop out of the sky and land in this album, and this album is really a new chapter of the same story she’s been telling all along. So we’re going to discuss these thematic elements and put them into context.
And finally, we’re going to wrap up with a brand new segment that reaches outside the Taylor Swift cinematic universe and goes into one of my other special interests: movie and tv shows. After we’ve fully dissected showgirl, I’m going to suggest some other content that you might like if you are in your showgirl era.
Next week, before we wind down for the holidays, we’re going to wrap up our showgirl season by looking at the trajectory. Where is she going next? What does this album, and the albums and events before this, tell us about her larger plan? What’s likely to come next, and what can we expect from TS13?
So: first is recap, where she’s been. Then it’s where she is currently with these themes she’s discussing in Showgirl, that’s going to be the majority of our discussion today. We’ll wrap up with some suggestions of other content in this showgirl vein, and then next week it’s a look forward to what’s likely to come next. And I hope this will put us in a good position to watch the docuseries that comes out December 12, so we can see this larger character arc as she adds this new chapter, or kind of (hopefully) fills in the blanks of these last few eras.
But before we get into the heavy thematic stuff, we’re going to have some fun by looking at Taylor’s best lyrics from this album. So let’s roll the intro, then get right into it.
(intro rolls)
Best Lyrics of Showgirl, Song by Song
When this album first came out in October, it was super polarizing, and a lot of that came down to Taylor’s lyricism. People were saying it couldn’t hold a candle to her wordsmithing of Tortured Poets, but if you’ve done the deep dives with me, you’ll know that’s just not true.
I’ve analyzed not only Showgirl, but every single song from every Taylor Swift studio album ever, and you can find all of my lyrical analysis on my website linked in the shownotes. So I do, in fact, know what I’m talking about when I’m speaking on her lyrics, even though every middle-aged man in my comments likes to tell me otherwise.
Is Showgirl as deep as Tortured Poets? No. Because it’s happier. It’s more optimistic. It’s not going to be as much of a gut punch because it’s not targeting that depressive funny bone we all have. Sad songs just hit harder than happier ones, universally. But is her lyricism any less crafty here? No. It’s just wrapped in a different package. It’s wrapped in a shinier facade, but that doesn’t mean that what she’s saying – and how she’s saying it – is less than or not as good.
So I’m going to quickly go song by song and pick the best line or the best lines that are either clever, or emotionally impactful, or funny, or just really memorable. And leave me your favorite lines in the comments.
Starting with Ophelia: “Tis locked inside my memory, and only you possess the key”. This is a variation on a quote from Hamlet, and the original is “tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key of it.” And just like that scene from Hamlet, what Taylor is saying is, we have this sacred, shared secret between us. It’s a really sweet line that tells us how deep and special this relationship is.
In Elizabeth Taylor: “I’d cry my eyes violet,” of course, is beautiful just as imagery alone. At a metaphor, it means if he left, she’d be so despondent even the color of her eyes would change. And of course she’s referencing Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes, but she’s saying that if he left, she’d be permanently altered. And then there’s “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever, In the papers, on the screen, and in their minds”. This references ET’s white diamonds ads from the 80s and 90s, where she whispered this tagline “diamonds are forever,” but it also means that the internet is forever. All of your wins and all of your losses – and especially your exes – will live on in the public memory forever. “You’re only as hot as your last hit baby,” and the public will remember your scandals more than your successes, because the triumphs fade away more easily. The mistakes live on forever.
From Opalite, this is an easy choice: “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past, My Brother used to call it eating out of the trash”. It’s just hilarious. And not only is it a great metaphor for not getting back together with your ex, it’s also bashing her exes, calling them trash. But it’s done in this subtle way, wrapping it in a metaphor and attributing it to her brother. It’s like, ‘I didn’t call you trash, Austin did.” But she’s published it in a song, which is just the best revenge. One of my favorite lines on the album, and it’s so simple but so effective.
Father Figure: Can I pick the whole of Father Figure? This is my favorite song on the album for so many reasons, but if I had to pick one, it would be “You made a deal with this devil, turns out my “check’s” bigger”. She flips this whole narrative on its head when the student becomes the master. And then she recycles these really important lines “I protect the family” and “leave it with me” so that they mean different things each time she says them. It’s brilliant, and I ride or die for father figure, I could talk about it forever.
Eldest Daughter: I did a Tiktok on this line, and it turns out you guys think this line is just as much of a gut punch as I do: “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie”. She used to be this tough, pretending to be cool girl who said she didn’t believe in marriage so that if he never wanted to marry her, she could pretend that she didn’t want it or didn’t need it anyway. She was trying to protect herself. But then she admits “that was a lie” which is this really vulnerable moment, and it might be the most vulnerable moment on the whole album. She’s no longer pretending, she’s taking off this mask or this facade and showing this person who she really is underneath, and what she really wants.
Ruin the Friendship, I have to pick the imagery in the prom scene: “Shiny wood floors underneath my feet, Disco ball makes everything look cheap,” and then “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist”. She’s painted this really depressing prom, and it’s depressing because she’s with the wrong date. But she conveys it through describing the physical setting. This scene looks on the outside how she feels on the inside. Taylor’s physical settings and imagery are usually used as emotional settings, and she does it really beautifully here.
Actually Romantic: This whole song is full of really cutting insults, and the boring barbie opening line is brilliant. But my favorite is the entire 2nd verse: “Hadn’t thought of you in a long time, But you keep sending me funny valentines.” Funny valentines are these cruel, hateful messages that are being sent to her by this drama queen, but she takes them as funny, and she takes them as obsession. And then the funniest line of the whole song to me is: “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse, That’s how much it hurts.” She’s comparing this hater to a tiny, yippy dog – their bark is worse than their bite. But that dog doesn’t have any real power, and this is the really brutal part – they’re caged inside a tiny purse. They can’t move, they’re so insignificant that they’re not even the person carrying the purse. They’re the dog that’s locked inside. It’s the most cutting insult, and the imagery she uses to paint this scene is perfect.
Wishlist: My favorite funny line is: “They want that spring break that was fucking lit, And then that video taken off the internet”. They want to get into some debauchery, and then have all of their indiscretions deleted.
But then my favorite vulnerable lines are: “I made wishes on all of the stars, please god, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.” This calls back to the Prophecy, “don’t want money, just someone who wants my company.” She wished upon a star, then all the stars aligned. It’s a beautiful, full circle moment. And then I also love “they want that complex female character”, because it describes both what Taylor tries to be, and what Taylor tries to write. It’s kind of this meta moment where she’s describing the position of women in the industry and what we demand of them. And then “boss up, settle down,” is another great one, where she’s saying “I need to woman up and settle down”. Or, I want to be the boss, AND have a private life. And it circles back to this central theme of the album which we’ll cover shortly, which is: can I have both?
Wood: I have to pick the entirety of the 1st verse: “Daisy’s bare naked, I was distraught, He loves me not, He loves me not, Penny’s unlucky, I took him back, And then stepped on a crack, And the black cat laughed”. She’s setting up these superstitions that never work out, but it’s also like she’s naming past versions of herself. That past person who picked the petals, hoping he would love her back, that’s Daisy, and that past person who tried to find lucky coins, that’s Penny. But this whole verse is just layering one superstition over another, it’s just these layers of constant bad luck where nothing is working out and it’s really, really well written.
Cancelled!: This is a tough one, but I think my favorite is the 2nd pre-chorus: “Did you make a joke only a man could? Were you just too smug for your own good? Or bring a tiny violin to a knife fight?” She’s listing all of these things that shouldn’t be cancelable offenses, right? They should be small blunders, but in the patriarchy, they’re worthy of burning witches. And the tiny violin to a knife fight is just hilarious and so clever. And then there’s my other favorite line which isn’t actually Taylor’s, but is from Macbeth: “Something wicked this way comes.” Check out my cancelled analysis if you want the whole rundown on Macbeth and the witches, because it’s a deep dive for sure. But it fits in perfectly with the whole vibe of the song, which is this witchy underworld of the celebrity spotlight. And we’re going to get into that in our discussion of the themes of the album, because it’s a big theme here.
Honey: This one is easy, this is far away one of my top 5 of the whole album: “You could be my forever night stand”. It’s a play on one night stand, so she’s taking something fleeting – a one night stand – and turning it into something permanent, a forever night stand. But this scene, this verse, takes place inside a bedroom, so it’s also referring to the nightstand in the room. He can be a permanent fixture in her bedroom and in her life. It’s a brilliant bit of lyricism.
Title track: I can’t pick just one. I love “I waited by the stage door, packed in with the autograph hounds, Barking her name,” where the dogs – the autograph hounds – are barking for Kitty, the cat. She’s painting this relationship between paparazzi and celebrities as antagonistic, it’s cats versus dogs.
I also love the metaphor of: I took her pearls of wisdom, hung them from my neck. She’s twisted this common metaphor, pearls of wisdom, and uses them as physical pearls. What it means overall is she heeded Kitty’s advice. But she does it with this great imagery, of taking these pearls of wisdom and actually putting them on and wearing them. Taking them to heart.
And then my favorite funny line is: “And all the headshots on the walls, Of the dance hall are of the bitches Who wish I’d hurry up and die But I’m immortal now, baby dolls I couldn’t if I tried.” We can picture this art deco dance hall, where there are all of these professional headshots of up and comers, but they’ll never stand a chance because Kitty will always be number one. But there’s also the double meaning of headshot, which is a shot to the head, and that’s reinforced by “all the bitches who wish I’d hurry up and die.” And she’s so self aware here, both as Taylor and as Kitty or this protege showgirl: she’s immortal, no matter what. She’s too big to fail. She looms too large over this whole industry.
But the real message of this song, the title track, is that WE don’t know the life of a showgirl. And if we did, we wouldn’t want it, or wouldn’t covet it. And that’s a good segway into a quick exploration of how our showgirl got to where she is today, and how this album fits into the larger character arc of Taylor Swift.
Debut to Showgirl: How We Got Here
In The Life of a Showgirl we’re living inside this world that looks beautiful on the outside, but is really harsh and hard to handle on the inside. But we didn’t just magically appear here, did we? No, this has been – to quote Taylor – a long time coming. So I want to do a brief synopsis of Taylor’s career and the themes in her songwriting that have led up to this showgirl moment, so we’ll have a better idea of how we got here, and where we’re going.
I’m not going to recap Taylor’s entire career – I have separate episodes on that in my Taylor Swift 101 playlist. But I do want to look at the larger narrative, because we need to put The Life of a Showgirl into context if we really want to understand the album as a whole. If you look at Taylor’s career as a chapter book, we didn’t just start with chapter 12. We had chapters 1-11 to get through that all led up to this point.
So when Taylor Swift first came on the scene, she was this fresh-faced country ingenue. But controversy was always, always nipping at her heels from the very beginning. It was never here’s your career, here’s your celebrity, plated on a silver platter. It was a struggle, and she’s been honest about this struggle. With Fearless, even though she won all the awards, they said she couldn’t sing. They doubted that she wrote her own songs. They said when she did write her own songs, they were just bashing her ex boyfriends. She then did what is now a classic Taylor move, which is to pivot, and to pivot so far in the opposite direction that it shuts down the haters. Or tries to shut down the haters. She tried to prove everyone wrong by writing Speak Now entirely on her own and really amping up her vocal and performance abilities. It works for a while. But now they just target her personal life since they can’t target her music.
In the Red era, she’s labeled a serial monogamist. She’s slut-shamed. So she pivots again, coming out with 1989 and not dating anyone so that tabloids don’t have any more ammunition. Still doesn’t really work, but lord knows she tried. Then she’s quote unquote cancelled between 1989 and reputation. Instead of pivoting right away, she retreats. She regroups. She grows a thicker skin, and she reinvents herself again. They call her a snake, so she leans into the snake with reputation, and claps back quite effectively. This is really the beginning of the darkness, or the dark side of fame, which will be ever-present in her lyrics from this point forward. It really starts with reputation. There was darkness before, but she kept it locked away behind the scenes.
What we didn’t know at the time, but what we know now, is that after reputation, she would be in a battle to regain control and ownership of her life’s work. She wasn’t just dealing with her reputation being destroyed, she had also left her record label and left her master recordings behind, because she had to. She had always been experiencing this dark side of the music industry and celebrity, but this I think is the crucial turning point that informs every album from here on out. She had this incredibly tough situation going on behind the scenes, and this is really where these big existential questions about the nature of fame, and the power of the patriarchy, really begin to seep into her writing.
With Lover she rebrands again, looking at the more optimistic side of things. But even though Lover is color-coded as happy, and it’s the first album that she owns outright, the darkness is still there. It’s not a cheerful album if you really look at it. And from Lover is where we get what I see as Taylor’s thesis statement that will define her songs both about fame and about love for albums to come: “Who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?” This line from The Archer really sums up these two parts of herself that are at war: the private girl who wants a private life and to be truly loved, and the pop star whose life gets in the way of the girl underneath.
After Lover is released, then the pandemic hits, the Lover tour is cancelled, and she pivots once more, leaning into indie folk vibes and putting out folklore and evermore back to back. These are deep, introspective, and sometimes very dark albums. She’s fully relinquished any of the brightness that Lover tried to offer. And it’s from folklore that we get mirrorball, which is really her most important song in the vein of her songs about fame. We’ll really dig into mirrorball in relation to showgirl shortly.
After the folkmore era, then the world reopens, and she comes out with Midnights, looking back at all of the sleepless nights of her life, the unanswered questions, these long dark nights of the soul. This darkness, and the dark side of fame, is heavy on this album. But then we get a really interesting juxtaposition: The Eras Tour starts, and career-wise, she’s on top of the world. She breaks all the records. She’s everywhere, more visible and popular than she’s ever been. She also begins the re-record project to essentially devalue the original recordings of her first 6 albums. If she can’t own them, she’ll try to make them worthless to whomever does own them.
So on the surface, she has it all. She’s putting on the greatest show of all time, she’s successfully releasing the re-records, but underneath, there’s something missing. And though her songwriting has already reflected this for quite some time, she’s really, really going to get into it in her next album.
During this stretch of really prolific songwriting, four studio albums in 3 years, we can kind of glean that there’s two things missing: a real partner, and her life’s work. So while she’s spinning on her tallest tiptoes every night on The Eras Tour, and on the outside she’s in her glittering prime, it seems that on the inside, she’s falling apart. And this becomes really, really apparent when she releases The Tortured Poets Department mid-way through The Eras Tour. After a breakup with her longtime partner, and a short-lived and incredibly polarising fling (which is maybe after a long situationship? We don’t know) with fellow pop star Matty Healy, it seems she is in the darkest, most introspective place she’s ever been.
TTPD is the darkest of the dark, and really addresses this internal battle head-on. It’s not just an album about heartbreak, it’s an album about WHY she keeps experiencing this heartbreak. And it’s really because of this fame monster that always seems to gets in the way. So TTPD, more than any other song or album before, really addresses her relationship with her own persona: the relationship between Taylor Swift Inc and Taylor Swift the human girl. And she wrote and released it at a time when her daily life was to be one person for the crowd – be Taylor Swift the pop star every night – but behind the scenes, she was doing it with a broken heart. She was the mirrorball on stage, and off stage, she was shattered on the floor.
So since the TTPD era comes right before Showgirl, we have to look at it more closely to understand where she was, and where she’s going. There are a few songs on this album that I see as important when we’re looking at this larger trajectory. And what I see as the most essential songs on TTPD that inform Showgirl are: But Daddy I Love Him, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, I Can Do it With A Broken Heart, Clara Bow, I Hate it Here, and The Prophecy. These are all songs that really discuss her relationship with fame, and I’ll link my lyrical analysis of each of these below in the show notes if you want to dive in further. I hope to begin my podcast episodes on TTPD once I’ve finished showgirl, but you can read the text version for now.
In But Daddy I Love Him, she’s drawing this distinction between her private relationship and this parasocial relationship her fans and critics have with her. In Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, she’s commenting on how large she looms in the industry. In I Can Do it With A Broken Heart, she’s discussing pretty overtly this private versus public life, and how one always gets in the way of the other. In Clara Bow, she’s talking about the expectations of women in the public eye and the drawbacks of extreme fame. In I Hate it Here, she’s talking about how she mentally and emotionally checks out of this life because it’s too much. And in The Prophecy, she prays for a real partner, because this pedestal of fame is incredibly lonely at the top.
So these are all songs that describe this entire world that she’s created, and while on the outside this life looks like “her glittering prime,” on the inside, it’s really lonely. In creating this massive career, she’s almost made herself unreachable or untouchable. The show has become bigger than the girl, and the show gets in the way of the girl. This is a big theme on TTPD, and it seems to be the larger question she’s trying to answer in Showgirl: can I have it both ways? Can I have this private life, while maintaining this massive public career? Is it a catch-22? Can I be this private person when I am required to be a very public person? And can anyone stand beside me when there are spotlights shining on us 24/7, and every move we make is dissected to death?
And it’s also important to remember that through this whole roller coaster ride, it’s not only an emotional battle, it’s also a physical battle, because she’s trying to regain control of her masters. It’s not only an internal power struggle – the showgirl and the girl – it’s an external power struggle – the man who owns her music versus the woman who created it.
So through this whole career and songwriting trajectory, we can see that she was headed in this direction, right? The evidence we already had – the songs, the albums, the lyrics – we already had, tell us that she was, and is, struggling with this fame monster. And that there are these two sides of herself that are almost different people: the showgirl, and just the girl. And while I don’t think most of us expected that The Life of a Showgirl would head quite so strongly in that direction, and we thought maybe it would be more focused on life behind The Eras Tour, it shouldn’t be surprising that it does. She was heading this way for quite some time, and it’s right there in the title: the life of a showgirl. Not the life of Taylor Swift.
So we can see the direction she was heading, but then we got our first plot twist: in May of 2025, Taylor announced that she had finally acquired the master recordings of her first 6 albums. So this long running battle to reclaim her life’s work was over, and she had won. The re-records were suddenly over, and this entire war – the masters dispute – was just done. So something that was likely causing a lot of tension and angst behind the scenes was finished.
And then we got another big plot twist: another big battle that she had been fighting – who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay – was also over, and the war was won. Travis Kelce proposed, apparently right after she announced this album. And the timing of both the masters purchase and the proposal are murky in the sense that we don’t know exactly how long the masters repurchase was in the works – probably a long time coming, as really big deals take a long while to iron out – but what this really what these two events in taylor’s life do is sets up Showgirl to be a victory lap, right? She’s just gone through the most prolific songwriting years of her life, she’s successfully re-recorded 4 of her previous albums, she’s just wrapped the eras tour, the most successful tour of all time, she’s just gotten her long-desired masters back, and she’s just found real love.
So showgirl was poised to be a victory lap in every sense. But – and there’s a big but – all those positive, incredible things can’t wipe away the very real conflict that this extreme level of fame and success brings to the table. What she’s been writing about for a long time is the internal battle that all these external forces cause, and that internal conflict, we could argue, is even more amplified now that she’s in this private relationship with someone who is also famous in his own right, and in this relationship that generates opinions and press every waking moment of every day, even when she’s not touring, even when she’s not doing interviews, even when she’s not physically in the public eye.
And though we may never know the timing of all of these things – when the songs on Showgirl were really written and recorded and finalized, when the masters were really secured, when her private relationships really began and ended- we can assume that all along, this central battle is neverending, no matter what is happening on the outside. She’s still incredibly famous, she’s still incredibly scrutinized, she’s still living with this fame monster, no matter what’s going on. So I think to look at this album, and where she’s been and where she’s going, we have to take all of this into account. She’s still coming from a very dark place, even though the skies are looking a lot brighter recently, and she’s been discussing the dark side of fame and the dark side of her career, for a really long time. So is Showgirl part victory lap, and part lamentation of all that she’s been through, and all that she continues to go through? It definitely can be both, and as things go with Taylor, something is never just what it seems on the surface.
The 3 Major Themes Within The Life of a Showgirl
So as we go through these major themes of the album, just keep in mind where she’s come from, and what’s happened recently, and then next week, we’ll try to see where she’s going next. I don’t know, but it’s fun to look at the patterns and make some guesses. We’re not going full-on clowning mode, but we can look at the data and see what it tells us.
So let’s take a deeper look into Showgirl as a whole, as its own story in the context of this larger story, and we’ll start with the first major album theme: we’re going to dive into this duality of self that Taylor has been ruminating on for a while. The showgirl vs the girl.
Theme 1: Duality of a Showgirl
If I had to pick just one theme for this album that describes it in a nutshell, it’s this: the duality of a showgirl. There’s the showgirl, the persona that she puts on, this life that she has built that’s become so large and unmanageable, and then there’s the girl underneath. These two selves – Taylor Swift inc versus Taylor Swift human girl – want and need very different things, and they’ve been at war for quite a few albums and eras now.
And this kind of existential question – will I ever get to have it both ways – is something she’s been worrying about basically since she got super famous. But for me, this worry, this question, really starts where most things start, with reputation. And if we had to pinpoint the very song in which she first really started talking about these things directly, it would be with Delicate: “my reputation’s never been worse so you must like me for me.” And this line is describing these two sides of herself: herself, her inner self, versus her reputation, the thing on the outside that the world sees and judges. Those are two separate things. One part of her – pop star Taylor, the persona she puts on for the world – can get in the way of the girl underneath who wants a private life and a private love. And in this earlier era, the reputation era, she also gets into this in detail in Call it What You Want, and then on The Archer in her Lover era.
But the song that most clearly describes these two sides of herself is definitely mirrorball from folklore. “I want you to know, I’m a mirrorball, I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight, I’ll get you out on the floor, Shimmering beautiful, And when I break it’s in a million pieces.” The mirrorball is this public-facing persona. The entertainer. The pop star. She’s spinning on her tallest tiptoes – trying her hardest – to be the best and make us love her. She reflects back what we want to see in ourselves.
But then the mirrorball breaks. The illusion shatters. And what happens next? We use her pain as entertainment, we’re “The masquerade revelers, Drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten.” These are the two lives, the two sides of Taylor Swift: the glittering mirrorball, spinning to entertain, AND the broken shards of glass on the floor. We stare at both, and we expect both to perform for us. If it’s not spinning on the ceiling, we’ll still watch it shattered on the floor. Both are interesting to look at for different reasons, but in neither case do we see it as fully human. We don’t care about the girl underneath the show, is essentially what she’s saying in mirrorball. And this really sets up this dual self that she’s exploring so thoroughly in Showgirl. And, again, it’s right there is the title: the life of a showgirl. Not the life of Taylor Swift.
So not only does Showgirl pick up these themes that she’s discussed in mirrorball, I think she’s specifically calling out mirrorball in her album imagery. On the cover. She’s in full showgirl garb, wrapped in rhinestones (like a mirrorball), and the edges are shattered. The image is fractured into these broken pieces.
So she’s just barely head above water in the bathtub, wearing this mirroball-like bodysuit. And when does she get into the bath? After the show. After the showgirl exits stage left and steps away from the show, she’s still wearing the trappings of this life, this costume, or this armor, these mirrored pieces. And it’s heavy. It’s weighing heavily on her. And yes, this alludes to the John Everett Millais ophelia painting, ophelia drowning, and the head above water is her not quite drowning, but the implication is there: it might drown her. This showgirl life is a big weight to bear, and it may have shattered her, or tried to shatter her, as reflected in the imagery.
So there’s the title and the cover, and then she also presented this theme – this duality of self, the mirrorball and the broken glass – from the jump in the prologue poem.
In the very first poem, that was in the Baby, that’s showbusiness variant, she says, “we learn these tricks of the trade, the flesh toned bandage wrap, covered by skin colored fishnets, because you will cover the wound, no matter how deep it is.” In this scene in the poem, she’s putting on her costume, her armor, and she’s covering both the physical and emotional wounds that this life has inflicted upon her.
This isn’t just a physical costume, it’s a metaphor for how the show must go on, no matter how the girl is feeling, and no matter if the girl wants to go on or not. It doesn’t matter if she’s broken into a million pieces, she has to put herself back together and be the mirrorball on stage. The show is bigger than the girl. She’ll pick up the pieces, stuff them inside the flesh toned bandage wrap, covered by skin-colored fishnets, and get herself out on stage to do her job.
And in the life of Taylor Swift, human, the show of Taylor Swift inc has become so much bigger than the girl underneath. That’s what she’s really grappling with. And many, many songs, and many lyrics on this album juxtapose these two sides of herself, and describe how they’re in conflict with one another.
So from the very first track, the fate of Ophelia, she dives straight into this duality, both with comparing herself to Ophelia from Hamlet, and with the key line “all that time, I sat alone in my tower”.
So she’s setting up this duality in a really interesting way that calls back to one of her recurring metaphors, which is her career as her castle or her kingdom. This really started way back in Long Live, and it’s continued through Look What You Made Me Do, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Call it What You Want, The Archer, Castles Crumbling, long story short, etc. In upcoming episodes, I’m going to dive into Taylor’s use of fairytale metaphors that describe her career as her kingdom, because she’s used it for a long time, and used it a lot.
So taking what we know about Taylor’s recurring castles and kingdoms, in Ophelia, “all that time I sat alone in my tower” really means all that time I spent alone in this self-made kingdom, my massive career, it isolated me from having real, meaningful relationships. This life – the castle I’ve built, this persona I’ve built – is a fortress built to protect me, but what it really does is keep people out. This life that I live is too crazy for most people to withstand. The outer me – Taylor Swift Inc, the castle, the kingdom – prevents inner me, TS the human who is alone in her tower, from living a normal life with normal relationships.
So she’s set up this dual self in Ophelia, and then this theme goes on in Elizabeth Taylor, and this is a song that from the jump we knew would probably be about fame, because Elizabeth Taylor was really the Taylor Swift of her time, right? The most famous, most criticized, most photographed person on the planet. And in this song, she has a conversation with Elizabeth Taylor as a mentor, and asks another existential question: “do you think it’s forever”? And this is a really loaded question. It could mean, is this dual life I have to live forever, or is there someone who can love both the showgirl and the girl? It could mean, this new love that I’ve found, will it last, or will he run away like all the rest, because my career drives people away? It could mean, is fame forever, or will I get cancelled again? It could mean, is my legacy forever? It could mean so many things, but they all tie back to this duality between the showgirl and the girl. Will the show go on forever, and if it does, what does that mean for the girl?
Then in eldest daughter, she goes deeper, and she gets more vulnerable on this theme. In this track 5, she really confronts these two sides of herself directly, in a pretty vulnerable way, and we also get a bit of an origin story of these two selves. She describes these tough facades that eldest daughters put on to protect ourselves. We dress up as wolves on the outside, but on the inside, we’re little red riding hood. And in eldest daughter she tells us explicitly: the stuff I show you on the outside? That’s a front. “I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage.” That hard exterior, that showgirl? That’s not really who I am underneath. On the inside I’m vulnerable and I have real desires and real needs, but to survive this insane life that I’ve built, I have to pretend to be unbothered just to get by.
But I think her most direct confrontation of this dual self comes in the title track, The Life of a Showgirl. And though it’s telling the story of this seasoned showgirl Kitty, who made her money being pretty and witty, we can see that in the end, it’s really about Taylor herself.
And this closing track really summarizes this entire theme, where we meet Kitty, and we hear from this aspiring showgirl or showgirls who want the life and the fame that Kitty has. But this OG showgirl tells them directly, “you don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe.” You don’t know what it’s really like on the inside. You just see the sequins, and the autograph hounds, and the lipstick and lace. You don’t see what really happens behind the scenes, or what it really takes to get this life, and to maintain this life.
Then we get Kitty’s backstory, which is probably also Taylor’s backstory, where she says she would “sell her soul to have a taste of the magnificent life that’s all mine.” That’s the price of being a showgirl – selling your soul. And then Kitty’s protege does sell her soul. She gets success through becoming tough as nails, and we know she’s sold her soul because she asks, “do you want to take a skate on the ice inside my veins?” She’s no longer human. She sold her soul to the devil for success. She played, and she paid. She paid a lot. She paid the ultimate price.
And in the end, we find out that our showgirl narrator or narrators are “married to the hustle.” They chose the showgirl life – the celebrity life – and sacrificed their private life to get there. And these are the two sides of the showgirl that permeate this album. There’s the showgirl, the perfect specimen, who lives in her tower and seems to have it all, and has ice for veins. That’s the showgirl we see on the outside, the one who is on stage, and makes all the money, and is built to entertain, to be our dance monkey.
And then there’s the inner girl. The girl inside the show. She got sacrificed in the name of the production. In the name of success. She’s the soul that was sold to get there. We don’t get to know her, we only get to know the life of a showgirl, because it’s what we see on the outside. “You don’t know the life of a showgirl babe” really means I’m two different people, and you have to be two different people to survive this life. You have to be the public facing person, and only let the crowd see what you want them to see. You have to make it look easy. You can’t let them know the struggle. Because if they knew – if they knew the real life of a showgirl – they wouldn’t believe the illusion anymore. You’d no longer be the mirrorball, you’d be the broken shards of glass on the floor. They’d be examining you, and gawking at you, for the wrong reasons. The life of the showgirl is trying your best to stay intact as the glimmering mirrorball – to keep up the illusion.
So these two selves are at war with one another throughout the album. And in some songs, it feels like the showgirl gets the last laugh. But in some songs, we do get to hear from the really vulnerable girl inside the show. But through the whole of the album, these two sides of Taylor Swift are not only battling against one another, they’re also battling the business they call show.
And that brings us to our discussion of the next overall theme on the album, which is the dark side of celebrity.
Theme 2: The Dark Side of Fame
In this album, Taylor has described these two sides of herself, the showgirl and the girl. But there’s also two sides to the show itself. There’s this whole world behind the curtain that we don’t get to see. And if we did see it, we would never want or covet this life that she has.
This theme is also really reflected in the title and in the cover, and if we look at this bathtub image again, it’s a little ominous, right? Like she could drown, that water is pretty close to coming over her head. That’s this darkness that kind of looms over this whole album: fame isn’t something to covet, and fame has this dark, scary underworld that us mere mortals never get to see. All of the images for this album, actually, are really dark. The lighting is dim, and it’s dim while she’s in this full showgirl garb, on stage, or in a dark theatre. The show, and putting on this show, isn’t light and bright and cheery. It’s dark, and it’s dangerous, and it’s full of obstacles and illusions.
She’s telling us just in the imagery alone that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. But she’s told us this for a really long time, and like most things in the Taylorverse do, it all goes back to reputation. She wrote this album after this huge professional setback: she was cancelled. And a lot of the songs on reputation deal with the aftermath of this big realization: fame and success aren’t permanent. They can be yanked away at a moment’s notice.
Many of the songs on rep are talking about this precarious nature of fame. There’s delicate, which we’ve already discussed, there’s Look What You Made Me Do (“I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me”), This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (“herein lies the issue, friends don’t try to trick you”), there’s Call it What You Want (“my castle crumbled overnight, I brought a knife to a gunfight, they took the crown but it’s alright”).
But I want to call your attention to an overlooked aspect of reputation, which is Taylor’s prologue poem, Why She Disappeared. If you’ve seen the Reputation Stadium Tour concert you’ve heard it – there’s a voiceover in part of the film – but you may never have read it in full, and there’s one particular portion that I think really ties into showgirl, so I’m going to read that portion for you, and if you’re watching this on YouTube I’ll put the full poem on the screen.
So the first part of the poem is describing her cancellation as falling and breaking her bones. Then there’s this portion, which describes what happens when she tries to get back up:
“When she finally rose, she rose slowly
-Reputation prologue poem, “why she dissapeared”
Avoiding old haunts and sidestepping shiny pennies
Wary of phone calls and promises,
Charmers, dandies and get-love-quick-schemes.
When she stood, she stood with a desolate knowingness
Waded out into the dark, wild ocean up to her neck
Bathed in her brokenness
Said a prayer of gratitude for each chink in the armor
she never knew she needed”
I love the entire poem, I think it’s a really gorgeous prelude to the album. But this portion really emphasizes this dark side of fame. She’s fallen down this rabbit hole that was hiding in plain sight, and fallen into this underworld, this dark side of celebrity and success. And when she climbs back out again, the world looks different, because she’s seen this whole other side of being in the public eye. She reemerges, and she’s now wary of everything – “phone calls and promises, Charmers, dandies and get-love-quick-schemes.”
Everything now seems scary, because she’s been scared to death. It’s kind of like the upside down in Stranger Things, where once Will sees what’s hiding on the other side of Hawkins, he can never see the world in the same way again, because he’s seen the danger and the terror hiding just underneath the surface.
When she climbs back out, after she’s learned that she basically can’t trust anyone and has to be wary of every little tiny detail – she looks around and she doesn’t see friends or lovers. She sees “Charmers, dandies and get-love-quick-schemes.” Even though she’s right side up again, she’s seen the darkness, and she can never unsee it. She has realized that her reputation isn’t solid – it’s precarious.
And this is the other really big theme in The Life of a Showgirl: what’s really going on behind the show of showbusiness. There’s this underworld “where it gets quite dark”, and if we saw that darkness, like Will sees the upside down, we’d never be able to see the show – the pedestal of celebrity – in the same way again. We see it as something admirable and something to covet, but she sees it as something she can fall off of at any moment.
So Taylor introduced this theme in reputation, and though there are a handful of songs in between then and now that also dig into the dark side of fame like mirrorball, right where you left me, etc, she really brings it back around in Showgirl. And before the album even begins,she lays out this idea in the prologue poem that there is this darkness to showbusiness that we don’t get to see or that we shouldn’t see. In the fourth poem, which was on the shiny bug variant – which, the shiny bug is just a mirrorball by any other name – she says:
“Perhaps someday they will despise you again, Perhaps it is not a matter of if’, But ‘when’, They’ll re-assess your merits and then, Take a magnifying glass to the shiny bug, Deflate all the heroes they had decided she was. And maybe they’ll do it just because.”
She’s talking about being cancelled again, but what this portion of the poem does is introduce this theme that the life of a showgirl has so much more going on behind the scenes than we ever get to know or ever get to see. And not just in her internal battle, the showgirl versus the girl, but in the nature of the show itself. She’s saying, I’m the shiny bug, and bugs can be crushed on a whim. They can be crushed whenever we feel like it. Public opinion can flip on a dime. And if that happens, this entire show – the production that is Taylor Swift – can just evaporate.
And she adds onto this idea in the final poem, where she’s on stage, looking around at the crowd, and she says, “it’s beautiful, it’s rapturous, it is frightening.” This career she’s built, this celebrity status, is gorgeous on the outside, but on the inside it’s terrifying. And to keep her shell intact – the shiny bug’s armor – there’s a huge amount that goes on behind the show to keep her in our good graces. And that’s really what Showgirl gets into in many of the lyrics. Fame is beautiful on the outside, but hideous on the inside. What it takes to stay famous and successful is not pretty. It’s dark, and it’s underhanded, and you have to sell your soul to get there and to stay there. Maintaining the show of your reputation is a constant battle.
As the album begins, she kind of dips her toes into this theme in The Fate of Ophelia, but then she dives in headfirst in Elizabeth Taylor. There’s this existential question, “do you think it’s forever?”, and then there’s this important line: “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby.” You’re only successful, and you can only stay famous, if you keep being new and fresh and relevant.
Elizabeth Taylor knew this better than anyone, because she was also on this roller coaster of public opinion. Her reputation was tied to what film she’d just put out, and which man she’d married, and which paparazzi photograph was just snapped. She wasn’t judged on her merits, she was judged by the noise, and that’s the same idea that Taylor’s getting at in Showgirl and on reputation, and in a lot of songs and albums in between.
Then there’s this other line in Elizabeth Taylor: “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever, In the papers, on the screen and in their minds.” What she’s saying here is, I’ve left a permanent paper trail. My successes and my scandals are forever, so I have to be incredibly careful where I step, because every move I make, I could be walking straight off a cliff. Like she says in the prologue poem, “every missed step is a mis-step.” One wrong move, and the shiny bug is crushed, and she’ll no longer be the hero we thought she was, she’ll be a has-been.
So there’s this constant struggle to stay in the public’s good graces, this dark, underhanded side of fame, and then in Father Figure, we get to hear this almost origin story of what it took to climb to the top of this pedestal of fame. And Father Figure is a really dark and twisted tale about this dark side of fame, and this struggle to get and maintain any kind of power.
This song starts off being narrated by this father figure, and we learn that he’s power hungry and money hungry. “I can make deals with the devil because my “check’s” bigger.” He takes advantage of his young protege and exploits him for fortune and fame. And this all goes according to his plan, until the protege gets a mind of his own. The protege realizes it was his blood, sweat, and tears that built the empire, and he kicks the father figure out of the metaphorical family.
By the end of this epic story, the power dynamic has flipped. And we can see that it was really an allegory about the industry, and how young artists can be taken advantage of when they have so little agency. They have to put their souls into the hands of devils in order to attain success. And though this is probably a story about Taylor’s masters dispute, and former manager Scott Borchetta who sold her masters out from under her, the larger takeaway is that there’s this whole world going on behind the scenes of the show.
There’s so much sacrifice, and hard work, and being tricked and taken advantage of, and it’s a really cutthroat business. This is the dark reality behind the curtain that we don’t get to see. People who were supposed to protect you can end up ruining you, and in the end, you won’t be able to trust anyone but yourself. This is the dark side of fame and success that they don’t want us to see, because if we saw it, it would shatter the illusion. We’d no longer buy in. We’d see that it’s all a show, and they have to make it look easy, or else the show would crumble.
But maybe the most important track that illustrates this dark side of fame is Cancelled, and this is a really interesting track in which Taylor uses satire to comment on cancel culture. She’s talked about what it felt like to be cancelled before, but really never so blatantly as she does in Cancelled. And though it’s satire – it’s not meant to be taken literally – there are some big kernels of what I see as truth inside.
“It’s easy to love you when you’re popular,” she says, “The optics click, everyone prospers, But one single drop, you’re off the roster, “Tone deaf and hot, let’s f-ing off her”. What she’s talking about here are these critical missteps. Make one wrong move, and the masked crusaders – the internet mob – will take you out back and cancel you. And staying in their good graces is nearly impossible, because you have to be hyper aware of everything.
So she talks about how easy it is to get kicked off the pedestal of fame, but she also tells us in Cancelled what it feels like after that happens: “welcome to my underworld, where it gets quite dark,” and “It’ll break your heart.” This is the dark underworld of celebrity culture, or stardom. It does feel like the upside down, where once you see this dark reality, you can never look at your career or your life the same way again. These two worlds – the purgatory of cancellation, and the pedestal of celebrity – bleed into one another. You can never be safely at the top of the charts without the constant threat of falling off the cliff.
But then she gets really, really dark, and also really really honest: “But if you can’t be good, then just be better at it, Everyone’s got bodies in the attic, Or took somebody’s man, We’ll take you by the hand, And soon you’ll learn the art of never getting caught.” She’s saying that our culture – our cancel culture – hasn’t made people behave better. It hasn’t made celebrities more cautious or more kind. It’s just made them better at disguise.
And though this song is satire, it’s totally true. There’s the dark reality that you can be kicked off the pedestal for something relatively minor, and then there’s the darker reality that most people, when threatened with reputation death, won’t really change or learn or grow. They’ll just get sneakier. They’ll just learn to hide their real intentions or real personality better. Because baby, that’s showbusiness for you. The show that we see on the outside is exactly that – a show. It’s all for show, and it’s what happens behind the scenes that is really dark, and ugly, but also true.
One final note on this theme, and then we’ll move onto the last one I want to discuss. In the title track, she says, “I’d sell my soul to have a taste of a magnificent life, That’s all mine”, But that’s not what showgirls get, They leave us for dead.” They sell their souls to have success, but then once they attain that, it can be yanked away at any point. Their careers can die at any given moment once the public tires of them. They are the shiny bugs that can be crushed whenever we feel like it.
And then later on she says, “And all the headshots on the walls, Of the dance hall are of the “witches”, Who wish I’d hurry up and die.” There are these up and coming showgirls or aspiring showgirls who want the major players to get out of the way so they can have their shot at infamy. But what this is implying is that at this pedestal of fame, there’s only room for one at the top. So once you’re kicked off, once you’re cancelled, someone else just takes your place. And if you want this spot at the top, and the peak, your moment in the spotlight, you have to off someone else to get there. There is not room for everyone, so not only do you have to play your cards very carefully to get there, to stay there takes an incredible amount of maneuvering and tenacity. This is the dark side, the cutthroat side, they don’t want us to see.
The show is really a show. And behind the curtain, it’s dark, and twisted, and manipulative, and it’s a power struggle. So in this sense, the life of a showgirl is also really about the death of a showgirl. As you’re living this life, which is one thing on the outside and a tangled mess underneath, you’re just trying to stay alive. To stay relevant. To stay intact. And it takes some pretty dark deeds to stay alive.
Theme 3: The Road Not Taken (Fate, what wasn’t fated)
The final theme that’s running through this album is something a little bit different, and it’s this idea of fate, or what was fated, and what wasn’t fated, and why. This is a theme that Taylor has always circled around, and she’s done it from one of her first album. On debut in a song called The Outside, she says, “I tried to take the road less traveled by,” and in that line she’s talking about the road not taken. She is, of course, referencing the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” etc, and there’s a whole rabbit hole of what that poem really means that we don’t need to get into for our purposes here. But we can see very early on, she has these ideas of fate and destiny, and what it means to choose one path and not the other.
And while she’s constantly told us her ideas about fate, and destiny, and karma in pretty much every album ever since, she really begins to go deeper into this idea in her later, darker albums. On folklore, she begins the entire album and era with this idea in “the 1,” “it would have been fun, if you would have been the one.” It would have been cool if we had ended up together, but I’m doing okay on my own. And then she continues on in invisible string, where basically the whole song is looking at fate and destiny. So within folklore, this idea is optimistic, right? It’s “so pretty to think that all along there was some invisible string tying you to me.” She seems to have this kind of faith that destiny will take her where she needs to go and to whom she’s meant to be with.
But then in evermore, this idea of fate takes kind of a darker turn. In “tis the damn season”, “the road not taken looks real good now.” She’s wondering if she can turn back time for just a moment, for just this one moment of happiness, because she’s not happy in her current life. And then in right where you left me, you know, “help, I’m still at the restaurant,” she says, “Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it, She’s still 23 inside her fantasy, How it was supposed to be.” She’s stuck, and she’s wondering why she got stuck. Everyone else is moving on, but she can’t. Why did fate, if fate still exists, put her in neutral while everyone else is driving on?
Then there’s the ultimate fate and destiny song that comes on her next album Midnights, and no it’s not karma, though that song is important, but no, for our purposes it’s would’ve, could’ve should’ve. “God rest my soul, I miss who I used to be, The tomb won’t close, Stained glass windows in my mind, I regret you all the time.” She’s gone from being curious about fate to trusting fate to really questioning fate to cursing fate.
And then, and then, she gets really, really dark about fate in TTPD with The Prophecy: “Please I’ve been on my knees, Change the prophecy, Don’t want money, Just someone who wants my company, Let it once be me, Who do I have to speak to, About if they can redo the prophecy?” She looks over where fate and destiny has gotten her, and she wants a redo. She sees herself as cursed by fate. Why did it land her here, in this space where no one can stand beside her? But then she closes TTPD with a more hopeful take in The Manuscript: “and at last, she knew what the agony had been for.” She’s looking over this whole larger narrative, and she assumes it must have been for a purpose. And the purpose was this manuscript, this songbook. It was going through these painful experiences so that she could write about it. That was her destiny.
And of course I’m cherry picking these songs, right? There’s much more to this whole theme in Taylor’s songwriting, but I’m just using these few examples to paint a general picture of where she’s been. We can see she’s really gone on a journey through her faith in fate. It’s been up, down, and all around throughout the albums and eras, but where we left off is in the manuscript. She trusts that it was all for a purpose. This is where we’re going to pick up in the life of a showgirl.
But before we touch on the very obvious ideas of fate in The Fate of Ophelia, I also want to point out this idea that she includes in the prologue poem.
In the 5th poem, which was on the tiny bubble in champagne variant, she says, “You’ve begun to feel that Every song before was just a prayer, A wish list, He is not what you’ve been waiting for, He is more, Why you held out, Why you left, And nothing aches suddenly, He has that effect.” These lines are touching on the prophecy, but they’re also re-introducing this idea of fate in a more hopeful way in this new album. Where we left off in TTPD, she was pretty hopeless, but moving toward acceptance. But now, she sees it was all for a purpose. He was the purpose. It was all leading here, she just didn’t know it at the time.
So if we left off with The Prophecy and The Manuscript, we pick up in the prologue poem, and then in The Fate of Ophelia, with Taylor’s updated vision of fate and destiny. And in this opening track, she re-writes the fate of Ophelia, and in doing that, she re-writes her own fate. She says, “if you’d never come for me, I might have drowned in the melancholy.” This rescuer comes and plucks her out of the depression of midnights and TTPD and changes the prophecy.
But here’s where there’s a new twist in the Taylor Swift fate and destiny narrative: she’s not just talking about what was fated, she’s talking about what would have happened if it wasn’t fated. She would have drowned in the melancholy or lingered in purgatory. She’s wondering both what it means that this is her fate, and why it happened the way it happened. She’s tracing all of these plot points and mapping how she got to where she is. She can see it going both ways, and she’s grateful that it played out the way it did. It’s like she’s no longer fixated on one particular path, or tring to steer in one direction or the other. She’s zooming out and can see exactly how everything played out.
And “Now I can see it all,” she says. And this mirrors that line in The Manuscript: she can see what the agony had been for. She can see this whole invisible string of her life, and how it led her to this point, where she’s finally reached happiness and fulfillment in love. But she also sees this other path, the road not taken, and compares her life now to what it would look like had she chosen differently.
And she really goes into these different paths of fate in Opalite. She starts the song looking back at this past version of herself, “I had a bad habit, Of missing lovers past, My brother used to call it, “Eating out of the trash”, It’s never gonna last, I thought my house was haunted, I used to live with ghosts, And all the perfect couples, Said, “When you know, you know”, And, “When you don’t, you don’t”.
This is the road she could have continued on had her life not turned around. Constantly probing the past, wondering what would’ve, could’ve should’ve been, and taking trips back in time to old lovers, trying to change her current fate. She was stuck looking backwards, at the road not taken, unable to look forwards. But then it turns around: “Life is a song, it ends when it ends, I was wrong,” she says. You don’t just go through life and then you die, you have to make the most of it and look to the future, not the past. I was wrong to do it the old way, and I’ve found a new way of living. It’s perspective. She’s gained a unique perspective.
And once she has this new perspective in Opalite, she really realizes that she was in charge of her own fate and destiny all along. “You were dancing through the lightning strikes,” she says. You were making the best of a bad situation, but “now they sky is opalite” means that my fate and destiny changed because I changed my behavior. I stopped waiting for naturally occuring gemstones, naturally occuring mood rings to change color. I created my own. I stopped waiting for things to happen and became an active participant in my own happiness. I stopped thinking that fate and destiny would just play out how they were supposed to play out, and I took control and took a chance, instead of always looking back at what happened and wondering why it happened. I started looking forwards.
So she’s kind of adding these new elements to her ideas on fate, and she also does this in Ruin The Friendship, where she looks back at the past to see how she could have played it differently. She zooms in on these particular moments where she didn’t take a chance, and she played it safe, and now with the power of hindsight and more maturity, she can see that she should have gone for it. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, or for an invitation, “I should have kissed you anyway.” And it’s not just about the kiss – it’s about choosing where you want to go. Choosing your own happiness, and not worrying about what others think or what others need. Putting yourself first, because you’ll never know until you try. And then she passes down this new revelation to us, “my advice is always ruin the friendship, better that than regret it for all time.” So she’s saying stop waiting for fate or destiny to take the reins. You have to choose your fate yourself.
In Honey, she’s also playing around with these new ideas of fate. She looks back over these past moments where terms of endearment like “honey” and “sweetheart” were weaponized. They used to hurt. But now that she has her new perspective, they feel sweet. They actually feel endearing, because they’re coming from someone who means what he says. He’s “redefined all of those blues”, which means now when she looks back at these painful moments, they don’t feel quite so painful.
But here’s this new perspective on fate: had she not had those prior experiences, which felt horrible, this new happiness might not feel quite so happy. And she’s not just talking about the language, the terms “honey” and “sweetheart,” she’s talking about the relationship itself. Had she not gone through those previous late night booty calls, with someone who didn’t mean what he said, she might not appreciate this new love for what it is. She had to go through the dishonesty and the manipulation to appreciate the honesty and the transparency when it’s right in front of her. She, in other words, had to kiss a lot of frogs to find her prince.
And in these songs in this road-not-traveled vein – Ophelia, Ruin the Friendship, Honey – she’s not just redefining her future. She’s looking back at the past, and seeing, really, that it was all for a purpose. It may not have been clear at the time, but as soon as she stopped expecting fate to just lay out her future on a platter, and actually began to make choices that would lead to happiness instead of lingering in her past sadness, that’s when fate and destiny finally feel fulfilled. It was fated to go through the hard times so that the happy times actually feel happy.
And even though she has some regrets, those are also for a purpose, because she learned from them. She learned what she wanted, and what she didn’t want, and why. So Taylor’s new ideas on fate and destiny are now less like a fairytale, and more like a heroes’ journey. She had to make the choices, she had to go through the rough patches, and she had to learn the lessons to get to a place where the sky is opalite. They onyx nights were for a reason, and it’s so that when the sky brightens, she has a point of comparison. It looks brighter because she knows what the darkness feels like.
The road not taken looks like a lesson, not a regret, and that’s the real epiphany that comes out of the life of a showgirl.
Album Summary
We could go into more themes of the album, but those three are, for me, the most important and the most crucial in the larger character arc, the larger narrative arc of Taylor Swift. She’s not really introducing any brand new themes here, but she is adding more to the story inside these things that she’s talked about for a long while.
So in an album that, by all accounts, should be a victory lap, I think it is in its own way. Because all of the darkness can’t simply evaporate. This darkness has plagued her entire career, and even though things are looking brighter recently, she’s still telling her own story. And her own story isn’t all rainbows and kittens. The life of a showgirl hasn’t been straightforward, it’s been really hard, and arduous, and it’s been a lifelong journey to get to these big realizations and learn these big lessons.
Personally, I’m incredibly excited for TS13, and in my next episode I’m going to take a closer look at this larger trajectory and try to make some predictions for what’s to come, but I’m not going to do it in the way you might think. And here’s a hint: it involves charts. And data. So please like and subscribe so you don’t miss my next episode.
But before we wrap up, I want to debut a new segment for you, and it’s a segment I’m going to call *VIBES*. where I suggest some other content that has the same vibes as whatever Taylor project we’re talking about. I should have done this in my song by song analysis, but hindsight is 20/20, so I’m just going to include it in the future if you guys are into it. So tell me in the comments if you want more vibes, like more cowbell, and I’ll be paying attention.
Other Media Suggestions With the Vibes as The Life of a Showgirl
Since we are in the showgirl era, here are some movies and shows that I think have the same vibes as The Life of a Showgirl. No spoilers for any of these if you haven’t seen them, just suggestions, if you’re into the vibes of showgirl, you’ll like these other things, too. So if you need some fresh ideas for what to watch over the holidays, here you go.
So starting off strong, A Star is Born, the 2018 Lady Gaga version, in which Lady Gaga’s character learns the life of a showgirl. She’s an aspiring singer songwriter, and one day this father figure pulls up to her in the jag, and turns her rags into gold, and then – plot twist – she saves him, or tries to save him, from The Fate of Ophelia. But this movie is, number one a beautiful love story and a beautiful loss story, but number two, is really about the perils and pitfalls of fame. It’s really about what this life costs, and how unavoidable this price to pay is when you’re famous and the crowd is always chanting more. It’s about what all that external pressure and validation does to you internally, and it’s a gorgeous story. You can watch the originals too, but they don’t have that Gaga/Bradley Cooper chemistry.
Two, Postcards From The Edge, the 1990 dramedy starring Meryl Streep and Shirley Maclaine. This film is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name written by Carrie Fisher about her toxic relationship with showbusiness and with her mother, Debbie Reynolds. Meryl Streep plays our protagonist Suzanne, based on Carrie Fisher, who is a famous actress struggling with addiction, and struggling with always living in the shadow of her more famous showgirl mother, Doris (based on Debbie Reynolds). And though there are a lot of themes of drug abuse and narcissistic family dynamics, we can see that the setting – this Hollywood, showgirl life – is really both the catalyst and the roadblock for all of these really hard things these characters are going through. They both KNOW the life of a showgirl, and it’s not a life that anyone should aspire to, which is also what Taylor is saying in this album. Also, if you’re into Carrie Fisher and her vast lore, definitely watch the documentary Bright Lights, which was filmed before both Carrie and her mother passed away.
Three: The Last Showgirl starring Pamela Anderson. Pam plays our protagonist, who has been a proper showgirl – a Las Vegas sequin and feather showgirl – all her life. And as these types of shows shut down, it follows Pam as she struggles with what her life meant, and what she sacrificed to have these moments in the spotlight. As she auditions for more modern shows, she finds that she’s kind of stuck in a time capsule. She’s been in this showgirl bubble, and the world moved on without her (help, I’m still at the restaurant). What felt like this ultimate life – being this glamorous showgirl – is no longer something the world is interested in. And it’s just a beautiful film, also starring Kiernan Shipka and Jamie Lee Curtis, that you should definitely watch.
Four: Almost Famous. Of course, this has to be on the list, and it’s a Cameron Crowe classic. It follows our protagonist, William, as he fakes his way into writing for Rolling Stone in the 70s. He gets to go on tour with this new hot band, and gets immersed in the world of rock and roll debauchery. But what really steals the show are the Band Aids, who are essentially groupies to all of these rock stars. Kate Hudson, and Anna Paquin, and others, just want to be in this world of music and superstardom, even though they’re not in the industry. And what this film emphasizes to me is really the power of fame. The magnetism of fame, and how it can attract people who aren’t good for you, and only want to exploit you. And how, even on the periphery, this world is dark, and dangerous, and this film displays it brilliantly, and it’s funny, and also somehow heartwarming, and just a classic you have to see if you’ve never seen it.
Moving onto TV shows, I have to start with Hacks. This is a more recent show on HBO Max that follows two comedians who have been recently cancelled, Jean Smart plays Deborah Vance, this older, famous comedian who is losing her lustre as she kind of ages out of the industry, and she’s paired up with Ava, played by Hannah Einbinder, who is an up-and-coming comedian who has gotten into some professional trouble with her jokes. Even though this is not based on the music industry, it’s inside the world of professional comedy, it’s really an exploration of women in the spotlight, and what it takes to get there, and what it takes to stay there. It discusses cancel culture, and the patriarchy, and the expiration date of celebrity women, and it’s incredibly funny and smart.
And the second TV show that has the same vibes is The Studio. This came out just this year, and stars Seth Rogen as this newly promoted Hollywood studio head who wants to make movies that matter. He’s optimistic, and he charges full speed ahead to make content that’s entertaining but that also really has something to say, but these wrenches keep getting thrown in his wheels, and the wrenches are the egos of celebrities and the egos of all these other people inside the machine. He can’t get where he wants to go because he has to keep trying to please people and make things look a certain way. It’s a really funny exploration of what we see on the outside of the entertainment industry versus what it’s really like on the inside. And Zoe Kravitz, friend of Taylor, absolutely steals the show in a later episode, and Agatha All Along (Kathryn Hanh) and Moira Rose (Catherine O-Hara) also make this series incredibly funny and memorable.
Those are my vibe choices, and there are probably some really obvious ones that I missed (and yes I skipped Showgirls starring Jessie Spano on purpose, because you can’t force that film upon my psyche anymore, I just can’t do it), but let me know what your vibe suggestions are in the comments. More vibes to come if you want this to be a regular thing.
Outro
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of the episode, please remember to like and subscribe because this channel is definitely for you. We are all nerdy Taylor Swift fans here who can dissect lyrics to death, and we all know that things are never just what they seem on the surface when it comes to the music of Ms Taylor Allison Swift.
Next week I’m going to look at the big picture, and try to come up with some predictions for TS 13, so stay tuned.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
