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If you’re a Taylor Swift fan, one of your deepest fears this year might have been that the pop superstar will be so wrapped up in a long, rapturous honeymoon that she’ll neglect to bring us down by continuing to write
about the bums that got away, or any lingering regrets that were accumulated on the way to the skybox. So it will come as some relief that three of the four new tracks on “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” prove she has no intention of turning in her Tortured Poets membership card any time soon.
Meanwhile, the fourth track, “Cleveland!,” establishes that she also has no intention of stopping writing about marital bliss, in the giddiest form possible, with an unrepentant sunniness so blinding it could almost blot out the memory that she’d ever written an elegy in her life. You’ve been warned.
However it’s packaged, these four tracks essentially constitute a new EP — something she really hasn’t formally given us since 2008’s “Beautiful Eyes” — more than they feel like any kind of obvious addendum to “The Life of a Showgirl,” despite reassembling the same trio of Avengers (Max Martin, Shellback and herself) for the task. Call if what you want: as much as the world loves Swift as the 21st century’s quintessential album artist, it’s refreshing to get something fast and easily digestible from her between pop opuses, too. Here’s how these four tracks taste at first bite:
“Patient Zero.” When Swift thinks of a certain recent ex in her past, she does not think of Tim McGraw. She thinks of hospitals, and/or pandemics. One has to suspect that if “Patient Zero” has a real-life inspiration, it’s the same guy who inspired her to write that she was dying, emotionally, in “You’re Losing Me,” the scary post-“Midnights” bonus track that appeared to be about her longest-term relationship going into its last throes on life support. But as harrowing as “You’re Losing Me” was, “Patient Zero” is absolutely chipper, since she’s singing about being long since recovered from the malady and remembering it only for the sake of warning the fellow’s current paramour about how his good-guy act won’t be nourishing in the end.
The sound is very different from anything on “The Life of a Showgirl,” so it makes some sense to learn that this and the other tracks were recorded after that album was already out (and very long after it was recorded). The dry drum sound heard on much of “Showgirl” is replaced here with electronic percussion, while the key bit of instrumentation is a violin, or something built to emulate one. If you didn’t know better, you might guess this was a stray Jack Antonoff track, since it doesn’t bear any of the obvious Martin/Shellback hallmarks. There’s a bittersweet, lopingly mid-tempo feel to it that we haven’t heard in, well, a fortnight.
Fans will point to her telling the ex’s new gal that she should take the sisterly advice from “someone who had him and walked away,” which does narrow down the possibilities of who it could be about IRL, if anyone. And from that, prompt the cries of “She’s married, and she still hasn’t gotten over it?” The point is kind of that she has. But good for her for keeping that memory mill alive; she’s going to need it to keep writing songs that aren’t all white picket fences. Plus, we love a T-Swift who forgives — maybe — but never, ever forgets.
“Cleveland!” Listen, this one is just effing goofy — calibrated somewhere between the cheeky self-celebration of “Me!” and the cheerleading of “So High School” and “Wood.” Not everyone loves Taylor Swift being a love-besotted goofball, but if that is offensive to you, modern technology makes it pretty easy to skip directly from track 1 to track 3. On first and second listen, I’m not sure whether it’s going to grow on me or gnaw at me in the future. But every singer who’s found love, especially just a bit later in life, deserves the shot at writing a honeymoon song or ten. So when it comes to the contagious ebullience here, you can consider some of us patient zero for succumbing to it.
And this is a charmer, at least if you can buy into the notion that Swift still considers herself an underdog; it’s almost like the direct happy sequel to “You Belong With Me,” in a way. Does Swift, having been queen of the world for this many years, still think of herself as a loser who’s pulling out of here to win? Well, apparently she’s been reading the comments, and is virtually quoting them back in the verses as she refers to the school of thought that she is the world’s clumsiest dancer (hardly true, but it’s out there). And just as on “Reputation” she could not believe that her new boy at the time was willing to see past all the lies of Kanye-gate and love her anyway, here she can barely believe that Travis will not hold it against her that she is not pop’s quintessential hoofer. The woman doth protest too much about how much the internet holds against her, but anyway, she has been to Cleveland Heights now, where there are also some non-ballerinas, and made herself at home. It’s sweet.
Musically, Martin and Shellback (and Swift herself, to offer proper co-producer credit) are switching it up again here, with some very live-sounding drum rolls here, in contrast to the electronic rhythms of “Patient Zero.” But floating above those drums is a keyboard line that sounds right out of the synth-pop late ’80s… although A Flock of Seagulls or their ilk would never have gotten prosaic enough to offer a spoken monologue like: “You only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn’t find you completely insufferable, and I have an important announcement to make — I found mine.”
(Now, will we get an exclamatory “Florida!!!”/”Cleveland!” mashup at some point on the next tour?)
“Pink Clouding.” We’re all going to agree that this presents itself as the finest of the four on first blush, right? (Although it’s pretty close to a tie between the final two.) The lush, overdubbed vocals that herald the dawning of the track, followed by a steady pulse and cheerfully boomy undercurrents, make this sound like it could have been on “Lover” or, yes, even a “1989” outtake. It’s one of Swift’s regret tracks, in the lineage that stretches back to the more somber “Back to December,” a done-somebody-wrong number in which the singer sounds wistful about the boy she ghosted, disappearing from a cloud they were mutually enjoying.
One recovery center defines “pink cloud syndrome” as “a temporary phase of intense euphoria, optimism and overconfidence experienced during the early stages of addiction recovery.” In other words, maybe the pink cloud she hopped onto with the guy in question was… a getaway car. Anyway, euphoria is something some Swifties may experience with this one on repeat, even if it means to be a cautionary tale. A
nd all this time later into her career, with the stereotype that she writes primarily vindictively still refusing to die in some circles, it’s still disarming to hear her put her guard down and confess: “Neither of us knew at the time that I was a liar… Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry…. I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person.” Nobody needs to worry that all that time spent screaming over touchdowns and penalties has knocked the shockingly tender poetry out of her.
“Babylon.” The most lyrically elusive song of the fresh quartet, “Babylon” is as mysterious as “Cleveland!” is determinedly simple. Is Babylon anything like Wonderland? (And to quote one instant tweet that popped up from a literalist within minutes of the song going live: “Who the hell is Aunt Virginia?”) It gets back to her roots right at the top with an acoustic guitar that briefly seems to place it in Aaron Dessner territory… or maybe the real backdating should be to “White Horse,” since Swift seems to be referencing it when she writes, “That small town’s even smaller now in your rear view,” a pretty clear callback.) Again, the sound is fuller here, more suggestive and resonant, than on most of the dialed-down original “Showgirl” tracks.
What it means is difficult to parse right in the moment, but there are sone superior lines to pick out: “You ran with all the wild things / A liberated libertine who longed for home.” Is that Swift talking about herself in her immediate pre-Travis days, when she was running with one hell of a seeming wild thing? “Love is ice upon the ladder that you need to climb” is a whoa moment. And she hasn’t written many better one-liners than: “The self-harm of never being where you are.” It sounds most like a song of empathy, maybe partly directed at herself but more apparently written in a loving manner for an ex she once would have killed with a thousand cuts but now has some real sympathy for. We can appreciate that it’s “Cleveland!” that gives her life, but part of her heart is still with the ones in Babylon, a path not taken on the way to MSG.
