Taylor Swift has released four new tracks under the banner of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore — and if you were worried that marriage and obvious happiness might have softened her into irrelevance, three of the four will set your mind at ease. The Tortured Poets membership card is firmly in her pocket. The fourth track, “Cleveland!,” is the honeymoon song to end all honeymoon songs and is either contagious or grating depending on your constitution.
Together the four tracks function more as an EP — something Swift hasn’t formally released since 2008’s Beautiful Eyes — than as any obvious continuation of The Life of a Showgirl. They were recorded after that album was already out, which partly explains why they sound different from it. All four were produced by the same trio of Max Martin, Shellback, and Swift herself, but the sonic palette shifts notably from track to track in ways the original album didn’t. What they taste like at first bite:
“Patient Zero”
The most immediately striking of the four, and the most sonically unexpected. The dry drum production that characterised much of Showgirl is gone, replaced here by electronic percussion under a violin — or something built to emulate one — that gives the track a bittersweet, mid-tempo lope unlike anything in Martin and Shellback’s recent catalogue. It could be mistaken for a stray Jack Antonoff production.
The subject: a former relationship, framed as a medical metaphor, in which Swift has long since recovered but feels compelled to warn the ex’s current partner about what she’s walking into. The register is not angry but cheerfully retrospective — the contrast with “You’re Losing Me,” the harrowing Midnights bonus track that documented what appeared to be the same relationship’s final hours, is stark. She has moved on. She just remembers everything.
The most quotable line — telling the current girlfriend she’s receiving advice from “someone who had him and walked away” — will narrow down IRL speculation significantly and will prompt the predictable response: She’s married and she’s still writing about this? The point, as she constructs it, is precisely that she has gotten over it. But she hasn’t forgotten. Good. She needs that memory to keep writing songs that aren’t all white picket fences.
“Cleveland!”
Fair warning: this one is goofy. Calibrated somewhere between the self-celebration of “Me!” and the cheerleading of “So High School,” it is a love song about Travis Kelce that reads like she genuinely cannot believe her own luck and cannot stop saying so. Musically, Martin and Shellback reach back to synth-pop circa 1987, which works better than it should under some very live-sounding drum rolls.
The lyrical premise: Swift, apparently having read the comments, knows the internet considers her a subpar dancer, and is amazed that she has found someone who loves her anyway. This is peak Reputation-era logic — barely believing that someone could see past the pile-on — now applied to a very real marriage to a man who plays professional football. The spoken-word moment lands as charming rather than embarrassing: “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.”
Not every Taylor Swift song needs to be a knife. “Cleveland!” is a door prize. Take it or leave it.
“Pink Clouding”
The finest of the four on first listen — though “Babylon” runs it close. The track opens with lush, overdubbed vocals before settling into a steady pulse and a warmth that places it somewhere between Lover and a particularly optimistic 1989 outtake. This is Swift writing a done-somebody-wrong song with genuine regret rather than vindication — a mode she does less often but perhaps more beautifully.
“Pink cloud syndrome,” in recovery language, refers to a temporary phase of intense euphoria and overconfidence in early recovery — the false dawn before the actual work. Swift uses the concept to describe what sounds like a relationship she walked away from before it could properly bloom, leaving someone she now looks back on with something closer to grief than anger.
The lines are as good as anything she has written in years. “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.” The poet who writes about touch-downs and wedding vows has not lost the capacity for the shockingly tender confession. This is proof.
“Babylon”
The most lyrically opaque of the four and, in its way, the most interesting. An acoustic guitar opening that briefly suggests Aaron Dessner territory — or, reaching further back, the register of “White Horse” — opens into something fuller and more resonant than most of Showgirl‘s more restrained original tracks.
What it means requires more listening than a single pass allows. But the superior lines emerge clearly enough: “You ran with all the wild things / A liberated libertine who longed for home.” “Love is ice upon the ladder that you need to climb.” And the best single line of the four tracks: “The self-harm of never being where you are.” It reads as a song of empathy — partially self-directed, partially a loving elegy for an ex she once would have dispatched with far less charity. A path not taken on the way to Madison Square Garden. We can be glad “Cleveland!” is where she lives now. But part of her heart is still in Babylon, and these songs are better for it.
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