The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore - Review
Just a couple days ago, Taylor Swift announced that she’d be releasing 4 new bonus tracks to her most recent album The Life of a Showgirl. Produced by the same music masterminds that engineered many of her previous chart-toppers, Max Martin and Shellback’s production show promising potential for this album. When I opened Spotify to listen to the 4 new tracks, the songs weren’t playing because of the overload of listeners on the app! But after refreshing for a couple minutes, this is my review of the new songs after the first listen:
1. Patient Zero
The string-heavy instrumentation accompanies a warning for the new partner of one of her exes. Acknowledging that the relationship started off great and there weren’t any signs for it to go badly, Taylor was the “patient zero,” the first to deal with the virus-adjacent manipulation that resulted from that relationship.
2. Cleveland!
This song starts off addressing some harmful criticism from the haters. However, it takes a romantic twist, stating how she doesn’t care about the opinion of the public, and this public scrutiny isn’t important to her compared to her fulfilling marriage and her new husband Travis Kelce’s embrace, using his hometown Cleveland as a symbol for his embrace.
3. Pink Clouding
“Pink clouding” is a state of euphoria near the start of addiction recovery, where one feels excited for sobriety. Just as the title suggests, this song talks about the temporary honeymoon phase at the start of a relationship, especially rushing into a rebound relationship after a breakup. Taylor felt that she had led a past lover on the wrong path with this false honeymoon phase, and hopes they ended up okay.
4. ☆ Babylon
The closing track to the deluxe album, Babylon’s beautiful lyrics stand out in my personal ranking. The Gardens of Babylon is a tale of sweeping gardens that turned to ruins. The people in these gardens wouldn’t have known about its significance until it went away, which is reflected in Taylor’s experiences with a past lover, and how he longs to find an escape, but then misses being trapped. Riddled with nostalgic memories of his hometown, we soon realize that this refusal to appreciate what he has not only hurts him, but hurts everyone around him.
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