The New Yorker:

Caroline Mimbs Nyce
Newsletter editor

Between the Eras Tour, her engagement to the football star Travis Kelce, and now two original albums in less than eighteen months, Taylor Swift has become “freakishly omnipresent in the cultural consciousness: a grinning lodestar in Louboutin boots,” the music critic Amanda Petrusich writes today in her review of “The Life of a Showgirl.” And yet, even amid all this crazy success, the singer has stuck to her underdog mentality. On her latest album, she sings about the struggles of being famous, adopting a tone that’s, at times, more vengeful than tender, Petrusich writes, to mixed results. “Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t.”

I caught up with Amanda, as well as the senior editor Tyler Foggatt (who has written about Swift’s rerecording efforts), to discuss their initial reactions to the new album. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: O.K., first thoughts?

Tyler Foggatt: I’m liking it so far, but I’m not really seeing that much of a connection to the showgirl theme! It’s kind of hilarious how she spends so much time crafting and pushing forward a particular aesthetic for each album (like the whole seventies thing she did for “Midnights”) and then the music doesn’t match at all. It would be actively strange to watch her perform some of these songs wearing, like, a sequinned headdress.

Amanda Petrusich: Totally. It’s funny to think that “The Tortured Poets Department” is actually the more showgirl-y album—it’s certainly more focussed on the cognitive disconnect of onstage vs. offstage. Given the extremely deliberate marketing rollout here—shout out to the branded briefcase she whipped out on the Kelce brothers’ podcast, “New Heights”—I was also expecting songs more in the “Lights, camera, bitch, smile” vein of “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart.” But I think it’s possible that we’ve reached the point where everything Taylor Swift writes is about being famous—I don’t know. That sort of bums me out?

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