Taylor Swift Unveils New Album The Life of a Showgirl

The wait is over: Taylor Swift has released her highly-anticipated twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl. Stream the 12-track project in full below.

The album arrives as Swift’s personal life, namely her engagement to Kansas City Chiefs football star Travis Kelce, is dominating headlines. The news was big enough to inspire a DoorDash discount, elicit an offer from Foreigner to serve as their wedding band, and cause JD Vance to wonder if the NFL would rig games in the Chiefs’ favor (eye roll).

Now that The Life of a Showgirl is out, however, Swift’s artistry is back in the spotlight. The record release arrives with a big-screen cinematic event, Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which will play in US theaters from October 3rd through 5th. The film will feature the world premiere of the music video for her new single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” plus “never before seen behind-the-scenes footage of how we made it, cut by cut explanations of what inspired this music, and the brand new lyric videos” from the new album.

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“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during [The Eras Tour], which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Swift revealed on a recent episode of New Heights, the podcast hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild dramatic place I was in in my life, and so that effervescence has come through on this record and like as you said, bangers… This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time.”

Many listeners will surely head straight for the album’s fourth track, “Father Figure,” which features an interpolation of George Michael’s 1987 hit single of the same name which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988.

Other than the George Michael interpolation, the only other guest appearance on The Life of a Showgirl is from pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter, who features on the album’s title track, which is also the last song of the set.

Swift’s popularity extend beyond the realms of pop music, with folksy alt-rockers Counting Crows covering “The 1,” the opening track from Swift’s 2020 album, folklore, earlier this year.

That broad appeal helped propel Swift’s most recent “Eras Tour” to a record-breaking $2 billion-plus in ticket sales, making it the biggest tour in music history.

See where “The Eras Tour” landed on our list of the 100 Best Tours of All Time.

The Life of a Showgirl Artwork: