Taylor Swift — The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore

I really wanted to love these four new songs. I was genuinely emotional during the first few seconds, and then Cleveland! happened and something immediately stopped working for me.

I have absolutely no problem with a happy, in-love, silly or intentionally cringe Taylor. I love ME! precisely because it knows exactly what it is and fully commits to it. My problem with Cleveland! is musical and stylistic. The 90s synths, the almost Christmas-y chimes, the exaggerated “announcement” vocal delivery and the extremely quotable relationship lines all feel like separate ideas rather than one coherent musical identity. None of those elements are inherently bad, but together I can almost see the seams. And when the big romantic revelation is essentially that she has finally found someone who doesn’t find her insufferable, instead of finding it romantic I’m left thinking: is that really the bar for “the love of my life”?

Patient Zero leaves me with a different but equally unpleasant feeling. Not because Taylor isn’t “allowed” to be petty, but because I feel like I’ve heard this story before: the charismatic toxic man, Taylor figuring out who he really is, and now a message to the woman who came after her. The metaphor has changed, but I’m not sure the perspective has. At this point in her life and her writing, I would rather hear what looking back has taught her than another variation of the same resentment.

Pink Clouding simply does nothing for me, while Babylon is the only one of the four I would currently save, and the only one I can see growing on me.

I think that’s where most of my disappointment comes from. I don’t mind Taylor changing. What bothers me is struggling to see the evolution behind the change. Even the dry, monumental, almost brutalist visual identity of this era made me expect something much more defined than what I’m hearing in these songs.

I don’t need Taylor to go back to folklore. I don’t need her to be sad or write another All Too Well. She can be in love, ridiculous, camp, sexy, completely happy. I just want the music, writing, production and visual identity to feel like they belong to the same world.

With three of these four songs, I can see the seams too clearly. And once I see them, I can’t unsee them.