Taylor Swift’s New Music Reveals Her Most Painful Flaw

Newly married, nearing 40 and a billionaire, Taylor Swift appears to have conquered almost every corner of life. Yet her music still struggles to develop a style that feels older than the high school cafeteria.

Swift’s latest 16-track release, The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, arrived Friday, but only four songs are genuinely new. The remaining tracks are recycled from her 12th studio album.

Consider “Cleveland!”, which begins with a list of imagined put-downs: that Swift is less attractive than she used to be—or never was attractive at all—that she is not a “girls’ girl,” dresses poorly despite her wealth and cannot dance.

“She’s not as hot as she was,” she sings.

Then comes another jab: “Why’s she dressed like trash?”

The song eventually arrives at its supposed victory lap: “But my baby likes what he likes.”

Good Lord.

“Pink Clouding” contains the outline of a mature idea—the regret that follows hurting an ex—but the thought is buried beneath layers of bubblegum vocals and sugary production. The meaning is difficult to hear through the gloss.

There are “Pr-pr-promises,” tiny “Pink, ha-ha-ha” asides and lines such as “Met the magenta sunrise / Fuchsia forever intertwined.”

The subject matter may be adult. The presentation is not.

Swift’s latest material is not a disaster. It is something more dispiriting: polished, costly, technically assured and almost immediately forgettable.

Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder and famously devoted Swiftie, offered a restrained verdict: “Overall decent. No smash hits.”

For an artist of Swift’s stature, “decent” should be a starting point, not the conclusion. With roughly 101 million monthly Spotify listeners and virtually unlimited creative freedom, she has a responsibility to push herself—not to satisfy everyone, but to reach beyond work that is merely competent, predictable and serviceable.

It seems fame has done more than separate Swift from ordinary life. It may also have kept her emotionally and artistically stuck in childhood.

The new songs carry a faintly Baby Jane quality—not because Swift is fading, obviously, but because she appears unwilling to leave behind the persona that made her famous: the misunderstood girl, the terrible boyfriend, the cruel mean girl, the betrayal and the carefully delivered revenge.

On 2008’s Fearless, Swift imagined a Romeo-and-Juliet romance in “Love Story” while presenting herself as the unnoticed outsider in “You Belong With Me.”

“She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers,” she sang.

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Well, the girl from the bleachers got the jock. Swift married Travis Kelce, the 6-foot-5 Kansas City Chiefs star.

The fantasy came true. Still, she won’t let it go.

Perhaps the problem is: Who, at this point, tells Taylor Swift no?

Even her mediocre albums sell. Her fans will buy the record, the vinyl, the alternate vinyl and the collector’s edition.

Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys once called her ‘a sort of Mrs Thatcher of pop music’ because of her fascination with the economics of the industry. A decade later, the comparison feels even more apt. Her business is formidable. Her art increasingly feels like product.

But Swift’s fans have aged too. Many of the girls who heard ‘Love Story’ in high school are now women with marriages, children, careers, divorces and mortgages. Perhaps they would like Swift to grow up alongside them. I won’t hold my breath.

This is frustrating because Swift has greatness in her. 1989 felt like genuine evolution: New York, adulthood, reinvention, an artist shedding one identity and moving confidently into another.

Michael Jackson famously named his home Neverland after Peter Pan’s kingdom, where children never grow up, yet even his music evolved dramatically from the Jackson 5 through Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous.

Swift’s problem isn’t lack of talent. It’s, perhaps, a fear of being forgotten.

She has effectively admitted as much. In Miss Americana, she said women in entertainment are ‘discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,’ as she argued that female artists must constantly reinvent themselves ‘or else you’re out of a job.’

That anxiety may explain the relentless output, but it doesn’t excuse the puerility.

Take a note from Adele: She disappears, lives, matures and comes back when she has something worth saying. She has written about motherhood, divorce, guilt and the pain of explaining a broken marriage to her son. Her album 30 could not have been made by the woman who recorded 21.

Swift has the opposite problem: oversaturation.

So, here’s some advice from a fan: Let us miss you. Leave Neverland and the high-school cafeteria. Then come back with something truly new.