Do We Still Like Taylor Swift When She’s Happy?

If I have been writing a music about Travis Kelce, a person I’ve by no means met, I’d point out that he performs football, and that he has a podcast. I’d indicate that he’s about to marry Taylor Speedy, and that the 2 of them seem to be more than pleased in combination. I may also come with a series about how Kelce turns out amusing; he has excellent vibes. If I have been in reality attaining—and I virtually no doubt could be, as a result of, once more, I don’t know him—I’d lodge to modest bodily descriptions. He’s majestic, and has noticeably immense palms (admirable for catching balls). Additionally, he’s lovely scorching.

Those facets, and reputedly those lonely, are those that Speedy dwells on in “The Life of a Showgirl,” her 12th studio copy, which got here out on Friday. “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,” she sings in “The Fate of Ophelia,” which additionally features a passing connection with Kelce the use of his “megaphone”—a.okay.a. his podcast, “New Heights”—to publicly categorical his pastime in her, then he had attended one among her Eras Tour presentations in 2023. In “Wi$h Li$t,” Speedy says she “made wishes on all of the stars” for anyone like Kelce: “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.” The after music, “Wood”—Sabrina Carpenter-esque in content material and Jackson 5-like in tone—is largely one lengthy dick shaggy dog story. (Neatly, no longer that lengthy: at two mins and thirty seconds, “Wood” is technically the shortest observe at the copy.) “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs,” she sings. At one level, she means that Kelce has reached “New Heights of manhood.” (“Singing about travis kelce’s penis over a Jackson 5 sample should get you taken out back like a rabid dog,” one particular person wrote on X.)

When Speedy first introduced that she had made a fresh copy—in a guest appearance on Kelce’s podcast, which he co-hosts along with his brother, again in August—she mentioned that the track got here from the “most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic” duration of her occasion. Occupation-wise, she was once at a top: she’d begun writing the document occasion she was once nonetheless at the Eras Excursion. However she was once additionally alluding to her dating with Kelce. Speedy described his population makes an attempt to courtroom her, including “This is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teen-ager.” Later they completed recording the podcast, Kelce proposed to Speedy in his again backyard.

I will have to admit that, after I heard concerning the engagement, I straight away questioned what it could cruel for her track. I totally settle for that it is a top instance of the way we recall to mind artists much less as actual population than as leisure. And that’s any such factor that I anticipated Speedy to spend extra age grappling with on “Showgirl,” which she billed as a behind-the-scenes take a look at the pressures of being a performer. Speedy is probably the most commercially a hit musician alive, and it could appear, at highest, reductive, and, at worst, misogynistic, to signify that her love occasion would have any bearing at the trait of her paintings. She had spent the early years of her occupation contending with a “boy-crazy” symbol, in large part pushed by way of the media and her detractors, which she would travel directly to satirize in “Blank Space,” her music about her “long list of ex-lovers.” And but those males haven’t simply been her boyfriends; they’ve been her muses. She is a grasp of telling non-public tales, making them tone compelling and, maximum impressively, making them really feel relatable. That is frequently completed during the fat importance of metaphor: an individual who is lovely in and out is “a mansion with a view” (“Delicate”); a decaying long-distance dating is captured thru “the rust that grew between telephones” (“Maroon”). Some have speculated that “Wood” is a riff on a viral 2021 tweet lampooning Speedy’s songwriting genre, by which a consumer joked that Swifties will have to be horrified when Ariana Grande “sings about sex and doesn’t write it like ‘he stuck his long wood into my redwood forest and let his sap ferment my roots.’ ”

She has all the time had an intuition for narrative, so it’s placing that, as Speedy’s dating with Kelce has grown extra severe, the tale she’s informed about him has in large part remained the similar. On “So High School,” one among her first songs about him, she sings, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” A negligible greater than a era upcoming, when she posted about their engagement on Instagram, she captioned the post “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” Those are the jobs they followed, too, when Speedy went on Kelce’s podcast. At one level, Speedy described a few of her track as “esoteric.” “She’s so hot when she says these big words,” Kelce mentioned. Speedy gave him a fairly exasperated glance: “You know what esoteric means!”

Previous to Kelce, Speedy’s muse was once Joe Alwyn, a British actor who’s reputedly so type and unassuming in actual occasion that he assists in keeping getting typecast in movies as a sexual predator. (“Boy Erased,” “Kinds of Kindness,” and, relying in your interpretation of a scene that occurs offscreen, “The Brutalist.”) Alwyn is the presumptive inspiration for “Delicate,” “Gorgeous,” and the alternative love songs on “reputation”—which, in spite of being framed as a revenge copy, is almost definitely Speedy’s maximum romantic document—in addition to many tracks on her next copy, “Lover.” (“I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all,” she sings, at the identify observe.) Alwyn and Speedy have been nonetheless relationship when she made “folklore” and “evermore,” the indie, lyrical masterpieces that she exempted throughout the pandemic, and he even helped incrible a number of the songs. (“I just heard Joe singing the entire fully formed chorus of ‘betty’ from another room,” Speedy defined in her documentary-style live performance movie, “folklore: the long pond studio sessions.”) Alwyn may be credited as a songwriter on “Sweet Nothing,” some of the most endearing songs in Speedy’s discography, a couple of spouse who needs not anything however your corporate—in an international that calls for the entirety else—at the “Midnights” copy.

Speedy and Alwyn penniless up in 2023, and, more or less a era upcoming, she pour out “The Tortured Poets Department,” an copy that coated 3 muses: Alwyn, the 1975’s entrance guy Matty Healy, and Kelce. Healy and Speedy’s dating could have been arguable and short-lived, however I can all the time be pleased about it, as it led to “Guilty as Sin?,” which could be the one really erotic music that Speedy has ever written. (The observe, which is concerning the thrill of fantasizing about anyone who you’re not with, means that Speedy is best at writing concerning the myth of intercourse than concerning the original business of it.) Kelce, in the meantime, were given the aforementioned “So High School” (“Brand new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto”) and “The Alchemy” (“So when I touch down / Call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I’m the one to beat”).