What I think.
The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore unfortunately does not change my opinion about this album that much. I’m genuinely sorry to be reviewing it again because I really wanted to see if time would make me understand it a little more, especially now with new songs, but it just doesn’t get better. The standard version had a 61 from me, and honestly, that score still represents very well how I feel about those original 12 tracks. The Encore raised it to 64, but let’s be honest, Patient Zero is doing most of the work here.
The funny thing is that the album actually starts pretty well. The Fearless Child is a really good opening and still gives me that feeling of “wait, maybe this is going to be good.” I had the exact same impression when I first listened to the standard version. There is something about the beginning that creates expectations for a much stronger album than the one we actually get. The problem is that the more it goes on, the less interesting it becomes.
And I think that is something that really hurts this album. Instead of getting better as you understand the concept and get deeper into the tracklist, it just gets more boring. Some songs start blending together, the production becomes repetitive in certain moments, and eventually the whole thing starts feeling monotonous and, yes, childish. It is one of those albums where I finish listening and my reaction is basically “hmm... that was kind of a bad album.” There is no big disaster happening all the time, it is just consistently not interesting enough.
The songwriting does not help either, and this is probably one of the most disappointing things about the whole project. We are talking about Taylor Swift. Writing has always been such an important part of her music, and we know exactly how good she can be. Here, some lyrics are so basic and sometimes so childish that I genuinely don’t understand what happened. And there is obviously nothing wrong with simple lyrics, but simple and bad are two completely different things.
Sonically, I have a similar problem. A lot of the album feels generic, and I don’t hear that much curiosity in the production. It feels safe. Very safe. Sometimes it honestly feels like Taylor is scared of changing too much and losing the part of her audience that wants a very specific version of Taylor Swift forever. And for me, trying so hard to stay inside that space is having the opposite effect. She is trying so hard to sound like herself that sometimes it doesn’t even sound authentic anymore.
The new songs could have been an opportunity to change that. If you are going back to an album because you got inspired again and had more material that you thought was wonderful enough to release, okay, I’m listening. I want to see what was so exciting that we needed to come back to this project. Patient Zero actually gives me some of that. It is a really good song, probably my favorite thing added to this version, and even though it does not completely match the sound of the album, I don’t really care. At least it gives me something different.
Cleveland! and Pink Clouding are a completely different situation. I’m sorry, but these songs sound like they were made for children. Cleveland! especially has this production that reminds me of a circus, a Christmas song, children’s music, everything except something I expected to hear after Patient Zero. And the lyrics somehow make that feeling even stronger. Pink Clouding has a similar problem, and together they really do not convince me that The Encore was something this album needed.
That is also why the whole “we got inspired and wanted to give you more” thing does not really work for me anymore. Obviously I cannot say whether Taylor was actually inspired or not because I’m not inside her head, but I can talk about what the music gives me, and I just don’t hear this huge new inspiration in most of these additions. Patient Zero, yes. The other two? Not really. If anything, they make some of the problems from the standard version even more obvious.
And this whole situation is especially frustrating because Taylor has already shown that she can change. I always end up thinking about folklore, not because I want her to make folklore 2, because I absolutely don’t, but because that album showed a Taylor who was willing to move somewhere else. The sound was different, the writing was beautiful, and most importantly, it still felt completely like her. She did not need to repeat what she had already done to maintain her identity.
Here, I feel almost the opposite. There is this constant attempt to stay familiar, accessible, and easy to understand, and after a while that familiarity becomes boring. I also get this feeling that she is still trying very hard to keep her younger audience with her, which would explain why some choices feel so juvenile to me. Again, that is just the feeling I get from listening to the album, but it is a feeling that keeps coming back.
And yes, I still think Taylor needs a break. A real break. I don’t mean this as “Taylor is over” or anything dramatic like that, because obviously she is incredibly talented and one weak album does not erase her entire career. But maybe constantly having something to release is not helping anymore. I would genuinely prefer to wait longer and get an album where I can feel that she had something she really wanted to do.
Because that is what makes The Life of a Showgirl so frustrating to me. It is not just that I think the album is bad. It is that I know the artist behind it can do so much better. This is the same person who has written some genuinely incredible albums, and now I’m listening to songs that sometimes sound like children’s music. Of course that difference is going to bother me.
The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is still a weak album. Patient Zero is good, The Fearless Child still gives the project a promising beginning, and there are other moments I can enjoy, but none of that fixes the album as a whole. It gets less interesting as it goes, the writing is surprisingly weak in several places, the production is too safe for me, and the new version does very little to change that. The score went from 61 to 64, yes, but my actual opinion about The Life of a Showgirl is pretty much exactly where it was before.
And that is honestly a shame. I don’t want Taylor to make the same albums she made ten years ago, and I don’t want another folklore either. I just want to feel like she is excited to try something again. Because right now, she seems so focused on staying inside what already works that the “Taylor Swift sound” itself is starting to feel less original, less authentic, and much less exciting than it used to be.
