While Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has gotten positive-to-great reviews from a lot of legacy media, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Taylor’s fans more disappointed in one of her projects. Many Swifties forced themselves to swallow The Tortured Poets Department, hoping that it was just something Taylor needed to get out of her system because so much of it was about Matt Healy. To make matters worse, it looks like this album is full of interpolation and uncredited “inspiration” – including hooks, chord progressions and lyrics from Joe Jonas, Lana del Rey, the Pixies and the Jackson Five. Someone even pointed out that she plagiarized The 1975 as well.
Still, TLOAS is selling well, which is pretty much the only thing Taylor cares about. The album sold 2.7 million copies just on its first day of release. That’s Taylor’s biggest “opening day” sales ever. The only album which had bigger first-week sales is Adele’s 25. Taylor loves to work the charts and sales records too, which is why she’s already announced TLOAS variants in the form of limited-edition CDs with acoustic versions of the songs. And fresh cover images too.
Meanwhile, Taylor just released the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia” – while this is one of the better songs on TLOAS, the music video just leaves me cold? Taylor has forced this “showgirl” aesthetic onto a song and an album which has nothing to do with showgirls. Taylor wrote and directed this too, and you can tell. I’m also including a clip from Graham Norton below.
File this under “save your best for the finale”… I think my favorite moments from the tour were the acoustic surprises. So I went back into the studio with Max and Shellback to record acoustic/unplugged versions of a few of the Showgirl songs with brand new vocals and… pic.twitter.com/HyzpYnvSmz
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 4, 2025
Screengrabs courtesy of The Graham Norton Show & Magic FM. Cover courtesy of Taylor’s social media.
