The Encore by Taylor Swift // The Life Of A Showgirl Deluxe Album Review
Taylor Swift kicked out the stage lights with The Life of a Showgirl, but she's still performing. Following the largely critically panned and commercially polarizing release of her 2025 album, she came back for more with The Encore.
For the last several years, especially after leaving her first label Big Machine Records in 2018, Taylor has become essentially a commercially invincible figure in music who can do - and release - anything she wants, whenever she wants. This freedom has allowed her the space to create and explore any artistic direction she desires, which in many cases has proven to be a crucial step in cementing her legacy as one of the most impactful pop artists of all time. The autonomy she has with music has allowed her to make some of the best work of her entire career; albums like folklore and evermore, for example, wouldn't exist without this boundless ability to go against every norm in the music industry entirely at her whim.
The difference with The Encore is that it instead feels like she's doubling down on any and all criticism she has been receiving over The Life of a Showgirl for the past year. These four extra songs sound like they were done for the sake of releasing music just because she can, and simply because everyone will keep buying it regardless of quality. Alongside the announcement of the standard version of the album on the New Heights podcast in August 2025, Taylor was very adamant about there never being a deluxe version of The Life of a Showgirl, especially coming off of the sprawling surprise double album she released the year prior. On the podcast, she said, "With Tortured Poets Department, I was like here's a data dump of everything I thought, felt, experienced in two or three years. Here's 31 songs. This is 12. There's not a thirteenth, there's not other ones coming." She continued, "That focus and that kind of discipline with creating an album and keeping the bar really high is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. I tend to write lots and lots of music, so it's a temptation to release lots of music. But oftentimes, I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle that these 12 songs for my 12th album, I feel like we achieved that and I'm really happy about that."
She collaborated with Max Martin and Shellback again on the deluxe tracks, right after finding out she had the biggest first‑week sales for an album in history - which is a fact that serves as definitive proof of how untouchable she is in terms of sales. She can sell millions of copies of her worst album just because she's Taylor Swift. Because of that, there are no stakes anymore for her to keep pushing herself artistically - but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a great deal of her reputation on the line at this stage of her career at the same time, as proven with the reception of The Life of a Showgirl era as a whole.
"About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind... You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history. I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album," Taylor wrote alongside the announcement of the deluxe album. "Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs."
This is a similar sentiment she shared five months after she surprise‑released folklore in 2020, except that wasn't necessarily driven by sales - and even if it partially was, it wasn't a core piece of the album's promotion. It was driven by the desire to say something that warranted another project so soon after, in the same universe, which became evermore. There were stones left unturned and more to explore within the world she and her collaborators built. She was very vocal about that being the case between folklore and evermore, but now with The Encore, she presents it upfront as being inspired by how much she sold - not by the overwhelming consensus of whether the audience loved or hated it. In this case, the consensus was that it was the weakest album she ever made, which just shows how far she is right now from the traits that once defined her as an artist.
This feels like the encore absolutely no one was asking for. Over the past year, it felt like Taylor had been distancing herself from the traits everyone disliked about Showgirl. In various interviews she's given this year, Taylor has been deeply focused on highlighting the art of her storytelling and songwriting in a retrospective sense, without mention of Showgirl - especially in all the press surrounding her becoming the youngest artist in history to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and soon the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame as well. She also released "I Knew It, I Knew You" for the Toy Story 5 soundtrack, a beautiful song that largely seemed to signal her long‑awaited return to country music. It was especially kismet timing with the twentieth anniversary of her debut album right around the corner, so many expected that song to be a precursor to what was hopefully coming next with a rerecorded version of her earliest work and highly anticipated thirteenth album.
Instead of leaning into that further, she doubled down and returned to Showgirl instead, with these four songs largely killing much of her momentum for the past year. To be fair, three of these four songs in particular aren't horrible, but they aren't anything notable or worth putting out - which makes it even clearer that there is no one around to give her constructive feedback or edit her work anymore.
The first of the four new songs is The Encore's lead single, "Patient Zero", which is overall much better than pretty much every other song off of Showgirl. It has such a catchy hook and a great flow to the chorus when she sings, "If you wanna party with somebody who might know about the devil on his shoulder under his halo, when the toxins take their hold, you'd rather die than let it go. but if you're sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero". It's a song about being able to sympathize with her ex's current partner and what she's going through, because she's been in her shoes before. Narratively, it can be linked to a lot of other work throughout her career - from Fearless, to Red, to The Tortured Poets Department. In that way, it's interesting that there are subtle threads woven into the song.
Taylor has proven countless times that no one else can write a bridge quite like her, and the same stands true here, except this time that isn't meant in a complimentary sense with "Patient Zero". It shifts into a strange sort of spoken‑word verse that feels out of place and disrupts a lot of the melody the rest of the song builds. It's one of many truly bizarre creative choices she makes throughout Showgirl, so it isn't even surprising at this point, but it still kills a lot of the momentum the rest of the song has. She uses this spoken‑word style of singing throughout a few of these deluxe tracks, which ends up creating a really disjointed listening experience and feels forced into every single song.
The single most garish and truly tacky moment of Taylor's entire career - and honestly, I didn't think it could get much worse after listening to the rest of Showgirl - is the release of the song "Cleveland!" She has so much genuinely interesting material to be pulling from right now, especially after her wedding and this new stage of life she's entering into, but instead she uses this moment to harp on all of the haters - and to delusionally romanticize being taken to...Ohio.
"And now I guess there's something we all can agree on, but my baby likes what he likes, he already took me to Cleveland and showed me The Heights, so hate all you like, this is the love of my life," she sings in the chorus. I'd be remiss not to point out that the endless references to her husband's podcast across multiple songs on the same album just feels like disingenuous product placement at this point. It is also as if "Blank Space" or "Shake It Off" were stripped of every ounce of irony and self-awareness that made them so great, and any good production elements were replaced with essentially what sounds like a royalty free Christmas version of The Office theme song.
The biggest issue with this song is how fixated she is on these alleged "haters" trying to bring her down - when in reality, she has truly never been in a more esteemed, beloved moment of her career or public perception than she is right now. In terms of media narrative, Taylor is essentially untouchable in a way she absolutely never was before. So all of these songs written about Travis end up focusing more on the public's supposed negative feedback toward them - which, as someone who is very tapped into the conversation surrounding Taylor, is virtually untrue aside from a small, select group of angry male Chiefs fans.
Travis has become so embedded into her brand now in a way no partner of hers ever has been, which is starting to reflect negatively in her work. If she were to write anything honest or deeply personal, it runs the risk of reflecting badly on both of them - and she clearly knows that. This issue ties back into one of the most hypocritical lyrics in the horrid "Patient Zero" bridge: "I know it seems like he shines so bright, but he's bathing in your reflected light on a free solo social climb".
The "social climber" implication is particularly funny, because no one - no friend past or present, no ex, no collaborator - has ever milked Taylor's name and career in the way her husband has from the very origin of their relationship. The B‑list (at best) actor who appears in a movie every other year is not milking her career. The musician who has all but disappeared from public life following the (largely unjust) mass cancellation her fans brought onto him is not milking her career. But sure, the man who uses every single chance he has to name‑drop her on his football podcast, and his entire family that has built an entire media platform off the back of their relationship, surely isn't either.
It would be different if the rest of her music up to this point wasn't so autobiographical; if it couldn't all be pinpointed to exact moments in time, or if there wasn't endless media coverage documenting every single step. But there always has been and there has rarely ever been a veil over who the songs are about, and she has never pretended otherwise. I truly don't want to be overly critical or negative for the sake of it, but every single song on this album comes back to the same thesis: I was sad, then I found a man who likes me, and now I'm happy again and anyone who dares say otherwise is just a hater. I stressed this same sentiment on my full review of the standard album too, but truly what happened to the person that once wrote "In your life you'll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team"? Now, though, the writing is steeped in insecurities and feels more concerned with the public‑facing view of their relationship than the actual introspective moments that defined the rest of her work. No one is jealous. No one is trying to take her man. So why is every single song written from that place now?
"Cleveland!" is a far cry from a song like "Call It What You Want", which was meant to invoke a similar sentiment - but directed toward the people who mattered, not toward imagined haters. It wasn't meant to posture a sense of bitter defiance; it was meant to show that the haters are going to hate and she's going to proceed not in spite of it, but because what she has is real, and nothing real can be touched by whatever noise happens online.
"You only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn't find you completely insufferable, and I have an important announcement to make, I found mine," she declares in the bridge of the song. In an album full of truly terrible lyrics, that line in particular is easily the most disappointing to hear coming from Taylor. This is coming from someone who has spent her whole life trying to put the meaning of love into words - to end up with someone who doesn't find her completely insufferable? Is that where the bar is now?
I also mentioned this in my full album review, but the implications that songs like "Cleveland!" and also "The Fate of Ophelia" hold within the wider themes of The Life of a Showgirl are not in line with the narrative she has been pushing for the past two decades. If her end goal was marriage and she has that now - then this song is a horrible message to be sending. Her audience is made up primarily of young women and girls, and the idea that the pinnacle of love is simply finding someone who can tolerate you is bleak and so far removed from the emotional intelligence that once defined her songwriting.
The next two songs are thankfully not nearly as egregious as "Cleveland!" is. "Pink Clouding" feels like it was written in hindsight, looking back on the period of her life when she made albums like Reputation and even Lover. She knew she was emotionally unavailable at the time but led him on anyway; and now, with distance, she apologizes for not being more open about the state of mind she was in and for not being more upfront about what she could realistically give him emotionally. It links back to a lot of the same feelings that defined a song like "Midnight Rain", as a direct acknowledgment of the ways in which she fell short and wishing him the best.
"I hope you realized my kind of trouble wasn't worth it and the way I treated you, you never deserved it and I swear to God, to this day I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person," she sings on the bridge. "And I gave you zero reason to believe it, so be it, but it didn't mean nothing just 'cause I could leave it". Sonically fits into the same world as the 1989 (Taylor's Version) Vault Tracks and is definitely a standout moment from the Showgirl era as a whole, although it should have just been tied to a different project entirely.
It feels similar in sentiment to "Happy For You" by Dua Lipa, rooted in nostalgia without any animosity and in the act of looking back, realizing how much they meant to you. In that way, it also feels tonally aligned with "Ruin the Friendship" as well, which is the only other truly well-written song off Showgirl and one of the few moments that still reflects the quality Taylor has long been known for. "I hope you landed safely on the ground," she sings in the outro, "And I hope you're so happy now".
The final bonus track is "Babylon", which is centered on the act of mourning a different version of your life that you don't live anymore, while being blind to the fact that the life you currently have is everything anyone could ever want - and not appreciating it until everything has changed again. A lyric that stands out is, "You're using nostalgia as a weapon to hurt yourself, but darling, you end up hurting everybody else, the self-harm of never being where you are".
On paper, it reads like quintessential Taylor songwriting. At the same time, it isn't really saying anything much of any real substance, and when it is, it's almost too vague to decode what the meaning actually is. The lyrics feel specific, but something is missing that keeps it from reaching the emotional level that songs of a similar theme share, like "right where you left me".
Looking at Showgirl now that the era is effectively finished, hopefully this is the lowest point of her career and she's able to come back with something stronger. "Babylon" is proof that she can still write a good song, or at least one more akin to her strongest work, just like she did with "I Knew It, I Knew You" earlier this year. However, it also feels indicative of something larger: that perhaps the issue is not that she can't write a good song anymore, it's more so that she doesn't want to anymore.
But what's the point when, out of sixteen songs, at most maybe a handful of them have any real substance that are worth returning to again? Were these four songs written in an effort to prove to herself, or to us, that she is still capable of writing a good song and hopefully rectify the public perception of the entire album? Maybe it was meant to reaffirm her songwriting skills after the brutal critical response to Showgirl - but if that were the case, then a song like "Cleveland!" would have never seen the light of day. Or maybe none of this is that deep, and she's just doing all of this because she can.
Regardless of the case, The Life of a Showgirl has never felt more calculated or emotionally hollow, feeling somehow even more disconnected from any sort of meaningful artistic intention than it did a year ago.
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