Taylor Swift is set to release her 12th studio album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’, on 3rd October, unveiling the cover artwork and full tracklisting.
The artwork was photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Spanning 12 tracks, the record features the title song with Sabrina Carpenter and includes ‘The Fate of Ophelia’, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’, ‘Ruin the Friendship’, ‘Wi$h Li$t’, and ‘Cancelled!’.
Swift has reunited with producers Max Martin and Shellback for the project, marking a shift from her recent run with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. She last worked with Martin and Shellback on ‘reputation’ and ‘1989’.
Details of the album were revealed during her first appearance on the New Heights podcast, hosted by her partner Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce. Explaining the artwork and its focus, Swift said: “My day ends in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress… I wanted to glamorise all the aspects of how the tour felt.”
“I wanted to have an offstage moment as the main album cover because the album isn’t really about what happened onstage, but what happened offstage,” she said.
Discussing the record’s theme, she added: “What was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant. It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life.
“And so that effervescence has come through on this record. And like, as you said, bangers.”
Swift explained that the goal of the album was “melodies that were so infectious that you’re almost angry at it” and also lyrics that “are as vivid, crisp, focused, and completely intentional.”
The album was worked on amid last summer’s European tour, travelling to and from Sweden between shows to record. “I would be playing shows,” Taylor explained. “I would do like three shows in a row. I’d have three days off. I’d fly to Sweden, go back to the tour, and was actually working on this. I was physically exhausted at this point in the tour, but I was so mentally stimulated and so excited to be creating.”
One thing that won’t be happening with this record is a second drop with extra tracks. “There’s no other songs coming. With ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, I was like, ‘Here’s a data dump of everything I thought and felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12. There’s not a 13th, there’s not other ones coming,” Swift said on New Heights.
“This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time… Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know, and you couldn’t take one out, and it’d be the same album. You couldn’t add one. It’s just right.”
Hints for the record date back to 18th October 2024, when Swift posted a TikTok en route to her Miami Hard Rock Stadium show, standing by section A12. At that concert, she performed in an orange bodysuit before switching to a green-and-orange outfit during the ‘1989’ segment, with Hard Rock Stadium later captioning a repost, “We were an easter egg all along!” Variations on orange and green reappeared over the past year — from the Grammys stage design to the 12th European Eras tour date, where Swift wore all-orange during the ‘1989’ section — while visual motifs in ‘Lover’ house graphics also showed an orange door.
Taylor also recounted the moment she regained ownership of her master recordings. She announced in May that she had bought back the masters to her first six albums, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time. The move followed a protracted dispute that began in 2019 when Scooter Braun and his firm Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group, which held the rights to her early work. At the time, Swift, who had moved to Republic Records, described the development as “the worst-case scenario” and accused Braun of “incessant, manipulative bullying”, outlining plans to re-record her first six albums.
Ownership changed hands again in 2020 when Braun sold the rights to Shamrock Holdings in a $300million deal. Swift said then the master recordings “were not for sale to me”. Earlier this year, she said she bought back her masters, along with her videos, concert films, album art and photography, and unreleased songs, from Shamrock.
“Since I was a teenager, I’ve been saving up money to buy my music back,” she said on the podcast. “I thought about not owning my music every day … it was like an intrusive thought.”
Swift explained that her mother, Andrea, and brother, Austin, negotiated the deal with Shamrock, with Andrea delivering the news by phone. “She was like, ‘You got your music,’ and I literally hit the floor,” Swift recalled. “Bawling my eyes out, just weeping.”
She added that when she went to share the news, Kelce was in another room playing video games. “I’m like, ‘Just go tell Travis in a normal way,’” she said, remembering that she immediately started crying as she tried to explain. Kelce put down the console and hugged her, at which point she was “absolutely heaving.”
“For me, this is not, ‘Oh, I want to own this asset because of its returns, because of the dividends that I will receive over the years,’” Swift said. “I want it because these [are] my handwritten diary entries from my whole life. These are the songs I wrote about every phase of my life. This is my photography, my music videos, most of which I funded. My artwork, everything that I’ve ever done, is in this catalog.”
Braun has addressed the situation in the years since. In 2022, he said, “I learned an important lesson from that. I think a lot of things got lost in translation. I think that when you have a conflict with someone, it’s very hard to resolve it if you’re not willing to have a conversation.” In July, he said Swift’s supporters had “made the horrible miscalculation that I care” about their anger over his purchase and resale of the masters.
Pre-orders for ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ — including several variant editions — are available via Swift’s website. The album follows ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, released in April 2024, arrives after the conclusion of ‘The Eras Tour’, and is her first release since regaining full control of the master recordings for her first six studio albums.
The tracklisting for ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ reads:
‘The Fate of Ophelia’
‘Elizabeth Taylor’
‘Opolite’
‘Father Figure’
‘Oldest Daughter’
‘Ruin the Friendship’
‘Actually Romantic’
‘Wi$h Li$t’
‘Wood’
‘Cancelled!’
‘Honey’
‘The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter)’
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