Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholar on “The Life of a Showgirl”

When I first listened to Taylor Swift’s new album,“The Life of a Showgirl” at midnight on release day, my only review was a text to my friend that read: “I’m confused.”

Let me be clear. I am the furthest thing from a Taylor Swift hater. “Fearless” and “Speak Now” were the scores of my childhood. “folklore” and “evermore” got me through high school. Last fall, I even made the deeply irresponsible decision to take a Spirit Airlines red-eye to Miami the weekend before a midterm to see the Eras Tour.

None of that prepared me to hear the voice that soundtracked the first 19 years of my life sing about her fiancé’s “redwood tree.”

So, for help unraveling Swift’s latest, I turned to Stephanie L. Burt ’94, the Harvard English professor who taught a course on Taylor Swift in the spring of 2024 and just released the book “Taylor's Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift,” about the music artist on Oct. 7.

For Burt, the album is not, as it was for me, a confusing, Travis Kelce-themed departure from the artist I’d known and loved most of my life.

Rather, Burt says, it’s a retrospective.

“A lot of the album is really about looking back and seeing your life again,” she tells me. “In that context, it’s a very retrospective album, and it’s a very moody album in some ways, even as it announces that she found what she was looking for.”

She cites the song “Ruin the Friendship” — about a high school crush that Swift lost touch with post-graduation, who died before she ever told him she liked him — as evidence of Swift’s backtracking. In it, Swift tells listeners: “My advice is to always ruin the friendship / Better that than regret it for all time.”

The song, according to Burt, maps onto “Forever Winter,” a track from “Red (Taylor’s Version)” — released in 2021, but written a decade earlier — seemingly about the same friend’s struggles with his mental health.

“She’s going back to ‘Forever Winter’ and retelling that story, which is what she’s doing throughout the album,” Burt says. “It’s retelling the stories we tell about her. To imagine, or in other cases, look forward to, the stable endings that she wasn’t going to get before.”

A part of this rewriting, Burt tells me, lies in the album’s lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” a Hamlet reference in which Swift recounts a beau — ostensibly, Kelce — who “saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” who, driven mad after her lover Hamlet kills her father, drowns.

The song is a follow-up to Swift’s early hit, “Love Story,” a Romeo and Juliet retelling where they get married at the end, and, according to Burt, reimagines the Shakespeare play by asking: what happens if Ophelia quits her obsession with Hamlet and finds someone else?

“It’s also a song about a girl who is no longer interested in dating tortured poets,” Burt adds, referring to Swift’s preceding album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” “Hamlet is a tortured poet, and she’s been dating tortured poets, and now she’s got a hot guy who is definitely not that.”

The “hot guy” in question — Kelce — is also the subject of “Wood,” a thinly-veiled ode to Swift’s intimate relationship that Burt calls a “goofy-ass piece of writing.”

When I ask her about it, though, Burt still sees merits in the song. “It’s not a great song, but it's not bad as sex education,” she says.

“Everyone who’s over a certain age, who’s old enough to be a traditional-age college student, probably knows some people who date men and are not experiencing the sexual pleasure that they want and think it’s cringe to talk about it,” she adds. “That is a failure of our education system, and it’s a failure of patriarchy, and one of the ways that we address it is by having people who like dick talk about dick.”

Burt has previously said that her thesis on Swift’s work is that “she’s excelled as a songwriter and as a performer by staying both aspirational and relatable. Swifties and casual fans see parts of ourselves in her, but we also see someone we wish we could be.”

But, I wondered, does that relatability hold up in an album that includes a song like “CANCELLED!” where Swift declares: “Good thing I like my friends cancelled / I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal”?

Burt says it does.

“What she’s trying to do with that song is to reach out to all of us who have had interactions that we didn’t expect and didn’t want, on social media, in public,” she says. “What Taylor is trying to do, using herself as an example, is to express some solidarity with all of us who have experienced that.”

And, she adds, other songs on the album — namely, “Eldest Daughter” and “Ruin the Friendship” — fill the relatability niche that draws so many to Swift’s discography.

“Eldest Daughter” — where Swift mournfully croons that she’s “not a bad bitch” — is, for Burt, “a great piece of writing,” and an honest reclamation of self.

“She’s not a bad bitch. She’s not going to be savage. She’s quite civilized,” Burt tells me, when I bring up the song. “She’s making fun of people who either want her to be a bad bitch or think she is one.”

“I don’t see it as her leaving her fans behind,” Burt says. “She’s addressing that by highlighting the parts of her inner life, her emotional life, that generate songs that can speak to us, with mixed success. I think ‘Eldest Daughter’ does that beautifully.”

I say goodbye to Burt with a newfound desire to revisit the album with an open mind. After all, she leaves me with the reminder that “almost every one of Taylor's albums, except for ‘folklore,’ was received initially as a disappointment to a lot of people.”

“They tend to grow on people,” she adds.

—Associate Magazine Editor Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.