The career trajectory of Taylor Swift has always reminded me of Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The secret of Swift’s stratospheric success is in her ability to make music out of misery, every album doubling as a lyrical autopsy of some doomed love affair, be it an unfulfilling relationship or an ugly breakup. It’s a precarious alchemy, one nobody has been more aware of than the artist herself.

“I used to have this dark fear that if I ever were truly happy and free, being myself and nurtured by a relationship, what happens if the writing just dries up?” Swift recently told the BBC.

The interview was sandwiched between two momentous occasions, coming as it did just weeks after Swift’s highly publicized engagement to NFL player Travis Kelce, and just a few days before the release of her latest record, The Life of a Showgirl.

Swift says her fears proved unfounded. “It turns out, that’s not the case at all, and we just were catching lightning in a bottle with this record.” And sure, that’s one interpretation—Taylor’s version, if you will.

But listeners are less certain, and more scared. It even seems possible, in the wake of the release, that what this album captures isn’t lightning at all, but a different electricity: the kind that races frantically across the surface of a dying brain, right before everything goes dark.

The Life of a Showgirl is a short album, and its themes feel a little stale—particularly to fans who use Swift’s work as a mirror, who don’t know how to process events or emotions until she’s written a song about it. There’s the usual riffing about the price of fame, celebrity gossip, and catty rivalries, topics on which she doesn’t seem to have evolved since the last time she sang about them, or the time before that. The one thing new about this album, and in her life, is Kelce.

In the lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift amusingly suggests that, much like Shakespeare’s tragic ingenue, she would have ended up losing her mind—and perhaps dying somewhere offstage—if not for the stabilizing, life-affirming love of a professional tight end. The song is silly, but the subtext is sweet, and on this and other tracks one senses Swift is writing the happy ending to a story she’s been simultaneously telling and living for the better part of two decades.

“The song ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ is silly, but the subtext is sweet,” writes Kat Rosenfield. (Screengrab via YouTube.com)

This is also the problem: The Swifties of the world don’t want a marriage plot.

They want the story to keep going, and going.

Because what Swift sells has always been as much memoir as it is music—which makes her all the more relatable to a fan base that alternates between treating her as a mascot and an avatar for their own difficulties in life and in love. Swift was something more than a pop star; she was the poet laureate of perpetual millennial adolescence. Here was a woman who could take everything her audience were thinking, feeling, living, and give it back to them with a beat. Songs of innocence; songs of experience; songs sung with all the passion of a person who has not just witnessed the struggle but gone through it herself.

The real question, unspoken but looming ever larger, was what might happen when she stopped going through it.

In 2022, before she met Kelce, Swift delivered a commencement address at NYU in which she lamented “having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game.” But the game is over now; her engagement brings her role as a romantic underdog to a triumphant but definitive end, and this is as it should be—indeed, this is how it is for all of us. Minus the spectator aspect, isn’t love a sport in which we’re all perpetual losers? Until, one day and with the right person, we win. As Swift puts it in the new song, “Opalite”: You’re starving till you’re not.

What The Life of a Showgirl captures isn’t lightning at all, but a different electricity: the kind that races frantically across the surface of a dying brain, right before everything goes dark.

Ironically, until recently, Taylor Swift was not only starving but seemed increasingly convinced that she would go hungry forever: Even statues crumble if they’re made to wait / I’m so afraid I sealed my fate / No sign of soulmates, she sang on her last album. But for those who’ve been watching her journey through the pantheon of feminine archetypes—from the embittered ex to the crazy cat lady, from damsel to girlboss to man-eating bitch—the hope remained that she would eventually walk down the aisle into a new era, trading the spangled leotards for a wedding dress.

The complication, very much evident between the lines of this latest album, is that what is good for a person—a fulfilling, loving, stable relationship—is thin gruel for a poet.

The songs about Kelce are all gratitude and no tension; one of them, “Wood,” tries (and fails) to make up in explicit references to the size of her fiancé’s penis what it lacks in emotional depth. (The lyrics include: Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs.)

And the response from fans to The Life of a Showgirl has been mixed, with some outraged posters even taking Swift’s obvious happiness as a form of political betrayal. (“She’s in her tradwife era,” sniped one representative TikToker.) But even for those who find the new record to be a generally satisfying collection of quippy phrases and catchy hooks, it’s haunted by the subaudible scrape of the artist’s fingernails as she searches for inspiration inside a cup that is no longer full.

There’s also the frustrating sense that Swift is trying to have it both ways: She sings about wanting to “tell the world to leave us the fuck alone” on the track “Wish List,” but she’s also imbued this album release with the sort of celebrity buzz she hasn’t indulged in for years, posing and podcasting and posting about her relationship with Kelce as she makes the rounds on late-night TV.

Taylor Swift was something more than a pop star; she was the poet laureate of perpetual millennial adolescence.

What drives this, I suspect, is the uncomfortable realization that things have changed—that they have to change. Taylor Swift may still write songs about her life; some of them may even be just as beautiful, and relatable, as her earlier work. But there’s little question that The Life of a Showgirl means the end of an era, and specifically a retreat from the ballsy, chest-opening mode of songwriting that made every album release feel like a peek into her diary (or an archaeological dig through John Mayer’s garbage, as the case may be).

For years, Swift found inspiration in the liminal space between the failure of one relationship and the fantasy of another, where the past was a painful lesson and the future was a question mark. And if the confession was delicious, the stakes were comparatively low—in a way they necessarily cease to be when you meet the love of your life, when you promise to marry him. It’s one thing to air out the dirty laundry of some dude you dated two or three or five years ago; it’s quite another to open up your marriage to that kind of scrutiny. The catharsis is not worth the cost, and she knows it, even as she still tries to pass herself off as the world’s most relatable celebrity who has no secrets. As an artist, Swift is already holding back in a way she never used to.

“What is good for a person—a fulfilling, loving, stable relationship—is thin gruel for a poet,” writes Kat Rosenfield. (Screengrab via YouTube.com)

Last year, I wondered if Swift might be in it for the long haul; I wondered if she might even follow in the footsteps of Madonna, who was then back onstage for what was generally understood to be a last hurrah. Swift was swanning around the globe on her Eras Tour at the time, selling out stadiums wherever she went. And like Swift, Madonna’s tour functioned as a career retrospective in which she was periodically joined onstage by dancers dressed up like the ghosts of her younger self.

But from Swift’s perspective, then–65-year-old Madonna was surely a ghost in her own right—the kind who haunts the protagonist in a Dickensian drama, rattling the hardware of her Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra instead of a chain. The aged pop star, her preternaturally youthful looks belied by the presence of an orthopedic brace on one knee, is living proof that the life of a showgirl is not necessarily improved by longevity.

Taylor could still go this route, but I no longer think it likely. I don’t think she is a showgirl; I think she’s a songwriter. Specifically, I think she’s like Billy Joel, who is currently the subject of a lush documentary retrospective of his life, his work, and his relationships with women—the latter thing understood by the producers and Joel alike to be inextricable from the former. Joel rather strikingly describes his lovers as “muses,” which is admittedly a term that seems better suited to women in general, and Christie Brinkley in particular, than to any of the men in Taylor Swift’s past. And yet, the alchemy that fuels their creative process is very much the same—and like Swift, Joel’s most fertile years as a songwriter were also times of immense personal turmoil.

His last pop album, released in 1993, is a beautiful, lyrical portrait of a life falling to pieces: a divorce that fractured his young family, a grotesque financial betrayal by his longtime manager, a worsening struggle with alcoholism.

Joel, then 44, has since turned his life around—and at 76, now remarried, sober, and a father to two more children, he continues to perform from his old catalog. But his songwriting days are over; instead of a muse, he has a wife. It’s almost as though the Piano Man had to die so that the stable, loving, financially responsible husband and father could live.

And so it goes too, perhaps, for the showgirl.