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Taylor Swift’s September surprise seemed more exciting when it sounded like it would consist of just one song. Coming nearly a year after the big-pop mishmash that was The Life of a Showgirl, and a few months after the soft-countryish Toy Story 5 single “I Knew It, I Knew You,” maybe “Patient Zero” would signal another stylistic turn ahead of a future album. At least, as the first official release from Taylor Swift the Married Lady, it would be some kind of landmark.
But that was Tuesday. On Wednesday we learned the single would be part of a four-song “encore” to Showgirl, in other words part of the now standard “deluxe edition” method by which artists usually extend the streaming life cycle of an album. Yawn. Meanwhile, Swift claims she was dropping in on producers Max Martin and Shellback to celebrate Showgirl’s record-setting first-week sales and they just got so worked up they accidentally wrote four songs. Because that’s plausibly how the schedule of the world’s biggest pop star works.
Give Swift some credit: By her standards, adding only four songs to a previously released album, and waiting a year to do it, is a huge act of restraint, like a former pack-a-day smoker who now just bums a loosie when she’s drunk. Keep it up and this music critic’s trauma might yet heal from that infamous April night when she added a whole second album to The Tortured Poets Department at 2 in the morning.
Anyway, true to its billing as the “encore” to Showgirl, these new songs sound fairly similar to that album, and similarly are at best a couple of notches above half-successful. “Patient Zero” itself opens with an unexpectedly Celtic-sounding fiddle lick. This teased at my futile hope that it would be a callout of her embattled friend and sometime faux-Celtic singer Ed Sheeran, with the upshot of “Remember, he failed to come out in solidarity with me first!” But no such luck. Instead, the epidemic-origin metaphor—a pop-culture commonplace by now, whose uncomfortable AIDS-era origins I don’t blame Swift for being too young to know—is directed at a woman being done wrong by some dog of a dude who did Swift wrong first. It’s a highly Swiftian formula of sympathy with a scoop of “I told you so.” And it’s perfectly passable, with lilting cadences you’ll hum along with when it’s playing and likely forget until it plays again.
The upbeat “Cleveland” would sound fine if you heard it from four or five rooms away, but listening closer, it just leads me to beg for the thousandth time that Swift please, please, please stop reading the comments. She recites a litany of mean things her Ohio-born footballing beau’s fans have said about her, does some of her most annoying talk-singing to say nyah-nyah, he likes me anyway, and then seems to announce their engagement at the end, which might feel like something if they hadn’t been married since July already. In other words, consistent with all her big love songs about Travis Kelce so far, it sucks. At least, unlike Showgirl’s “Wood,” it doesn’t make me want to peel all my skin off to escape it.
Mercifully, matters improve from there. “Pink Clouding” is an airy disco song whose theme is genuinely affecting: “You were so good / That’s why you haunt me like you should … Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry.” The title echoes “Lavender Haze,” from Midnights, and a lyric refers to “where the arrow hit,” reminding me of “The Archer,” from Lover. It could have fit on either of those records, and maybe it’s about the same person they were. On a couple of hours’ acquaintance, I would call it a keeper.
That goes double for “Babylon,” which is a story song in the Folklore–Evermore line, which Swift seems to be doing at least once an album these days to prove she still can. It always makes me wish she’d flip the ratio and write mostly fictional narratives (as on Evermore) while saving the personal ones up for the deepest impact. The yarns need to find a wider musical range, though—“Babylon” has contours a bit too much like “The Last Great American Dynasty,” for instance. It’s about a man who comes to regret abandoning his family for pleasure and ambition, wishing he could go back to “Babylon”—which Swift seems to be using as a lost-paradise term like Shangri-la, and I’d say somebody really needs to expand her reggae collection stat, except I fear where that might lead. But it’s not immature, whiny, or narcissistic, and that, my brethren and sistren and ’tren beyond the binary, is an exodus to root for..To be honest, I’ve almost stopped hoping for more. Maybe we’ve gotten all the growth from Swift we’ll ever get. But “Babylon” at least reminds me there was a time not so long ago when she took an evolutionary leap, even though she then mostly reverted to form. It could happen again, ideally without need of another pandemic. Otherwise, it feels as if her reality, as with so many of her fellow billionaires, will only continue to withdraw from the one the rest of us must inhabit, and her future will continue to look like a series of ever-less-convincing encores.
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