Taylor Swift has responded to rumours that ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ is her last album.
Swift released the record, her 12th studio album, on Friday (October 3), following up last year’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’. Since the album came out, fans have been speculating that the singer may be considering retiring from music. It comes after she announced her engagement to Travis Kelce back in August.
She also recently indicated that she has no intention of heading out on tour again anytime soon, after the gargantuan effort that went into her record-breaking ‘Eras’ tour.
Now, she’s cleared up the rumours, insisting that she’s not quitting music any time soon. In an interview with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2 this morning (October 6), she discussed her upcoming marriage, saying: “I’m really right now just like really stoked about the idea that I get to marry this person.
“I’m gonna think about that and then I’m gonna put out this album and then I’m gonna think about other things after that,” she continued. “Just to put you into a window into the psyche of where I’m at right now”
Mills then said, “Taylor, don’t tell me this is your last album,” to which she responded, “What? No.”
Mills went on to say: “I just saw some fans going, ‘Well, she’s going to get married and then she’s going to have children and then she’s going to be the last album’.”
“It’s a shockingly offensive thing to say,” Swift said, laughing: “It’s not why people get married, so they can quit their job.” The singer continued, saying of her fans: “Oh, I know they love to panic sometimes, but it’s like I love the person that I am with because he loves what I do and he loves how much I am fulfilled by making art and making music.
“That’s the coolest thing about Travis, like he is so passionate about what he does, that me being passionate about what I do, it connects us. There’s no point in time where he’s gonna be like, ‘I’m really upset that you’re still making the music’,” she added.
One of the biggest talking points from the record so far has been the track ‘Actually Romantic’, which is widely rumoured to be a diss track directed at Charli XCX. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift sings on the song. “High-fived my ex and then said you’re glad he ghosted me / Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some people might be offended / But it’s actually sweet.”
Many considered this a rebuttal to Charli’s ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ from ‘Brat’, on which she sang: “Don’t know if I’m spiralling / One voice tells me that they laugh / George says I’m just paranoid / Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up real quick.”
Swift has since said ‘Actually Romantic’ is “a song about realising that someone else has kind of had a one-sided, adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden they start doing too much and they start letting you know that actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea.”
NME gave ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ three stars, writing: “To seek escapism is not a sin, but the best pop music makes the personal feel like life or death. ‘Speak Now’, ‘Reputation’, ‘Folklore’: her greatest works could be genuinely transformative. For the first time, ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ sees Swift not catalysed into artistic growth by love, but merely comfortably secured by it.”
Yesterday, she released a music video for ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’, making it the first official single from the record.
