This is not a dedicated Swiftie outlet, but we obviously need to discuss what 99% of the planet has been listening to whether they want to or not...
When Taylor Swift released four new songs on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore last week, I did what I always do on a Taylor Swift release day: listened to each track, formed my own opinion, then headed to the comments section to see who agreed with me amid the usual CIA-level forensic analysis Swifties are known for. Which lyric is about whom? What does the color of the chair in the video mean? Did everyone notice the number of buttons on Dakota Johnson’s coat and figure out what it means?
This time, though, I kept seeing an overwhelming amount of something else: We need something new from her. A new sound... A new producer... A new genre (she might need to invent one at this point)...
A new era.
Four songs had barely made it out of the oven and fans were already asking what else was for dinner.
To be clear, you can dislike the songs. I’m not saying they’re all her catchiest hits. You can also think the production sounds too familiar and wish she’d worked with somebody else. Or decide this album just isn’t for you. We are allowed opinions about all art, including music we listen to voluntarily. I personally have several.
But “I don’t like this” and “become someone else now” (AKA: dance, monkey, dance!) are two different reviews. The latter is a pretty incredible thing to ask of an artist whose last tour was essentially a three-hour retrospective of all the times she has already reinvented herself and all of the worlds she’s created within each era. At this point, Taylor has had enough eras to outpace Madonna and Miley combined.
Years—and six eras—ago in the Miss Americana documentary, she described the pressure on women in entertainment to keep finding new parts of themselves that people will find shiny and new. Seeing the response to an album literally called The Encore (a title that explicitly promises a continuation, as if to say “There’s more where that came from”), it’s clear she wasn’t exaggerating this point.
And this goes far beyond Taylor. We love an artist right up until we’ve learned the shape of their work, and then familiarity starts to feel like a defect. We want the singer to give us the same feeling as the song we fell in love with, only different enough to impress us all over again. If they change too much, they’ve lost what made them special. If they don’t change enough, they’ve lost their audience out of boredom. Where are they supposed to land? The intersection of “old” and “new” is not easy to hit every time, especially when someone releases as many albums as Taylor Swift.
Maybe it’s because we’ve gotten used to treating people the way we treat our feeds. When we get tired of something, we scroll in search of different entertainment. The next aesthetic, the next sound, the next TV show... The next unexpected version of practically anything is always one swipe away. Eventually, we begin expecting actual people to keep up the same pace.
You can see it in how we talk about other talented people, too. A culinary influencer shares a recipe everyone loves, and six months later the comments complain she only makes Italian food and needs to cross to other regions. Basically, the punishment for finding your thing is that everyone asks you to find another thing right after.
And who doesn’t love the excitement of discovering a new side of someone? Kate Hudson’s new singing career has paid off even after years of the team around her telling her she should stay in her leading-lady acting lane. Proving how thrilling it can be when someone surprises us, the hype leading up to her debut album was everywhere from sold-out shows to an endless stream of positive social media comments. It then helped that her first album was insanely good.
We love being surprised by people—but we’ve also started expecting it from them. Is it unfair to turn our appetite for surprise into somebody else’s full-time assignment? (Please respect the rhetorical tone of that question.)
There’s also a difference between growing and making a spectacle of forced growth. Most of us are allowed to evolve quietly. We can try a new haircut, change our minds about a job, or get really into baking bread without announcing that we’ve entered our Sourdough Era and launching a Hulu culinary series. Nobody accuses our latest loaf of tasting too much like our earlier work. We simply get to enjoy it and pass some along to the people we love to enjoy it too.
Maybe these four songs aren’t Taylor’s best. Maybe her next album would benefit from a new collaborator. Maybe they’re growing on you. Or maybe you loved them instantly. We can talk about these opinions without pretending like she owes us an entirely new personality we’ll be captivated by before the end of the year.
I’d rather give people the time and freedom to finish what they’re making. To be excellent at the thing they’re already good at. To make something people find merely okay but still appreciate and respect the hard work it took to create. And if and when they do change, it should come from their own self-exploration and curiosity. Their own restlessness. Not because the audience got restless halfway through the show while they were giving us everything they had doing something most of us couldn’t begin to pull off.
An encore is a bonus. A little something extra because someone chose to step back onstage, put themselves out there again and share. Cue the applause.
—Your Friend
