Go inside the making of The Life of a Showgirl with the one and only Taylor Swift. It's Taylor Swift: On The Record, where the GRAMMY-winning icon takes us track-by-track through her twelfth studio album.
LISTEN NOW: On The Record with Taylor Swift
Nobody knows Taylor better than Taylor, so we had her share the stories and inspiration behind her latest project, along with Audacy's Bru, entering the next era with the woman that created it all.
Reuniting with producers Max Martin and Shellback, The Life of a Showgirl is inspired by her experience on The Eras Tour, and is very much bursting with love from her relationship with Travis Kelce. It's evident throughout, but especially on songs like lead-off track, "The Fate of Ophelia," and the strutting and smiling "Opalite."
"'Opalite' is a song on my album that I think is just so infectiously, contagiously happy, and it's really an expression of happiness," Swift shares during On The Record. "The song itself is about choosing happiness and getting through rough times, adversity, and really choosing your own joy and your own sort of path to joy. It didn't just happen accidentally for you."
"Opalite is actually a man-made opal, so I kind of took that metaphor of a man-made gemstone and applied it to, 'what if you make your own happiness in life?' I really loved that sort of comparison between the two and that analogy, and it turned into one of my favorite songs on the album."
Already much has been made about the joy of The Life of a Showgirl, but it's not without a few scores to settle for Taylor, like on "Actually Romantic."
"'Actually Romantic' is a song about realizing 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 like doing too much and they start letting you know that actually you've been living in their head rent free," reveals Swift. "You had no idea and it's presenting itself as them sort of resenting you or having a problem with you, but taking that and you just accepting it as love and you accepting it as attention and affection and, how flattering that somebody has made you such a big part of their reality when you didn't even think about this. It's actually pretty romantic if you if you really, really think about it."
Concluding with the title track, Taylor shares the real life moment that still gets her choked up when listening. "The last song on this album is the title track, 'The Life of a Showgirl.' It is the story of a fictional showgirl named Kitty and how my character in the song goes to see her perform and is completely inspired by her, but rather than responding with fakeness, she tells it like it is and she kind of warns me off of this lifestyle because it's much more than just the glitter and the glamour."
"It's kind of an ode to show business and the women who move through those pitfalls and obstacle courses," Taylor adds. "I thought who better to ask to be a part of this song than the ultimate showgirl, Sabrina Carpenter, and thankfully she said yes and she's absolutely incredible on this song."
"One thing that I really love about the ending of it is that we actually ended the song with actual crowd noise from my last 'Eras Tour' show in Vancouver. So that always chokes me up because it transports me right back to that actual memory of standing on that stage for the last time on that tour that was so important to me," says Swift. "The tour that really inspired this album, so it's the last track of the album and a really special one to me."
Don't miss your guided tour of the next era from Taylor Swift. It's Taylor Swift: On The Record, now playing right here and on the free Audacy app.