Friday, Taylor Swift released “The Life of A Showgirl”. This is the singer’s 12th album, and as his fans are concerned, he is jewelry with Easter eggs, coded messages and sneaky nods to very real people in the rapid payment.
But what people? What lines? The song “Wood” on her fiancé, the football player Travis Kelce?
You have any questions. We have answers.
Well, we think We have answers. Ms. Swift, as always, plays him a little shy with her lyrical references and her syntactic shade.
Does “really romantic” about Charli XCX?
Many people certainly think! Let’s start with a history lesson.
Charli XCX, which opened its doors for Ms. Swift during her reputation tour in 2018, said later on the Pitchfork music site that she was “grateful” for experience, but that I had the impression of getting up on stage and agitating the 5 -year -old children. ” She specified on Twitter thereafter that she had meant “no shadow” and that things were all good between the two artists.
However, during the green lemon reign of his album “BRAT” last year, Charli XCX released the song “Sympathy is a Knife”, which, according to many listeners, was written on Mme Swift.
In the song, Charli XCX sings to feel unsure of another woman. “I don’t want to see her behind the scenes at the show of my boyfriend,” she sings. “The fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they quickly separate.”
Charli XCX is married to George Daniel, the drummer of the 1975. Mrs. Swift briefly dated with Matty Healy, the singer for the 1975, that some fans speculated was the inspiration for many words on “The Torred Poets Department”. (Charli XCX denied that the song was talking about Mrs. Swift in a New York magazine profile in 2024. “People will think of what they want to think,” she said.)
“I am blown away by Charli’s melodic sensitivity since I heard” staying next to it “in 2011,” said Swift in this same profile. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song in places you would not expect it to go, and she has done it regularly for more than a decade. I love to see a hard job like that paying.”
Quick advance to the present!
Friday, Ms. Swift released a song entitled “In fact romantic”, leading to speculation of fans according to which the song takes a swing to Charli XCX with a wink of the song of the British artist “Everything Is Romantic”, another piece of “BRAT”.
In the opening salvo of “really romantic”, Mrs. Swift sings a person who, under the influence of cocaine, calls her “boring Barbie” behind her back. (Charli XCX published a special edition of “kid” filled with white powder.) “My ex high and you said that you are happy that he ghosts me,” sings Mrs. Swift, a line that some fans believe in Mr. Healy.
In the chorus, Ms. Swift declares that the way she lives without rent in the head of this hypothetical person is “sweet” and “really romantic”.
Does she talk about Charli XCX? We will almost never know with certainty. In his review of the album for The Times, Jon Caramanica wondered about a potential connection with Charli XCX, while referring to another possibility: “” in fact romantic “is perhaps a replica for the knife of Charli XCX to Swift on” Sympathy is a knife “(or, if the Crunch of the Guitary is a Tell, perhaps in Swift ‘ Olivia Rodrigo). “
“He claims that he does not know what these words mean, but he knows what these words mean,” said Ms. Swift by disclosing the 12 track names. “He knows all the words, and he knows what they want to say. He may not have read “Hamlet‘ But I explained to him.
The first song, entitled “The spell of Ophelia”, is full of references to the Shakespearean character of this particularly tragic game.
“I heard you call the megaphone / You want to see me on your own,” sings Mrs. Swift. The megaphone could be a simple sporting reference, but a deeper layer here could refer to meeting the couple. Mr. Kelce said that before he was released, he tried and did not meet the singer during his time tour and then publicly called her on his podcast.
(Complicating the questions is the fact that one of the ex-girlfriends of Mrs. Swift, actor Joe Alwyn, appeared in a recent film adaptation of “Hamlet” earlier this year. He is also in the film of 2025 “Hamnet”, which tells the true story of the dramatic of William Shakespeare and his wife “))
“Keep him a hunt on land, the sea, the sky,” sings Mrs. Swift later in the song. “Complete allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibrations.” The eagle swings of the word connected this word to an Instagram publication of Mr. Kelce in July in which he captioned several photos of the couple with the same digital sentence, using a “100” emoji. And, with the tenderness of Ms. Swift for numerology, the fact that 100 is the total combined the jersey number of Mr. Kelce (87) and the favorite number of Ms. Swift (13) could also play in things.
Some listeners think that the song “Opalite” also talks about Mr. Kelce. Born in October, his birth stone is an opal. (An opalite is a simulation of synthetic opalescence of the real thing.) Mr. Kelce said that this song was his favorite during the announcement of the album earlier this year. Other listeners believe that “Wi $ H Li $ T”, in which Ms. Swift is crunizing to want to “have a few children” and a house with a basketball hoop, concerns the same way her fiancé.
And then there is “wood”, perhaps the least subtle of the group. “New summits of virility / I must not strike on the wood,” sings Mrs. Swift, referring to Mr. Kelce’s podcast by his name, while browsing a series of metaphors and references which leave little to imagination.
“Héquoia tree, it is not difficult to see / his love was the key that opened my thighs,” sings Mrs. Swift in the post-chiseur.
What is Elizabeth Taylor doing on this album?
Ms. Swift previously referred to Ms. Taylor, a 20th century Hollywood icon that shares her name, with a line in “… Ready for It?” Out of his album “Reputation”.
“He could be my jailer / burton at this Taylor,” she sang, referring to the famous love story between Mrs. Taylor and actor Richard Burton. (A case! Marry and divorce twice!) Like Mrs. Swift, Ms. Taylor was not unrelated to the big titles of her love life, which included eight marriages at the time of her death in 2011.
On the latest album, Mme Taylor obtains a song entitled, literally, “Elizabeth Taylor”. Known for her collection of developed jewelry, it is not surprising that Ms. Swift mentions Cartier and Gemstones on this track. “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever,” she sings, the popular perfume of Mrs. Taylor, “white diamonds”.
What about the “paternal figure”?
As the title suggests, this song plays a little bit of the hit by George Michael “Father Figure”, who has had a rebirth on social networks in recent months.
However, there is a debate on who speaks the song. Some fans believe that the words indicate Olivia Rodrigo, the singer whose “vampire” piece was interpreted by some as a piece of dissiors on Mme Swift.
Other listeners believe that the “paternal figure” concerns the saga of Ms. Swift to recover the rights to her music and her very public oxen with Bigwigs from the music industry like Scott Bornchetta.
Mr. Bornchetta, the director general of Big Machine Records, signed Ms. Swift as a teenager and worked with her on her first six albums, which he finally sold, with the very vocal discontent of Ms. Swift, on Braun scooter.
Ms. Swift then started to reject her old albums, fixing a “Taylor’s version” label to everyone and urging fans not to listen to the original versions. It was a bold decision that borne fruit. Earlier this year, Ms. Swift announced that she had bought the rights over these first six albums.
