If you’re a Taylor Swift fan, one of your deepest fears this year might have been that the pop superstar will be so wrapped up in a long, rapturous honeymoon that she’ll neglect to bring us down by continuing to write about the bums that got away, or any lingering regrets that were accumulated on the way to the skybox. So it will come as some relief that three of the four new tracks on “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” prove she has no intention of turning in her Tortured Poets membership card any time soon. Meanwhile, the fourth track, “Cleveland!,” establishes that she also has no intention of stopping writing about marital bliss, in the giddiest form possible, with an unrepentant sunniness so blinding it could almost blot out the memory that she’d ever written an elegy in her life.
However it’s packaged, these four tracks essentially constitute a new EP — something she really hasn’t formally given us since 2008’s “Beautiful Eyes” — more than they feel like any kind of obvious addendum to “The Life of a Showgirl,” despite reassembling the same trio of Avengers (Max Martin, Shellback and herself) for the task. Call if what you want: as much as the world loves Swift as the 21st century’s quintessential album artist, it’s refreshing to get something fast and easily digestible from her between pop opuses, too. Here’s how these four tracks taste at first bite: “Patient Zero.” When Swift thinks of a certain recent ex in her past, she does not think of Tim McGraw.
She thinks of hospitals, and/or pandemics. One has to suspect that if “Patient Zero” has a real-life inspiration, it’s the same guy who inspired her to write that she was dying, emotionally, in “You’re Losing Me,” the scary post-“Midnights” bonus track that appeared to be about her longest-term relationship going into its last throes on life support. But as harrowing as “You’re Losing Me” was, “Patient Zero” is absolutely chipper, since she’s singing about being long since recovered from the malady and remembering it only for the sake of warning the fellow’s current paramour about how his good-guy act won’t be nourishing in the end.
The sound is very different from anything on “The Life of a Showgirl,” so it makes some sense to learn that this and the other tracks were recorded after that album was already out (and very long after it was recorded). The dry drum sound heard on much of “Showgirl” is replaced here with electronic percussion, while the key bit of instrumentation is a violin, or something built to emulate one. If you didn’t know better, you might guess this was a stray Jack Antonoff track, since it doesn’t bear any of the obvious Martin/Shellback hallmarks.
There’s a bittersweet, lopingly mid-tempo feel to it that we haven’t heard in, well, a fortnight. Fans will point to her telling the ex’s new gal that she should take the sisterly advice from “someone who had him and walked away,” which does narrow down the possibilities of who it could be about IRL, if anyone. And from that, prompt the cries of “She’s married, and she still hasn’t gotten over it?” The point is kind of that she has.
But good for her for keeping that memory mill alive; she’s going to need it to keep writing songs that aren’t all white picket fences. Plus, we love a T-Swift who forgives — maybe — but never, ever forgets. On first and second listen, I’m not sure whether it’s going to grow on me or gnaw at me in the future.
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