In 2024, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made a celebratory social media post about his middling Christmas action-comedy Red One. The movie had “shattered a viewing record” for Amazon Prime, becoming the fastest movie to hit 50 million views, and Johnson was thrilled. “RED ONE has a long shelf life with multiple verticals – kudos to our Amazon partners for their strategic win, that’s just getting started,” Johnson effused. When Taylor Swift announced the sudden arrival of a bonus version of last year’s The Life Of A Showgirl (having previously said no bonus album would be necessary), it reminded me of such metrics-based fanfare. To commemorate achieving “the biggest first week for an album in history,” she visited her Showgirl collaborators Max Martin and Shellback in Sweden and one thing led to another: “There was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: we wrote more songs.”
Some artists compose songs because they are in love, or heartbroken, or because they want to party, or because they are tired of partying. Taylor Swift’s recent songwriting compulsions have come from the business of being Taylor Swift. Showgirl itself was inspired by the “effervescence” of being on the Eras Tour. By this logic, her next album may be about how much fun she had in Sweden writing these bonus tracks.
Though dispensing with statistics and lore is a tough ask when talking about a Swift release these days, let’s put aside both for a second and ask: how do the songs sound? These four bonus tracks—a sleek sidecar in comparison to the double-wide trailer of 15 songs that were hitched onto The Tortured Poet’s Department as a release night surprise—are a perfectly pleasant addition to Showgirl. That album’s chief obstacle might have been the matter of expectations. When Swift appeared on her now-husband Travis Kelce’s podcast to announce it, the Kelce brothers hyped it up as an album of “bangers,” and the resulting melange of hater-taunting midtempo numbers felt wan in comparison to the parade of titanic bops on 1989 or Reputation. With no explanation beyond “we wrote these when we were happy about our album sales,” there’s a bit less pressure on the Encore songs to do anything other than not completely suck.
And… they don’t! Lead single “Patient Zero” takes a snappy narrative about comforting someone with whom she shares a toxic ex (“If you’re sick of him, I got you / I was patient zero”) and floats it on a plaintive violin motif that sounds like it was snatched from a traditional Irish folk song. Just when the repetitive chorus melody starts to get grating, there’s a classically verbose monologue in the bridge: “I know he charmed your family and friends / And you thought it’s ‘cause he loves you / But it’s ‘cause he loves how everybody else loves him,” she spits, practically daring her listeners to pry further into the song’s subject matter.
And “Patient Zero” might actually be the weakest of the bunch. “Pink Clouding” is an effervescent breakup postmortem with a burbling backing track that feels like a much perkier version of the songs on Ariana Grande’s Petal. There’s a muddled metaphor in there about skydiving and getting shot by an arrow, likewise some intriguing but underexplained psychology talk—“pink cloud” is a term for the euphoria felt in the early stages of sobriety; “grey rocking” is a communication technique for dealing with abusive or narcissistic people—but the silvery backing vocals and plush synths polish over the lyrics’ rough edges. “Babylon” has the best songwriting of the bunch, tracking the path of a small town boy made good who can’t stop thinking about the one that got away, with a percolating structure reminiscent of “The Last Great American Dynasty.” Swift’s skill at fitting a grand narrative into a handful of tight verses snaps into place with lines like “Twenty watches in the safe / ‘Cause your time is money” and “Because she loved you so/Pretty as a picture that you didn’t post.”
