Taylor Swift has made a rare media appearance on New Heights, the podcast hosted by NFL players Travis and Jason Kelce. At 12:12 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, April 12, she announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, in a clip from the episode. During its premiere tonight (Wednesday, August 13), she revealed the album’s cover art, release date, and tracklist, which includes a guest appearance from Sabrina Carpenter on the title track. Check those out and watch the episode below.
“And, baby, that’s show business for you. New album The Life of a Showgirl. Out October 3,” Swift wrote on social media. Recorded during the Eras Tour, her 12th studio album will follow last year’s The Tortured Poets Department and its extended edition, The Anthology. Swift produced the record alongside Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish songwriting team behind some of her biggest hits including “22,” “Blank Space,” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” “The three of us have made some of my favorite songs that I’ve ever done before,” she told the Kelce brothers.
“When I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show,” Swift added, “and I was talking to him, and I was just like, ‘I feel like we could knock it out of the park if we went back in.’” She confirmed that The Life of a Showgirl features no producers other than Martin and Shellback, meaning that Jack Antonoff—who played a prominent role on every Swift album from 2019’s Lover through The Tortured Poets Department—and the National’s Aaron Dessner are not involved.
“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Swift said on the podcast. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. And so that effervescence has come through on this record.”
She continued: “With Tortured Poets Department, I was like, ‘Here’s a data dump of everything I thought and felt in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs.’ This is 12. There’s not a 13th, there’s no other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time…Every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, you know, and you couldn’t take one out, and it’d be the same album. You couldn’t add one. It’s just right.”
