Taylor Swift detailed the story behind the artwork for her 12th studio album, The Life Of A Showgirl, while chatting with Jason and Travis Kelce on the New Heights Podcast, marking her first-ever podcast interview.
During the nearly two-hour conversation, Swift shared all the details about her upcoming album, including the cover art, a photo of her in a bathtub wearing a bedazzled silver burlesque dress with only her face above the mint green-tinted water, and explained why she chose it.
“This represents the end of my night, right? So when I’m on tour, I have the same day every single day. My show days are the same every single day. I just happen to be in a different city. My day ends with me in a bathtub, not usually in a bedazzled dress, but we try to keep it decent, you know,” Swift shared. “I wanted to sort of glamorize all the different aspects of how that tour felt, and that’s how that felt to be at the end of the night, when all this has gone down, you won’t be able to get to bed till four in the morning after this. But you had to jump through 50 million hoops in this obstacle course that is your show, and you did it. You got two more in a row, but you did it tonight.”
She continued to explain that she wanted the album art to highlight a personal moment to match the lyrics on the project as they reflect her life off the stage.
“And the reason I wanted to have it sort of like an offstage moment as the main album cover is because this album isn’t really about what happened to me on stage. It’s about what I was going through offstage,” Swift added. “So… I didn’t want to have, the lights are bright, I’m on the stage as the main album cover. It’s just this to me tells more of what the actual content contents lyrically of the album are, which is The Life Of A Showgirl.”
The fourteen-time GRAMMY Award-winner unveiled all of the details to her 12th studio album, The Life Of A Showgirl, on Wednesday evening (Aug. 13) during an appearance on New Heights, hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce.
Produced by Swift, Max Martin and Shellback, who she previously worked with on Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017), The Life Of A Showgirl features 12 tracks, including “Elizabeth Taylor,” “Ruin the Friendship,” “Honey,” “Actually Romantic,” “CANCELLED!”, “Eldest Daughter”, “Father Figure”, “Opalite,” “The Fate of Ophelia,” “Wood,” “Wi$h Li$t,” and the title track, “The Life Of A Showgirl,” which happens to be a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter.
“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. And it just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in my life and so that effervescence has come through on this record,” she detailed of the project before adding that it’s full of “bangers.”
She also admitted that “this is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time.” The 35-year-old singer/songwriter and Pennsylvania native continued, “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, and it be… just right. And that focus and that kind of discipline with creating an album and keeping the bar really high is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I tend to love to write lots and lots of music. So it’s a temptation to release lots of music.”
“Oftentimes, like I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together, like a perfect puzzle that these 12 songs from my 12th album, it just, I feel like we achieved that, and I’m really happy about that,” Swift added.
The Life Of Showgirl follows Taylor Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, produced by Swift, Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner and Patrik Berger, which spent 17 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
The Life Of A Showgirl, which will arrive on October 3 via Republic Records, is available for preorder now in four variations, including “Sweat and Vanilla Perfume,” “It’s Frightening,” “It’s Rapturous,” and “It’s Beautiful.” Each includes unique artwork, photo cards, and a jewelry box with a collectible charm bracelet. The album can be purchased on glittery orange cassette, glittery orange vinyl, or a CD.
