Fans take pictures in the lobby as they attend "Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl" at AMC Montgomery 16 movie theater in Bethesda, Maryland on October 3, 2025. Photo by Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP
Last week, Taylor Swift sold a bunch of records and broke one: With 4 million units moved (and counting), Swift’s 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” just hit the highest first-week numbers ever recorded for an album in the modern era - dislodging Adele’s “25,” after just shy of a decade.
Accelerating the super-viral spread of “Showgirl” are its 30-plus appropriately termed “variants” - i.e. alternative physical and digital editions of the album pressed in assorted colors, packaged with entirely different cover art, or enhanced with acoustic versions and bonus tracks.
Some of these variants spring up and peace out. On Oct. 9, for instance, Swift posted “The Life of a Showgirl (Deluxe So Punk on the Internet Version)” - an edition distinguished by its fleeting nature (it was available for only 6½ hours) and the inclusion of seven “original songwriting voice memos.”
That “So Punk” part must refer to the scruffy nature of these voice notes, recorded by Swift on her phone as she sketched out melodic and lyrical ideas for the songs that would appear on “Showgirl,” often in conversation with producers Max Martin and Shellback. For an artist whose product is so precisely polished and market tested, the memos entice with their own variant of intimacy.
Certainly, Swift is onto something. Who doesn’t love to peek behind the finished product and observe the artist at work?
In the world of popular music, the work in progress takes many forms - the studio outtake, the rehearsal tape, the demo. One of my favorite artists growing up was PJ Harvey, who routinely released raw early versions of her songs, revealing her musical ideas in white-hot form before they hardened into completed works. Her 1993 album “4-Track Demos” exposed a visceral side of her music that made her studio releases sound tame by comparison.
And the unfinished is embraced elsewhere in the arts. Poetry fans linger over Emily Dickinson’s extant drafts and manuscripts - her curious penmanship and expressive dashes alive on the page with a crackling physicality. And the visual arts have long reserved a place for process-based exhibitions - from the sketches of Rubens to the drawings of Hopper - the uncertain wobble of the artist’s hand at the outset somehow making the eventual masterpiece more relatable, more human.
As such, the Swift memos seem like the latest attempt to make the world’s biggest pop star - a billionaire coming up on twice over, a global brand, a shaping force of consecutive zeitgeists - more relatable. But the rush of their release (and disappearance) couldn’t help but come off as a reaction to a growing stir online.
Shortly before the album’s release, Swifties reacted vocally and poorly to promotional materials for “Showgirl” that appeared to incorporate AI, causing #SwiftiesAgainstAI to trend on X. This kerfuffle fueled further conspiracies that flared up on Reddit: “I am starting to wonder if Taylor Swift’s new album might actually be 100% AI generated,” one wrote, “(and there is a plan behind it).”
If the mission of the memos was to serve as a musical captcha, they do the job. The first, a rough draft of “Life of a Showgirl” (the song), is split into two “acts,” with Swift trading strained falsettos with producers as she auditions overlapping lyrics over a piano. She reveals that this will be the title track. “Wow!” they all say, repeatedly.
Skip to Act II, and we’re in the studio, where the verse we just heard now plays with silky sleekness from studio monitors. “I’m recording,” she alerts the room before they work to fill in the blanks and iron out the syllables of the song’s bouncy midsection.
A skeletal sketch of “Cancelled!” is barely populated with words but loaded with snarly, snarky tone. A run-through of “Father Figure” is charged by Swift’s excitement over her own cleverness. A lone piano charts out the shifting rhythmic tectonic of “Eldest Daughter,” the song and the idea still in search of each other.
A demo of “Honey” actually works as a charming little stand-alone for a few moments - the track distilled to a light piano and a strummed guitar, with the producers hooting along in the background. Out of all the “original songwriting voice memos,” this one stands out for its clear capture of collaboration.
If these aren’t enough, additional voice memos for “Wood” and “Ruin the Friendship” are available - you’ll just have to purchase the (sigh) “Deluxe So Glamorous Cabaret Version” as well.
The memos certainly highlight Swift’s lyrical tendencies in a wilder state: She pens lyrics the way I repack a suitcase at the airport when I’ve been told I’m over the weight limit - a hurried and haphazardly edited attempt to make everything fit where it does not.
They also seem to confirm a suspicion I’ve long had about Swift’s songs - that they often spring entirely from individual words or shiny phrases, the way an interior decorator might design a whole room around a statement lamp. One memo charting the progress of “The Fate of Ophelia” makes clear that Swift is far more attached to the sound of the title than the spirit of the character.
More than anything - and perhaps this is why these memos feel like a letdown - there’s nothing surprising to be found behind this curtain. The life of “The Life of a Showgirl” sure sounds like business as usual at the Swift mill. Each memo seems to tell a story about filling in a predetermined shape with stray ideas and lightly tweaked clichés. Sometimes the recordings expose the songs as little more than syllabic puzzles or unfinished pictures in a coloring book.
In this way, the demo-memos reveal less about Swift’s process than her product - a brand of pop that has a lot more to do with formulas than chemistry. The next time Swift decides to take us behind the scenes, I hope she’s also willing to take us below the surface.
