Taylor Swift opened up about her upcoming 12th studio album “The Life of a Showgirl,” discussing how there won’t be any bonus tracks for the project and explaining that she recorded it during days off on her Eras Tour.
The singer appeared on Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast “New Heights” on Wednesday, discussing various facets of the album — including reuniting with Max Martin and Shellback and why she chose the title — shortly after revealing its cover art and tracklist on social media.
Much to the dismay of some Swifties, she explained that the record’s 12 tracks will be all that fans are getting from this era. “With ‘Tortured Poets Department,’ I was like here’s a data dump of everything I thought, felt, experienced in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs. This is 12,” she said. “There’s not a thirteenth, there’s not other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time. I also wanted it to be every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, and you couldn’t take one out and it be the same album, you couldn’t add one and be… It’s just right.
“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,” she continued. “I tend to write lots and lots of music, so it’s a temptation to release lots of music. But oftentimes, 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 for my 12th album, I feel like we achieved that and I’m really happy about that.”
She got into the details of how she managed to find time to record the album, stating that she would jet to Sweden during off days on the Eras Tour to work with Martin and Shellback.
“It was something that I was working on while I was in Europe on the Eras Tour,” she said. “I would be playing shows, I’d do three shows in a row, I’d have three days off, I fly to Sweden, go back to the tour and actually working on this, I was physically exhausted at this point in the tour but I was so mentally stimulated and so excited to be creating.”
As for why she chose the title “The Life of a Showgirl?” Travis Kelce said that she was “living the life of a showgirl” by jet-setting across Europe, to which she responded, “I was, that’s why I called it that! Nailed it.”
“The Life of a Showgirl” sees her reuniting with Martin and Shellback, who worked on hits including “Bad Blood” and “Shake It Off.” When she announced the album early Tuesday morning, Spotify ran billboards with a code that led to a playlist of songs that Swift had worked on with the pair, suggesting they were reuniting for the album.
Swift confirmed that when she announced the tracklist and revealed the cover art on Wednesday afternoon, explaining why she linked back up with them.
“The three of us have made some of my favorite songs that I’ve ever done before,” she said. “We’ve never actually made an album before where it’s just the three of us. There are no other collaborators, it’s just the three of us making a focused album where it felt like catching lightning in a bottle.”
“The Life of a Showgirl” is set to release on October 3.