Taylor Swift Reveals Tracklist and Release Date for New Album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ On ‘New Heights’ Podcast

Taylor Swift Reveals Tracklist and Release Date for New Album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ On ‘New Heights’ Podcast

Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, is officially coming this fall.

The pop star, announcing the news on boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights Wednesday, said her latest album will be released on Oct. 3 and feature 12 new songs. Swift said the album is about what was going on during her life while she was on the Eras Tour.

“It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life,” Swift told the Kelce brothers on the podcast.

“As you said, bangers,” she joked. Swift also confirmed on the podcast there would be no other songs on the album aside from the 12 announced tracks, referencing her surprise double-album drop of The Tortured Poets Department. “This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time,” the pop star said.

Swift also released the tracklist for The Life of a Showgirl, which features a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter that ends the album. The album’s first track will be “The Fate of Ophelia.” Track five, a coveted placement on a Swift album, which typically features the most emotional moment of the project, will be “Eldest daughter.”

The album reunites Swift with legendary hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. Swifties have been heavily speculating Martin and Shellback’s involvement in the album since billboards in New York and Nashville drew fans to a new Taylor Swift Spotify playlist, which featured 22 Swift songs that were made with Martin and Shellback. The move could mean a sonic turn for Swift, leaning heavier toward pop; the duo worked with Swift on some of her biggest, more pop-leaning hits like “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,” “22” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.”

On the podcast, Swift referred to Martin as her mentor, and confirmed that there were no other collaborators on the production and songwriting. This will mark Swift’s first record since 2014 that won’t feature production from Jack Antonoff.

“We’ve never made an album before where it’s just the three of us, there’s no other collaborators,” Swift said of her work with Martin and Shellback. “It’s just the three of us making a focused album where it felt like catching lightning in a bottle, honestly. I essentially said to him ‘I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras tour, and for the same reasons.”

On the podcast, Swift revealed that she started working on The Life of a Showgirl while she was on the Eras tour in Europe.

“I’d do like three shows in a row, I’d have three days off, I’d fly to Sweden, go back to the tour,” Swift said. 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.”

“And literally living the life of a showgirl,” Kelce added.

“I was, that’s why I called it that, nailed it,” Swift responded.

Swift’s appearance on New Heights was a hot topic of conversation since it was announced earlier this week. In her extensive two-hour-long conversation, aside from details on the new album, Swift recalled gaining ownership of her masters, the beginning of her relationship with Kelce, and her experience on her record-breaking eras tour among other topics. 

“This podcast got me a boyfriend ever since Travis decided to use it as his personal dating app about two years ago,” Swift joked during Wednesday’s episode.

Swift called it “such a wild romantic gesture” for Kelce to be courting her so publicly with the podcast.

“This felt more like I was in an ‘80s John Hughes movie and he was just like, standing outside of my window with a boombox,” Swift said. “I was like ‘if this guy isn’t crazy,’ this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.’”

Regarding her masters, Swift said she’d been saving up money since she was a teenager with the hopes of buying the rights to her recordings. After the Eras tour ended, she said, she’d connected with her team and decided it seemed like a good time to approach Shamrock Capital, the firm that had purchased her masters from Scooter Braun in 2020.

Swift and her team had no idea if they’d be interested, and Swift said she wanted to buy her music outright rather than establish a partnership with another company. She recalled sending her mother and brother out to Los Angeles  to talk with Shamrock, and they told the company the story of why it was so important to Swift to own the music. 

“I’m in the business of human emotion, I’d so much rather lead heart-first in something like this,” Swift said on the podcast. “I want it because this is my hand-written diary entries from my whole life. Everything I’ve ever done is in this catalog.”

In tears, Swift recalled being in Kansas City when she got the call from her mother telling her she finally got ownership of the masters.

“I was bawling my eyes out, I’m just like weeping like ‘really? What do you mean? This changed my life, I can’t believe it still,” Swift said. “Every time I think about it I have to tell the short version to everyone. This will affect the rest of my life. I think about this every day now, but instead of it being an intrusive thought that hurts me, it’s ‘I can’t believe this happened, how lucky am I.”