Taylor Swift’s Latest “The Encore”: Taylor Swift has added four more songs to her The Life of a Showgirl and released The Encore, with each of the songs feeling like different weather systems, perhaps because love is not just one thing.
Taylor Swift’s Latest “The Encore”
Sometimes love is knowing what kind of person you should run away from because you have survived them; sometimes it is lying awake years later wondering if you left a scar on somebody who did not deserve even one; sometimes it is looking back at something beautiful and realising you only understood how magnificent it was once it was gone; and sometimes it is simply knowing.
The different flavours are what make Taylor Swift’s Latest “The Encore” so interesting beyond the obvious excitement around Taylor Swift dropping a song. The Encore adds Patient Zero, Cleveland!, Pink Clouding, and Babylon to the original 12-track Showgirl album.
Patient Zero
Patient Zero is probably the most delicious way to start the conversation because this is not Taylor Swift writing from an insider perspective of a relationship, but she stands outside it.
More interestingly, Patient Zero sounds like a song where she is talking to the woman who is now with a man Taylor already knows; the one that comes with a warning label. The chorus says, “But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was Patient Zero”.
The love in this song is not necessarily romance but recognising; a strange intimacy of looking at another woman and thinking, “I know exactly what she is going through!” and offering help. There is a little sisterly care about the song’s emotional architecture that puts a very “girl’s girl” energy to it. She is basically handing a survival note written in invisible ink.
Patient Zero lyrics feel very different from the Taylor songs where love is something to fight for at every cost. This song channels a self-love and self-worth energy in knowing that someone is toxic and helping someone out of their shadow. Personal theories about the song circulate but nothing seems confirmed.
Pink Clouding
Pink Clouding lyrics, in a very gentle way, put across a feeling of regret: not dramatically, not in a “please come back” way, but very silently after years. Pink Clouding feels like love after ego has finally stopped being the defender of one’s behaviour.
The emotional centre of the song sits in “Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry?” and that appears to be such a different shade of love because there is no obvious demand attached to the “sorry”, but she is simply admitting that looking back at the past mistakes hurt emotionally because she realises what she did was wrong only after it was too late.
The song becomes about the uncomfortable possibility that sometimes we are also the person who hurts someone, and that might be one of the most mature versions of love Taylor Swift has written. The song explicitly circles guilt over having hurt a “good person”, with Swift singing, “I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person”. Pink Clouding is more of something that is about accountability.
Babylon
Taylor has always been fascinated by the architecture around love: the castles, kingdoms, gardens, ruins, and forever promises, but Babylon lyrics feel like they are about what happens when the kingdom disappears.
Babylon lyrics: “You never knew that it was Babylon, ‘til it was gone” play, and suddenly a relationship is no longer a relationship. It turns into a whole little world that existed between two people back then and is now gone.
This is where Taylor Swift’s latest, “The Encore”, becomes a little more interesting because Babylon does not sound like “hey, I want you back”, but rather like, “I now understand what we are”, and the difference is important.
Cleveland!
Cleveland! Is perhaps the brightest and the cheekiest of the four recently released songs. The chorus gives us “This is the love of my life” without any riddle, metaphor, ambiguity or “in another lifetime” hook.
Cleveland! lyrics say, “He already took me to Cleveland and showed me The Heights, so hate all you like”, and the certainty in the song feels like a commentary surrounding the trust in a romantic relationship.
The certainty is perhaps an evolution in the four-song collection because there is a particular kind of freedom in no longer needing everyone else to understand the love to be real. Cleveland! feels like love without any apology.
So What Does Love Sound Like Now?
The Encore does not give us a single definition of love, but rather it gives us four, and none of the versions cancels out each other.
Perhaps that is what makes Taylor Swift’s latest “The Encore”, feel less like four bonus songs and more like a little post-Showgirl detail to the question: What does it mean to love someone?
But which version of The Encore love sounds like you and has kept you hooked? Perhaps this is the most interesting thing about Taylor Swift’s album; it perhaps asks us what love sounds like when nobody is performing anymore.
Listen to all four tracks of The Encore on Spotify.
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