Taylor Swift didn’t rest for long after wrapping her global Eras Tour. After just eight months of downtime, the pop superstar all but broke the internet by revealing at 12:12 a.m. ET Tuesday (Aug. 12) that she’d be embarking on a brand new era with the release of an album titled The Life of a Showgirl, which will mark the 12th studio LP in her discography.
What was almost as eye-popping as the announcement itself was the way she shared the news. In lieu of her more recent method of unveiling new albums during award-show acceptance speeches — like she did for 2022’s Midnights at the VMAs and 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department at the Grammys — Swift instead chose a much more casual route of spreading the word this time. Joining boyfriend Travis Kelce on his New Heights podcast, the 14-time Grammy winner simply revealed the project’s existence and title in a clip posted to the show’s social media accounts, just one day before the full episode’s release.
“So, I wanted to show you something,” she said in the video, pulling a blurred-out vinyl from a “T.S.” brief case as the Kansas City Chiefs tight end beamed beside her. “This is my brand new album, The Life of a Showgirl.”
Fans are now clamoring for all the information they can get on the LP, which will mark Swift’s first full-length since 17-week Billboard 200 chart-topper Tortured Poets. But while only time will tell how the famously cryptic, Easter-egg-dropping musician will continue sharing new details about Life of a Showgirl, Billboard is keeping track of all of them as they come.
See everything there is to know — so far — about Swift’s 12th studio album below.
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The Title
The title of The Life of a Showgirl was the first detail Swift revealed about the project, doing so in the New Heights clip, which was posted after a timer on her website ticked down to 12:12 a.m. ET on Aug. 12. But fans are already starting to come up with theories about what inspired the theatrical name, with some people pointing out that scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 — a 92-year-old film about showgirls — just so happen to match the aesthetic of her Eras Tour performance of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”
Swifties have also picked up on the fact that the musician likely wrote most or all of The Life of a Showgirl while putting on her own traveling show for two years straight on the Eras trek. “Okay wait I’m already obsessed with this album concept,” one fan wrote on X. “The Life of a Showgirl potentially being about Taylor’s life during the eras tour, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the physical and mental toll, the glitz and the glam, the celebrations, the constant travel, the longing and long distance… I am OBSESSED.”
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The Color Scheme
For months, Swifties speculated that her incorporation of more and more orange outfits in the final stages of the Eras Tour meant that the star’s next album would have an orange theme — something that proved to be true when Swift finally announced The Life of a Showgirl, changing her website to have a sparkly clementine wallpaper, and updating her profile pictures on social media to show a similarly hued lock. Taylor Nation had also shared 12 images of Swift wearing orange on stage hours before the album was announced.
A second crucial color of the new era, however, appears to be mint green — and fans think they might have already figured out what it represents. “The colour scheme is copper oxidizing because a showgirl is on a pedestal for the world and over time, in the public eye they lose their shine…,” one person wrote on X, using the Statue of Liberty’s fade from bronze to green over time as an example.
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Max Martin Appears to Be Involved
After working almost exclusively with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner for about eight years, Swift appears to have reunited with producer Max Martin for The Life of a Showgirl. At least, that’s what fans have gathered from the mysterious Spotify playlist Swift personally curated for the new era — titled “And baby, that’s show business for you” — that includes only songs she made with the elusive Swedish pop pioneer.
The premise of Martin’s involvement is definitely exciting, as he helped Swift craft some of her biggest hits to date. Their previous collaborations include “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off,” each of which spent multiple weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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