Taylor Swift is set to bring more glitter pen songs on The Life of a Showgirl. The superstar shared that Max Martin and Shellback are back as the sole producers, along with Swift, for her 12th studio album.
Swift revealed the news on Wednesday night during her episode of the New Heights podcast. On the show, the singer called Martin her “mentor” before describing their work together. “The three of us have made some of my favorite songs that I’ve ever done before,” she said, referring to some of her biggest hits such as “22,” “Shake It Off,” and “Blank Space.” “They’re just geniuses in different avenues, in different ways,” Swift said of the producer duo.
“We’ve never actually made an album before where it’s just the three of us,” she continued, before confirming: “There’s no other collaborators. It’s just the three of us making a focused album.” For Swift’s last five albums, the musician teamed up with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, whom she also tapped for work on her Taylor’s Version re-recording project. She touched on the intervening years where she worked on surprise album folklore and evermore, calling those projects “esoteric.” “I was just kind of exploring and trying to challenge myself as a writer,” she said of that time.
The time apart proved to be just what Swift, Martin, and Shellback needed. “By the time we came back together, I feel like we had so much more dexterity to what we do,” she said, adding: “It felt like all three of us in the room were carrying the same weight as creators.” The singer praised the creative experience and noted that the record contains “the best ideas we’ve ever had.”
The musician shared that the production work for The Life of a Showgirl occurred on the Eras Tour while she was in Sweden. “When I was on tour in Stockholm, I had Max Martin come out to the show, and I was talking to him, and I was like, ‘I just feel like we could knock it out of the park if we went back in.”
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Swift’s main focus of the album was how it connected to her career-spanning tour. “I essentially said to him, ‘I want to be as proud of it as an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons,” she said. “And he was like, ‘Do you understand what kind of pressure that is?’” To Swift’s credit, she definitely does.
“I know the pressure I’m putting on this record by saying that, but I don’t care because I love it that much,” she said, before going on to describe the “effervescent” energy of The Life of a Showgirl. “It just comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life.”
