Taylor Swift’s Encore: Exes, Euphoria and One Goofy Honeymoon Song

Taylor Swift has released four new tracks as “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore,” and three of them prove she has not retired from writing about the ones who got away. The fourth, “Cleveland!,” confirms she is equally committed to writing about marital bliss — with a sunniness so blinding it could almost blot out the memory that she ever wrote an elegy.

However it is packaged, these four songs effectively constitute a new EP — something Swift has not formally delivered since 2008’s “Beautiful Eyes” — rather than an obvious addendum to “The Life of a Showgirl.” The record reunites the same production trio behind that album: Max Martin, Shellback and Swift herself. As much as the world loves Swift as the 21st century’s quintessential album artist, the review notes, “it’s refreshing to get something fast and easily digestible from her between pop opuses, too.”

The tracks were recorded after “The Life of a Showgirl” was already released, and the sound reflects it.

“Patient Zero.” Swift thinks of a certain recent ex and thinks not of Tim McGraw but of hospitals and pandemics. One suspects the real-life inspiration is the same figure behind “You’re Losing Me,” the stark post-“Midnights” bonus track that appeared to chronicle her longest relationship in its final throes. But where that song was harrowing, “Patient Zero” is chipper: she sings as someone long recovered, warning the ex’s current partner that his good-guy act “won’t be nourishing in the end.” The dry drum sound of “Showgirl” gives way to electronic percussion and a prominent violin — or a synthesized emulation of one — that could pass for a Jack Antonoff production, bearing none of the obvious Martin/Shellback hallmarks. The tell comes when she advises the new girlfriend to take the sisterly counsel of “someone who had him and walked away.” The point, the review argues, is not that she hasn’t moved on — it’s that “she’s going to need it to keep writing songs that aren’t all white picket fences.”

“Cleveland!” This one is, by the critic’s own admission, “just effing goofy” — calibrated between the self-celebration of “Me!” and the cheerleading of “So High School.” It functions almost as a happy sequel to “You Belong With Me,” with Swift quoting back the internet’s comment section about her supposedly clumsy dancing, and marveling that Travis will not hold it against her. Musically, Martin and Shellback switch again: live-sounding drum rolls replace electronic rhythms, topped by a keyboard line straight out of late-’80s synth-pop — though A Flock of Seagulls would never have offered a spoken monologue like: “You only need to find one person in this entire world who doesn’t find you completely insufferable, and I have an important announcement to make — I found mine.”

“Pink Clouding.” The finest of the four on first listen, its lush overdubbed vocals, steady pulse and boomy undercurrents would fit on “Lover” or as a “1989” outtake. It is a regret track in the lineage of “Back to December” — a done-somebody-wrong number about a boy she ghosted. One recovery center defines “pink cloud syndrome” as “a temporary phase of intense euphoria, optimism and overconfidence experienced during the early stages of addiction recovery,” which suggests the pink cloud in question doubled as a getaway car. Most disarming are the confessional lines: “Neither of us knew at the time that I was a liar… Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry… I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person.” The tender poetry survives intact.

“Babylon.” The most lyrically elusive of the quartet — as mysterious as “Cleveland!” is simple, and already prompting literalist tweets asking, “Who the hell is Aunt Virginia?” It opens with an acoustic guitar suggesting Aaron Dessner territory, though the deeper callback may be “White Horse,” which Swift appears to reference with the line “That small town’s even smaller now in your rear view.” The standout lines include “You ran with all the wild things / A liberated libertine who longed for home” — possibly Swift describing her immediate pre-Travis days — and what the review calls a whoa moment, “Love is ice upon the ladder that you need to climb.” Few of her one-liners beat “The self-harm of never being where you are.” It reads as a song of empathy for an ex she once “would have killed with a thousand cuts.”

The verdict: “Cleveland!” gives her life, but part of her heart remains in Babylon — with the path not taken on the way to the skybox. Whether an exclamatory “Florida!!!”/“Cleveland!” mashup awaits on the next tour is now, apparently, a live question.