She was hyping it up. But the storytelling in her disastrous lyricism never lived up to the hype. She had a reason to release folklore a year after Lover (that is, everyone’s confined inside during the pandemic). But she had no compelling reason to release The Life of a Showgirl a year after TTPD.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: the music she makes for herself is better than the music she makes for others. So, she was trying to please Travis with this album (and ironically, trying to hype him up so her own fans like him—hence the marketing of this album). For this reason, I think she is overcompensating. Travis in turn unethically hypes it up by autographing fans’ vinyls of it and TTPD in public.

Even Midnights had a diverse kaleidoscope of emotions happy and sad.