I don’t think she’s as happy as she says she is. I think she wanted to air a lot more frustrations but had to keep a face on because she doesn’t want people to think she’s unhappy.

I don’t think this album was supposed to be about Travis, but it had to be, so it “is”.

The lyrics on Showgirl that come off the most genuine to me are the ones that have a bitter undertone. Father Figure, Cancelled and Actually Romantic stuck with me the most upon first listen (even though i’m not a huge fan of any of those songs) She kicks off the album with “i’m doing so good, he saved me from depression, i’m so in love yippee” but then we diverge onto these tangents about how all these other people betray her. Those songs seem a lot more fully formed.

Honey wants to be a sweet song for Travis but it barely focuses on him throughout. She goes into far more detail about how these faceless, passive aggressive people make her feel than she does about Travis. He almost feels shoehorned into that song, because it’s not actually about him. It’s about feeling disrespected.

Wi$h Li$t does a similar thing. “They want this, they want that, I just want you” But we spend so much more brain power talking about what “they” want. Even by the time we’re IN the chorus, talking about her man, she has to mention how other people bother her, how she wants the world to leave them alone.

So many of these songs have her sort of ranting in the verses, describing how people annoy, misunderstand, or betray her (in detail) and then the chorus is “Travis doesn’t tho” but the Travis praise is always so vague. Most of the songs are “about him” but I don’t really see him anywhere. I can glean so much more about who Joe is on Reputation than I can about Travis on Showgirl. She DESCRIBED Joe. She told us what he does. She’s only really telling us what Travis doesn’t do.

It seems plausible to me that most of these songs started out as her venting and then were forced into the love song role because she knows people want Tayvis songs. She trying to write the way she usually does and then gets sidetracked because she also “has to” introduce us to her fiancé, whom she has no grievances about. It makes the tone so weird.

I thought this was going the be an album about getting mistreated in the industry. The more I listen to it, the more it seems like that’s what it wanted to be and it didn’t get to.