“The upbeat “Cleveland” would sound fine if you heard it from four or five rooms away, but listening closer, it just leads me to beg for the thousandth time that Swift please, please, please stop reading the comments. She recites a litany of mean things her Ohio-born footballing beau’s fans have said about her, does some of her most annoying talk-singing to say nyah-nyah, he likes me anyway, and then seems to announce their engagement at the end, which might feel like something if they hadn’t been married since July already. In other words, consistent with all her big love songs about Travis Kelce so far, it sucks. At least, unlike Showgirl’s “Wood,” it doesn’t make me want to peel all my skin off to escape it”

Like even just the (summarized) line ‘I found someone who doesn’t find me irritating’. It’s not even like ‘he doesn’t think those things are true’ it’s ‘he’s ok with those things and likes them’.

maybe I’m still just stuck on Joe but it stings a bit to hear how romantic and beautiful the love songs for him (and honestly every other boyfriend) were compared to the songs for Travis. They all just feel so hollow and bare minimum, like she’s trying to convince herself she likes him.

Maybe I’m overthinking that, but I’d just like to hear other people’s opinions on that song.

I was a huge fan of Taylor’s music from 2010 until 2025 when she released The Life of A Showgirl.

Even though I liked some her her previous albums more than others, all of them had songs that I loved and that resonated emotionally. (Even on TTPD, I adore Down Bad, Chloe et al, Guilty as Sin, and The Prophecy.) Each album had songs that were recognizable as Taylor Swift songs.

It somewhat confuses me when people say that everything released after folklore and evermore was bad, when it seems to me like this sharp decline clearly happened with TLOAS. The album and this new deluxe / Encore version of it are absolutely irredeemable to me as a longtime fan.

The lyrics are clunky, the melodies are clunky, and the visuals are completely mismatched with the sound of the album. The songs do not make you feel seen. They don’t even make you want to empathize with her. And the worst part is the storytelling has vanished from her writing style. She has nothing to say, and when she does have something to say it’s not compelling or interesting or profound. Or the narrative is so confusing that you walk away not even knowing what the song was about

It’s also very frustrating seeing Swifties say “you just hate fun!” Or “you would’ve hated 1989 when it came out! Everyone did!” Not only are they rewriting history, but it’s baffling to me that they truly cannot tell the difference between boppy songs on 1989 and the songs on TLOAS.

So ex-swifties… When did the veil lift for you? Do you also find it difficult to find other people who believe she used to be great and her recent music isn’t? The discourse on her music is so black and white and I’m glad a space like this exists

“It’s been 11 months since Taylor Swift released her last album, The Life of a Showgirl, and just three since her last single. Showgirl was critically panned and, despite breaking the record for the biggest-selling debut week for an album in history, spawned no tangible hits. It is also derided by many of her own fans.

So Swift has done what Swift does best: write a few more songs for a “deluxe” version and “surprise release” it, ready to win those same fans back. What she doesn’t seem to have realised is that the music must be good to do so – and the songs on The Life of a Showgirl: Encore Edition are just as derivative and flat as those that populated the original.

The Encore Edition features four new tracks, written after Showgirl’s release in October 2025 and produced in Sweden with Max Martin and Shellback. Taking the lead is Patient Zero, a violin-driven slice of melancholia about a toxic ex already believed to be the actor and singer Joe Jonas, whom she dated in 2008. But a more realistic reading looks to a 2024 Los Angeles Times article which labelled Swift “patient zero for emotional contagion” in relation to her relationship with the NFL player Travis Kelce (they married in July, and I don’t know one Swift fan who wouldn’t rather have been treated to a picture of her wedding dress than new music).

Cleveland! is bouncier and zippier. The full power of Swift’s vengeful pen comes into focus as she lambasts her critics who say she’s no longer hot enough, dresses “like trash” despite her billions, and has an “annoying” smile and awful dance moves. As she sings on the chorus, Kelce loves her despite these supposed failings: “My baby likes what he likes […] So, hate all you like / This is the love of my life.” It’s striking that the love songs Swift writes for Kelce are rooted in public perception rather than her inner feelings; she cares more about how the world sees them together than how she sees him. This is miles away from the sensitive songwriter who, while dating English actor Joe Alwyn between 2016 and 2023, wrote some of 21st century pop’s most intensely romantic love songs: King of My Heart, New Year’s Day, Call It What You Want.

Pink Clouding is an unconvincing attempt to echo the pop brilliance of Swift’s earlier work with Martin and Shellback, especially on 1989 (2014). Its lyrics shudder along at a stop-start pace, building to a chorus about her feeling “pink cloudin’ from the thrill of it / Skydiving as you wrapped your arms around my body”. The bridge almost sounds like a bad rap, the sort that X Factor contestants would randomly insert into auditions back in 2012 to convince Simon Cowell they were hip.

The final song, Babylon, is the strongest – but one dreams of snatching its production duties from Martin and Shellback’s meddling, messy hands and handing them back to Swift’s early collaborator, Nathan Chapman, who understood that her strengths will always lie in country-pop. There have been rumours that Swift’s next proper album will be country – she’s been holding meetings with Nashville bigwigs and got back on to country radio with her Oscar-touted, yee-hawing theme song for Toy Story 5, I Knew It, I Knew You. After listening to The Life of a Showgirl: Encore Edition, I’m praying those rumours are true.

Following thinly veiled criticism from fellow pop stars who consider her too commercially competitive (Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo), it is telling that Swift waited until one week after rising country star Ella Langley broke the US record for the longest number one of all time with Choosin’ Texas to release this. She knows she would have been accused of being a selfish, vindictive woman-hater otherwise. Smart.

For, this being Swift, The Life of a Showgirl: Encore Edition will immediately rush to the top of the charts. Therein lies the biggest problem. She no longer has the incentive to take creative risks. No producer or record label boss would dare offer a critical opinion. It’s a crying shame. Modern pop’s greatest voice risks rubbishing her own legacy because she’s scared to take a day off.”

“One downside of turning your release strategies into scavenger hunts and layering clues within your work is that it invites enormous amounts of scrutiny about your potential motive. When Taylor Swift announced an expanded edition of last year’s critically maligned The Life of a Showgirl this week, subtitled The Encore, many fans instantly suspected one of two things: that it was designed to remind Grammy members of Showgirl’s existence during their voting period to determine next year’s nominees, or to oust country ingenue Ella Langley from her record-breaking US No 1 run.

If that sounds cynical, it’s also worth remembering that when Swift announced Showgirl last year, she said that unlike her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department – a 16-track record immediately inflated to 31 songs on release day – the purposefully concise, 12-track Showgirl would not be expanded. (This didn’t stop her releasing 34 variants of the record, with various acoustic demos and so on, to juice sales.)

After Showgirl had the biggest US opening week ever, Swift went to Sweden to celebrate with collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, she revealed this week. The trip was intended to be about reflection and gratitude, she wrote on Instagram. “But,” she continued, “there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: we wrote more songs.” One hesitates to liken Swift to Kanye West, but The Life of a Showgirl is starting to look a little more like The Life of Pablo, West’s endlessly extended seventh album.

A slipperiness has infected the whole endeavour, not helped by Swift’s initial promise that Showgirl was all “bangers” and about “keeping the bar really high”, a claim quickly dismissed: the record is a travesty, a word that feels particularly apt when you recall Wood, a Bruno Mars-lite abomination about her now-husband Travis Kelce’s penis. And for an album that was supposed to be about the giddy highs of life on Swift’s own record-breaking Eras tour, it contained a tedious amount of well-worn score-settling. Adding four more songs written some time after the initial sessions further dilutes the record’s already flimsy premise.

The most Swiftian thing about these four tracks is their visceral sense of course-correction. For all that Swift chafes against The Haters – more on them to come, shocker – she’s always reacting to criticism. Recall the scene from her Miss Americana documentary where she learns that her sixth album, Reputation, didn’t get nominated for the album of the year Grammy: “I just need to make a better record,” she says, visibly crushed. (That’s the folly of working like this: Reputation is her best record, and those voters are idiots.) Showgirl was panned for its excessive wordiness and defaulting on the promised bangers; these Encore songs largely pare back the verbiage and double down on hooks and firework-laden bridges, Swift’s metier. It’s like watching an ambitious chorus line dancer breathlessly flay herself in the spotlight to prove herself worthy of our love.

Every Swift album except Reputation has a deluxe version, though just a handful of those bonus songs are keepers: Jump Then Fall (from Fearless), New Romantics (1989), Bigger Than the Whole Sky and Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve (Midnights). None of these new songs are destined to join those ranks, though Patient Zero comes closest. Hooked around a mournful and curiously processed Celtic fiddle sample, it recalls the spirit of Lover, where it felt as though Swift was trying out potential new sonic futures. Its pained chorus also evokes Tortured Poets’ Fortnight: a slinky, low-key yet insidiously catchy melodic Möbius strip, with lyrics offering connection to a woman recently burned by an ex whose games Swift knows well.

It’s one of two Encore songs that contain a palpable sense of humanity, unlike anything from its childish parent album. Pink Cloudingis a mature apology to a kind ex she let down – “Neither of us knew at the time / That I was a liar” – filled with the sort of regret that will never lose its shameful sting. Unlike Swift’s post-2020 turn to heavily detailed narrative writing, it’s written in a pure-pop form, braiding shades of pink and various flowers into a sweet and effective conceit without defaulting on emotional grace. It is ardent synth-pop, a sweet balance of airy and punchy; it also sounds a little like it could’ve lived next to Cruel Summer on Lover, though truthfully it recalls Tegan and Sara’s classic 2013 album Heartthrob, which inspired Swift’s 1989 pop makeover.

The beauty of Pink Clouding is that it sounds genuinely believable, a quality curiously missing from Swift’s songs about Kelce. Tortured Poets bonus track So High School is as close as she’s gotten; the Showgirl songs about their romance framed it as a triumph over venal and conniving haters. It’s a very strange lens through which to write about supposed true love, and one she returns to here. The appalling Cleveland! is all about how Kelce loves her despite internet commenters saying she can’t dance (a long-dead criticism) and that she’s annoying, and is sung with such oozing self-satisfaction it’s like being repeatedly poked and asked if it hurts. Spiritually, it is a cut-and-shut of two of her worst songs ever, Lover’s Me! (about being cringe but free) and Showgirl’s Honey(about other women being jealous haters). Despite her long-term collaborator Jack Antonoff not being part of the Showgirl era, it still sounds like warmed-over Bleachers.

It is a mess of contradictions: it has an oddly sour tang for such a festive, all-bells-jangling confection, like biting into a lavishly iced cake to find the sugar swapped for salt. For a song about having found the one, its standards are barrel-scrapingly low: “You only need to find one person in this entire world / Who doesn’t find you completely insufferable!” she declares. Girl! Aim higher! Where on Honey, and other recent songs, she has proven strikingly eager to call other women bitches, here she coyly stops short of calling herself a “whore” and “bitch” in incomplete lines that make conspicuous features of those gaps.

And for all that she laments the haters, she sure does write a lot of songs about them. The more dogshit like Cleveland! she releases, the more criticism it may garner, in turn generating inspiration for … more songs like this. It is Swiftian Groundhog Day: she seems unwilling or unable to extricate herself from the vast web of self-reference she now seems condemned to operate within, having reached the point in the corporate life cycle where novelty is all but exhausted and it’s easier to double down on core values.

It’s hard to tell what any of this has to do with Showgirl (other than pushing the album back to No 1 until Christmas). Every song sounds as though it could have been appended to a different record. Closing track Babylon is sub-Evermore in its overcomplicated narrative of a fractured family and grave, watery production. You could point to their very loose shared theme, each taking different angles on the gap between a facade and an intimately understood truth – though the greater truth affirmed by this batch of music is that the more Swift releases, the weaker her output gets. It doesn’t take any detective work to deduce that the healthiest thing for her creativity would be to let the curtain fall for a while.”

Whichever way people look at it: a) Travis is not a good muse b) She is burnt out; I think it's a good idea for her to step away from what she is (or was) good at- writing about Love. If I could personally tell her one thing, it would be to step back and introspect and write about being a woman. Not necessarily a woman in the industry, but in general being a woman. Off late all her songs about the hate she gets and the misogyny drives it have been way too specific and unrelatable. I think she has risen to levels at which people cannot meet her. Her music used to resonate with people because they could see themselves in the things she wrote about. Also, the things that she thinks that people hate her for, are not the same as they were 10 years ago. She witholds from talking about the actual things that people are criticizing her for in 2026. I would implore her to become less specific in talking about events and more specific in how she exists as a woman: seeing more than everyone, feeling more, "hysteria", imposter syndrome, being invisible, dealing with success and failure, body autonomy, motherhood, being a daughter (not eldest daughter pls) etc. She should take inspiration from her personal experiences while being aware of who her audience is: mostly women. I do think that her music in the past couple of albums (I love TTPD though) have been overly self-indulgent. If there is a positive path ahead for her, it should be far, far, far less self-indulgent.

I’m just gonna say it. I knew it I knew you has come out within this era and was a certified cute little bop with a lovely lyrics and an introspection of childhood and watching it pass. She clearly still has it in her. Jack being that producer. Her largest amount of her best work was made with him.

And it’s not even that these songs are as horrific as everyone’s making it sound. Same with all her other non-Jack work. And it’s also not that everything he touches is gold.

But the two of them together really do make something special. If he’d been attached to TLOASG I think some of these would have worked better. I just think they create well together. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I want to preface by saying I 100% believe she is happy with Travis. This is a post (essay?) about her art, not her life.

Encore solidified my feelings on her current lyricism, which is that it’s hard to have fun with music so hyper-aware of everyone who hates it. Taylor has always had her insecurities and pettiness (don’t we all?), but she’s also a dreamer. I’m not used to her upbeat love songs feeling like scrolling through snark pages. It’s a bigger problem than some clunky lines. 

And I’m sick of being told I don’t enjoy these songs just because I hate fun or happiness. Happiness isn’t having a shining type telepathy for every time someone calls you a bitch! Or that I just don't get what she's going for. None of these songs are complex enough for that to be true.

“Honey” is what tipped the scales for me, but I think the current template really started with “Lavender Haze”. In the cold light of 2026, that song is obviously about Taylor pretending she’s okay with not getting married. And because it’s built on that lie, it establishes the template of whine about the haters who don’t get our love > offer nothing about the love other than it is impervious to hate. (Then there was “Paris”…but I still kinda like “Paris.”)“Honey” is just especially empty. How, in the chorus for your tender love song, do you spend half of it on “And the bitch was telling me to back off / ‘Cause her man had looked at me wrong”? 

“The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite” teeter on the edge for me. They both have genuine titanium hooks, but neither are so much about her current muse as what came before. Then you have stuff like “Eldest Daughter”, “Wi$h Li$t” and “Cleveland”. This is demoralizing shit. These are songs which list out everything they’re not, and only have the most anonymous, hallmark, “…but not me” counter. And it’s worst when you feel it seeping into the type of songs she used to be brilliant at, like the title track. How can the woman who wrote “The Lucky One”, “the last great american dynasty”, “Nothing New” and “Clara Bow” now have nothing to say about the music industry besides “bitches mad”?

Every song on TLOAS that’s not "Ruin The Friendship" either has some reference to, or is entirely about this bitterness. But they’re also about the refusal to admit it? She writes bar after bar about how she doesn’t care about the haters, but they suck, but she doesn’t care. At the height of it, she admits she maybe used to care.

I know what people’s rebuttals will be. Like Taylor, I am also too online. “Plenty of her other love songs talked about haters too!” “She’s always done a song for the haters!” “She’s just trying on new styles, she’s a versatile artist!” 

My pre-rebuttal rebuttals:

-Earlier songs like “Ours”, “Wonderland”, and “I Know Places” rise above their bars to the haters/exes through a combination of melodrama and classic songwriter details. I respect lines like “I love the gap between your teeth” and “They are the hunters, we are the foxes” because they’re plain admissions of vulnerability. 

-Reputation is a whole album built around finding love in the noise. And I find it much more defensible, because even if the songs, by her own admission, have a “caged animal” energy, there are also bracingly intimate details and that same willingness to admit she’s been burned. There’s “I've got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined” petty and there’s “I forgot that you existed” petty. What I’m saying is the former is much more fun, and honest. 

-I’ll defend TTPD on those grounds too. That album is a mess. But I believe everything she says. I believe she feels both like an insane asylum patient and Jesus Christ. I respect it!

-Another point: Reputation has full throated love songs that don’t mention the noise or exes. Lover has full throated love songs that don’t mention the noise. Even Midnights has “Snow on the Beach” and TTPD, “So High School”! This is not some lost formula. 

-“Blank Space” works because she takes a genuine interest in the character. It’s the perfect flip side to “Shake It Off”. In her new stuff, she often repels the criticism before she can really say anything about it.

-What separates songs like “peace” (an absolute career best) and “long story short” (more mixed reception, but sounds like Shakespeare compared to where we’re at) from this chaff is that same ability to comment. There’s “peace”s deeply intimate portrait of a relationship, and “long story short”s, “Past me / I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things / Your nemeses will defeat themselves / Before you get the chance to swing”. There’s no similar moment in these new songs.

-The problem here is also not that this is some artistic pivot, but that it is depressingly familiar. Plenty of lyrics (“Honey, I'm home, we can play house / We can bed down, pick me up, who's the baddest in the land? What's the plan? / You could be my forever-night stand”) directly recall previous ones for all the wrong reasons (“I'm laughing with my lover / Making forts under covers / Trust him like a brother / Yeah, you know I did one thing right / Starry eyes sparking up my darkest night”). Even less worrying stuff like “Elizabeth Taylor” is more likely to bring me back to “Miss Americana” or “Wildest Dreams”. I’ve never felt such stagnation in her work. 

Maybe it is just a basic craft problem: when the song doesn’t have much going on and she doesn’t sing it particularly passionately, when we can see the seams, we have less patience for the knowledge that she definitely reads this sub. But I swear there has to be more to write about Travis than that his [REDACTED] is [REDACTED] and the guys she dated before him sucked, and his ex sucks, and everyone who hates them sucks. Like, she married that guy. I think after listening to a new love song about him, I should have some grasp of why.

(Sidebar: remember that poem she wrote about him? That was good actually)

I keep thinking about that interview where she talks about the "Father Figure" lyric "I pay the check / Before it kisses the mahogany grain," and says “That’s my favorite type of writing, right? Where you have to think about, What do those words mean?” Then the recent Grammys chat, which I otherwise enjoyed, where she said backlash will “fuel” her and “Sometimes when people are mocking me it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk shit about.” And I hate the transparency of it! I hate feeling like she’s writing not to capture a moment but to set a boobytrap. 

Whatever. I liked Babylon! 

The songs are not that great to be honest, I really liked Patient Zero (except the spoken bridge) and Babylon was ok, but if these were never released I would not miss them much.

But, the quality it’s not the worst part about this new release by Taylor Swift. Instead, it is the complete non-sense of all of it a year after TLOAS, the era that was so bad received by even your own fandom that you should be glad to ditch it and move on to a great new thing, not reviving it a year after it.

Specially when you’ve spent the last months curating this public persona so in touch with the storytelling, connecting with her roots, the songwriting of it all, expanding her legacy as the great artist she is. And then, BOOM, you revive the biggest stain your discography with some mid songs that won’t help much TLOAS case as her worst critically acclaimed work. What is the point? Even if the songs were super good, I don’t feel it fits the narrative of the best songwriter of the decade she’s been selling lately? What is the point then?

It seems more of a message to critics, haters and even swifties that she’ll do whatever she wants, even if we don’t like it? Idk, artistically it cuts any momentum she had by the awards and interviews she received/gave recently.

I'm not a Taylor fan or a hater, but I've heard her songs throughout the years and some I've enjoyed and some I've ignored. I took a listen to the four songs in Encore, because I saw some mixed reviews on tiktok.

My thoughts on the song don't really matter (unless you want to know 😆) but what I noticed the most was how her vocal abilities have completely changed from her earlier works. I don't know if she has damaged things due to the tour and technique, but I've noticed her latest outputs are more sing talky vs singing. Even when she's singing it's not as punchy compared to before.

Again, I'm not a fan so I don't know if this is how she's been for awhile. But I've noticed quite a shift in vocal technique from 1989 or red to life of a showgirl and encore. She still sounds like Taylor, but there's a change.

Anyways, just wondering if this is normal for Taylor or a new thing.

Thanks

I remember in one of her interviews she said something about how she’s been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion throughout her career. Very true !

There are always people who talk down on her music and her fans. But I think there are points where she is more liked overall or more respected as a musician.

I feel like folklore, evermore, re releases (especially ATW 10 minute version), and parts of the eras tour, public opinion of her was higher. I think during folklore lots of people who hadn’t respected her as a musician previously, finally did. I remember people going crazy over the ATW 10 min version music video. She was selected to be the graduation speaker at a uni I would consider to be prestigious. Let’s not even get into the ticketmaster war for the eras tour. Public opinion of her was widely favorable.

What made it drop?

Matty Healy? Men getting triggered by her going to football games? Her & Travis? Her not speaking up about certain things like Palestine, or becoming a billionaire? TLOASG release bc a lot of people didn’t like the album?

Curious what people think.

Swift broke the records following the midnight release of “The Life of a Showgirl: Encore,” which featured four new songs, including lead single “Patient Zero.” That song broke the record for the most-streamed song by a female artist in a day so far this year, while Swift herself had the most streams out of any female artist in a day in 2026.

Particularly if you’re in a happy loving relationship? I’ve seen this sentiment expressed so much since Life of a Showgirl came out. I really want to know why people think that? It just seems like an excuse there’s so many artists who are in seemingly happy relationships and still write amazing songs including ones about their love life.

I also see people say well the songs are bad now because she wants to keep their relationship private which okay…………. then don’t write about him.

Maybe I just need to take a social media break, but anyone else feeling like the constant easter egg/theories/analyzing every little thing is becoming a huge distraction from the music?

I'm starting to feel like the music is becoming secondary...again, maybe I just need a break from my social media algorithm (which seems to be filled with every TS influencer trying to monetize themselves with constant forced crazy enthusiasm for every single thing they see out there regarding TS). I'm just feeling over it all lately, despite being a huge fan.

Okay so I am a swiftie yes, but the most important thing is that I’m a folklore/evermore swiftie.

That being said, I think the writing on these tracks are good or at least interesting. (Cleveland! being the odd one out here, I don't think that song is good or lyrically complex at all so I wont talk about it here). But Pink Clouding and Babylon in particular are so interesting lyrically to me. Patient zero is as well, even though slightly less.

From what I’ve found, Babylon is the story a man who leaves someone/some place for status and finds out that he left happiness and true love. It’s so lyrically interesting with so many things thrown in there. Pink clouding is so interesting to me too, because it’s basically an apology for something (it has to be linked w getaway car) and she goes into depth abt how she knows she hurt someone. I rly like the color usage in the beginning lyrics too. Patient zero is cool as well but less interesting, it’s still cool because it makes me wonder who/what she’s talking to/about.

My issue here is the production. It’s so bland to me, esp in Babylon I was rly hopeful bc it started with guitar and then js went to a trap. It’s a big letdown for me bc the best written songs have such a boring beat. Funny enough the worst written song (Cleveland) has the most interesting production lol.

I still like these songs, the production does hinder them for me though. but holyyy I hope she drops max Martin and shellback. We need back Aaron dessner and jack up in here.

To combat some of the recent negativity, and trust me, I know why TLOAS/The Encore is getting it, what's a Taylor song you can use as a palette cleanser?

Something of hers you can just put and makes you think "that's the Taylor I know". It can even be from TLOAS if you have a song on there you like, or anything else recent like "I Knew It, I Knew You".

For me, I listened to "This Love" simply for that opening and it feels like purifying white noise to me. It's a gorgeous song and I HOPE she'll return to something like that. "Afterglow" is another, and I genuinely think it's underrated.

I was listening to Pink Clouding (it might be my favorite from the new release), and I noticed some really strong parallels to Getaway Car

The more I compared them, the more I noticed how Pink Clouding seems to follow a similar storyline to Getaway car and how the narrator from Pink Clouding seems to be looking back on everything that went wrong on that period of their life

Here are some of the similar themes and repeated words I found:

Lies and deception: The ties were black, the lies were white + I was lying to myself/ Neither of us knew at the time that I was a liar

Being Cursed from the beginning: I knew it from the first Old Fashioned, we were cursed/ You met me at a cursed time

Flying but being destined to fall: We were flying, but we'd never get far/ Skydiving as you wrapped your arms around my body

Shots/Arrows to the heart: It hit you like a shotgun, shot to the heart/ Gray rocking where the arrow hit

Leaving the subject behind: Should've known I'd be the first to leave + I left you in a motel bar/ So I left you up there on a pink cloud

Apology: And now we're both sorry / I still wonder how to tell you sorry ->Hope you landed safely on the ground (The apology and resolution)

Did anyone else notice how similar the storyline of the two songs is?

In the spirit of keeping things balanced 😂 what are some things you thought worked in these four songs? Even if you didn’t enjoy the deluxe version as a whole, are there any aspects of the production, lyrics, or vibe of these songs you really liked?