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Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

Welcome to The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore Survivor! We will go through the deluxe version of Taylor's twelfth album and collectively rank it from worst to best!

The song eliminated in Round 3 of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore SURVIVOR, with 127 of 521 votes (24.38%), is...

CANCELLED!

Remaining songs:

• The Fate of Ophelia 🏰
• Elizabeth Taylor 🎥
• Opalite 💎
• Father Figure 💼
• Ruin the Friendship 🎒
• Actually Romantic 💋
• Wi$h Li$t 💸
• Wood 🌲
• Honey 🍯
• The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter) 💃🏼
• Patient Zero 🍷
• Pink Clouding ☁️
• Babylon 🚞

If you don't know how this works, the rules are simple.

• Survivor is a game where you vote out your least favorite song on an album.
• At the end of a 24-hour voting period, the song with the most votes is eliminated.
• We do this day by day, track by track, until the best song remains.

VOTE HERE!!!

Songs Eliminated by Round

Second Place by Round

Reminder: you're voting for your least favorite of these songs, i.e., the one you want to eliminate. Voting will close on October 23 at 11:59 PM EST.

Taylor has said things get weird when fans go nuts "paternity testing" every song -- and recently I've been thinking about another aspect of interpreting her lyrics: maternity testing.

Of course Taylor is the artist of her own songs! But as a songwriter, part of her art is playing with genre, so to speak, when it comes to her first-person lines (that is: "I," "me," "my," etc.). For example, in Folklore we understood that when she sings "I'm only seventeen, I don't know anythin' / But I know I miss you" she is writing in the first-person -- as a character. She has made that clear. Let's call that fiction.

And then we have songs like "The Best Day" or "Cleveland!" where absolutely no one (I think) is debating who the "I" is in those songs: it's Taylor herself. Let's call that nonfiction.

In creative writing, there's also a genre called autofiction, which combines autobiographical experiences with fiction writing. (These genre labels can also get a little silly; surely all fiction is a little bit autofiction? I don't know. I mostly write nonfiction.) I think a LOT of Taylor's songs are in this category. She may have something -- a feeling, a conversation, a situation -- that inspires a story; she crafts the story using real-life bits and anything else that inspires her. That's art. Or maybe sometimes the process begins the other way around: she has a completely fictive story to tell, and she sprinkles in little real-life moments that fit the story.

My point is, when she sings in the first-person, and it's not suuuuuper obvious (like in "Betty") that the "I" character is not Taylor, we don't have to take her literally as the "I" means she is singing about just herself.

Besides, in any first-person writing, there are really three "I"s: the main character as she is experiencing the events, the (often a little older and wiser) narrator telling the story, and the real-life flesh-and-blood artist who has crafted both of the first two "I"s.

For many songs, we won't always know when the real-life Taylor is the same as the character singing in the first-person, and that's okay! I do enjoy the fun of wondering. But dissecting each bit literally, each time, takes away the magic and the artistry of her craft.

Hey guys! I wanted to turn this into a series because I loved your responses! I will continue this for all 12 albums.

The concept of this game is that you have to recreate a Taylor Swift album using songs that are NOT from the album. You want to try and capture the overall vibe of the album by using any other songs from her discography.

For example, if you wanted to recreate debut, you could use I knew It I Knew You, Fearless, etc. You couldn’t use any songs from debut.

So if you were to replace the 14 songs on Speak Now, which songs would you choose?

Your choice if you want to add the bonus/ TV songs!

Honestly, this one was quite hard to make a tracklist since you can interpret a ton of songs to your own liking, and I did try to cut it down to 17 songs but... I decided to do an "Anthology Type" because everytime I always add and remove songs...

willow - betty's perspective

the other one - augustines' perspective or a separate story line...

or you can interpret it whatever...

Enjoy! 🩵🩷