The Life of a Showgirl, which reunites Taylor Swift with Max Martin and Shellback, the Swedish producers behind her first breakthrough pop hits, is an exuberant album from an artist whose career and personal life are at their absolute peak. She staged the most successful concert tour of all time, she’s engaged to the captain of the football team, and earlier this week she became the first female artist to sell over 100 million albums. But in the middle of the celebration—or right at the beginning of Side 2, should we be listening on one of the album’s innumerable vinyl variants—Swift hits pause on the party to take a swipe at an unidentified hater who bears a strong resemblance to fellow pop star Charli XCX.
Even before The Life of a Showgirl dropped at midnight, a blurry screenshot of the lyrics to “Actually Romantic” had been parsed to death, and Swiftologists were confident they’d identified the target of its ire. “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift begins, “high-fived my ex and said you’re glad he ghosted me.” The ex in question, the thinking goes, would be the 1975’s Matty Healy, a bandmate of Charli’s husband, George Daniel, and, more to the point, the target of an indeterminate number of songs on Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. And while Swift would seem to have moved on from that brief but intense relationship, it appears as if she’s still keeping track of who’s on whose side.
“Actually Romantic” seems to be in part a response to “Sympathy Is a Knife,” from Charli’s 2024 album Brat, in which she confesses her insecurity in the presence of a more successful woman widely assumed to be Taylor Swift. “Sympathy” is more of a confession than a diss track, focusing on how just being around whoever-it-is makes Charli want to self-harm; though she hasn’t said who the song refers to, she has insisted that its real subject is “me and my feelings and my anxiety.” But what may have gotten under Swift’s skin is Charli’s admission that she doesn’t “want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/ Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”
Presumably, that’s what Swift is talking about in “Actually Romantic,” when she sings that the target of her vitriol “wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face.” But in Swift’s superheated imagination, the hater in question isn’t just jealous—they’re in love. “It’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me,” she sings. “No man has ever loved me like you do.” Given that Swift released The Life of a Showgirl’s track names well in advance, and given the widespread assumption that the album would be focused on her relationship with Travis Kelce, it’s kind of a great dark joke that the song whose title most obviously nods to romance is actually about one of her purported enemies. But in Swift’s telling, there’s a fine line between love and hate, and even negative attention lights her fire. “I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it,” she sings, before the punch line: “It’s kind of making me wet.”
That lyric also reads as a fairly straightforward admission that Swift is playing up this particular feud because she gets off on the drama. Having built her early career on anthems of heartbreak and recrimination, she’s never been one to rise above a slight when she can hit back instead. “Actually Romantic” feels like a throwback in more ways than one. It’s scored largely with conventional rock instruments, including a grungy electric-guitar chord progression lifted straight out of the Pixies’ 1988 classic “Where Is My Mind?,” and, with Swift as the sole credited songwriter, it sounds as if it could have changed very little from an acoustic voice memo banged out in a dressing room. The reference to Daniel as Charli’s “boyfriend,” rather than her husband—they married in July—is also another indication that Swift may have had the song in her back pocket for some time. But that only makes it more curious that she would choose the moment of her greatest triumph to release what seems like such a petty and small-minded rebuke, especially as one of only 12 songs on the shortest album she’s released since her 2006 debut.
Even before Martin and Shellback first took her to the top of the charts with “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Swift has made clapping back at those who she feels have wronged her a spectator sport. On her early tours, she cautioned potential offenders from the stage: If you’re mean to me, “I’m gonna write a song about you”—and “Actually Romantic” serves notice that the warning is still in effect. The trouble is that when you’re on top of the world, there’s nowhere to punch but down. We don’t know for certain who “Actually Romantic” is about—the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica suggests Olivia Rodrigo as a possible alternative—but it’s a given that, whoever it is, they’re less famous and less powerful than Swift herself. Even the ultrasuccessful are entitled to their negative thoughts, and, as Swift argues on Showgirl’s “Elizabeth Taylor,” her life doesn’t always feel as glamorous as it looks from the outside. But it’s notable how much less insightful and introspective Swift’s song is than the one she’s supposedly responding to.
“Sympathy Is a Knife” can be bitter and small-minded, but it’s a song about those feelings, not just a vehicle for amplifying them. Like Charli’s “Girl, So Confusing,” which delves into her love-hate relationship with Lorde, it’s a song that ultimately, and deliberately, reflects most critically on the person who’s singing it. That brave and brutal honesty ended up moving the song’s subject so much that she joined Charli on a second version that proved to be one of the most revelatory pop moments in recent memory—two women, sharing a track and a stage, admitting how each envies the other, and using that mutual understanding to strengthen their bond rather than tearing each other down. So perhaps there’s room for a second version of “Actually Romantic” too, one in which Charli, or whoever, gets a chance to have their say and settle this once and for all. Let’s work it out on the remix.
