Okay, so the waiting part is over.
Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is available now, and the expanded release adds four new songs to the Showgirl world.
Which means the giant Patient Zero mystery that kicked this whole thing off finally has a very real answer.
The four new songs on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore
The new tracks are:
- Patient Zero
- Cleveland!
- Pink Clouding
- Babylon
So yes: Patient Zero is officially part of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.
If you were here when Taylor first started teasing Patient Zero, we went fully down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what the black-and-white artwork, the zeroes, the 12 exclamation points and that old “patient for the encore” clue were pointing toward. You can read all of our Patient Zero theories here.
And, apparently, the “encore” clue was doing a LOT more work than we realized.
Taylor says the new songs came from a trip to Sweden
When Taylor announced the expanded release, she said the four new songs came out of a celebratory trip to Sweden with Max Martin and Shellback after the original album’s massive first week.
There was also a studio there.
And because this is Taylor Swift we are talking about, apparently nobody was ever going to just sit around and have a nice little celebratory dinner.
They wrote more songs.
And “Cleveland!” is still going to cause chaos
I mean.
Cleveland!
With an exclamation point.
Pink Clouding and Babylon round out the new songs, and now that The Encore is actually out, we can finally stop treating all four titles like clues on a corkboard.
The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is available now
Taylor Nation’s official email says The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore is available now.
So the “coming Friday” part of this story is officially retired. The songs are here. The theories now have to survive contact with the actual music.
Good luck to all of us.
