The Guide #212: The Taylor Swift backlash has me asking: how much good music can one artist really produce?

In this week’s newsletter: The mixed response to The Life of a Showgirl is proof that even the biggest star isn’t immune to creative burnout

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mid the flood of discourse around Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, one recurring sentiment jumped out: that the album – which many critics have declared a misstep in Swift’s otherwise consistently solid discography – felt hurried, hasty, rushed. “The Life of a Showgirl Is 40 Minutes of Elevator Music Rushed Out to Break a Beatles Record”, read the particularly savage headline of a piece on Collider. In the Guardian music desk’s excellent round table on the album, just about every panellist expressed a wish that Swift would take a break from the constant churn of releasing records, in order to recapture a lost spark.

And it has been quite the churn. Since 2019 Swift has on average released an album a year, and that’s not counting the Taylor’s Version re-records of her older albums. All of this managed alongside a certain billion-dollar-grossing, 20-month stadium tour, too. No wonder the word “burnout” is being thrown around liberally. The Guide will leave it to more knowledgable Swiftheads to decide whether that’s the case, but The Life of a Showgirl backlash does raise an interesting question: how much music is too much? How frequently should a band or artist be releasing albums?