“Cleveland!,” for anyone not yet keeping score at home, was one of four new songs tagged onto an extended edition of 2025’s “The Life of a Showgirl” album, subtitled “The Encore.” The other three were what people have mostly come to expect from the singer, looking back on long-distant relationships with rue and regrets — that she might have treated one of her past loves poorly, in the subtly moving “Pink Clouding,” or that she ever got involved in the first place with guys who turned out to Not Be All That, in “Patient Zero” or “Babylon.”
So… Taylor Swift in 2026 as Paul McCartney in 1971? The analogy gets more complicated when we consider that, at times, Swift has been more of a John than a Paul, actually. (Then again, there were moments when Paul was more of a John, too, but that’s a digression for another day.) Swift’s brutal, bitter takedowns of not just some of her former loves but former business partners or industry enemies in some of the darker passages of “Folklore” could legitimately be characterized as Lennon-esque. And that was not so many years after the decidedly Paul-like “Shake It Off”… and not so many years before she began writing about her future husband with “So High School,” the pep-rally outlier on the otherwise fantastically depressing “Tortured Poets Department.”
As a lifelong McCartney fan, when rifling through his catalog, I’ve often skipped over “The Lovely Linda,” “My Love” (unless it got to the brilliant guitar solo, and then I was inexorably hooked) and “Silly Love Songs.” Yet I never shunned them entirely, and I was happy they existed. Similarly, in the week that the extended “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” has been out, I’ve played three of the four new tracks a good deal, while I have saved “Cleveland!” for, uh, special occasions. It’s never going to be a favorite, but it’s never going to feel like a moral affront, either. It’s always been my position that people ought to get at least a partial pass for the things they say and do in the immediate throes of a new love, or in the first aftermath of a breakup — it’s those extreme reactions that make the world go round. You can love that she’s in love without having to love the latest song that came out of that altered state… or without having to demonize it, either. (Especially when it’s, you know, a bonus track?)
In the bigger picture, perhaps we could listen to what the man said: Love doesn’t come in a minute. Sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. Those lines have always struck me as deep and resonant, weirdly, in a song that’s otherwise anything but.
In the meantime, back in inflammatory meme-land… To quote the sage poet who wrote the previously most famous song about Cleveland, Randy Newman: Burn on, big river, burn on!
