You sit in class next to a redhead named Abigail, and soon enough she’s proud of your 12th studio album.
After Taylor Swift dropped The Life of a Showgirl, her childhood pal Abigail Anderson Berard couldn’t wait to listen — and share her glowing review.
“Constantly blown away by all that you are @taylorswift 🧡,” Anderson Berard, 35, wrote via her Instagram Stories on Friday, October 3, on the album release day.
Anderson Berard also reposted Swift’s own Instagram message about the record.
“Tonight all these lives converge here, the mosaics of laughter and cocktails of tears where fraternal souls sing identical things,” Swift, 35, wrote hours earlier on Friday. “And it’s beautiful, it’s rapturous [and] it is frightening. I can’t tell you how proud I am to share this with you, an album that just feels so right.”
The pop star continued, “A forever thank you goes out to my mentors and friends Max [Martin] and Shellback for helping me paint this self-portrait. If you thought the big show was wild, perhaps you should come and take a look behind the curtain … The Life of a Showgirl is out now.”
When Anderson Berard reposted Swift’s upload, she set her post to “Ruin the Friendship” off the album. Swift even mentioned her longtime BFF by name in the lyrics.
“When I left school, I lost track of you / Abigail called me with the bad news,” Swift sings. “Goodbye / And we’ll never know why.”
Fans theorized that Swift, who famously doesn’t reveal the names of her lyrical muses, was singing about her high school friend Jeff Lang, who died in 2010 after a fatal overdose.
“It was not an invitation / But I flew home anyway,” she sings in the chorus. “With so much left to say / It was not convenient, no / But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway.’”
Swift, meanwhile, revealed during her official “Release Party of a Showgirl” theatrical event that the song was born from reminiscing over her high school years.
“I used to write about high school all the time. I haven’t written about it in a very long time, but sometimes I will,” she said in a behind-the-scenes explanation video. “I love to kind of go back to that moment. Now that I’ve had years that have passed since that experience, I was having a very specific thought of, ‘You just think that everything is so intense and everything will ruin everything if you put one foot out of line.’”
Swift added, “You don’t want to tell this person that you have feelings for them because it might ruin the friendship, and God knows what would happen if that happened. I was sitting there thinking, ‘What, it would have been fine to take changes that I didn’t take.’ I’ll never know.”
Swift, who noted that she was “always so disciplined about things in high school,” wrote the emotional ballad as a way to explore what could have happened if she took a leap of faith and confessed that she had a crush on her friend.
“It was exploring that idea of, ‘Was it so consequential? Would it have been so crazy if you were younger and you took some chances that you didn’t take?’ Swift concluded. “That really made way for this story that was inspired by several different people I knew in high school who either went through this on both sides of it. It was an amalgamation of different characters that I’d seen throughout my life. I’m very proud of it. It’s very wistful [and] very nostalgic.”
Swift is now engaged to NFL star Travis Kelce, who presumably inspired the Showgirl songs of “The Fate of Ophelia,” “Honey, “Wish List” and “Wood.”
The Life of a Showgirl is available now.
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