Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl marks her transition from billionaire mogul to soon-to-be spouse of NFL superstar Travis Kelce. “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?”, for example, is a line from her new song “Cancelled!”. It is an unashamedly conservative-coded record, and not only because she is now approaching matrimony.

At the start of her career, Swift’s politics were oblique. But as time went on, she began to repeat the shibboleths that reflected her young, female fanbase. To mark Pride Month 2019, Swift started a petition in support of the Equality Act. In her song “You Need to Calm Down” from the same year, she doubled down on her LGBTQ ally status, singing: “Shade never made anybody less gay.” In a Guardian interview, she called Donald Trump’s first term as president an “autocracy”, came out as strongly “pro-choice”, and endorsed Hillary Clinton — albeit three years too late. In the vexed summer of 2020, Swift took to what was then Twitter to accuse Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism”.

But now, in “Cancelled!”, she bemoans the fans who expect uninterrupted virtue from their celebrity idols: “good thing I like my friends cancelled”. Once a strong believer in the Current Thing, Swift seems to have realised the risks of self-satisfaction: “It’s easy to love you when you’re popular/ The optics click, everyone prospers/ But one single drop, you’re off the roster.”

Anti-smartphone sentiment, another frontier of the conservative movement, abounds in The Life of a Showgirl. There are digs about mindless “trolling and memes” and in the song “Opalite” she directly accuses Kelce’s ex-girlfriend of being addicted to scrolling, saying: “You were in it for real/ She was in her phone.”

“Wi$h Li$t”, meanwhile, is Swift’s ode to pro-natalism. With Kelce, she claims, she suddenly wants to “settle down” and “have a couple kids/ Got the whole block looking like you.” His all-American charm has “got [her] dreaming ‘bout a driveway with a basketball hoop”, on which he’ll presumably teach these übermensch offspring to become sporting greats.

Later in the same song, she distinguishes herself from unmoored progressives, who “want that freedom living off the grid/ Three dogs that they call their kids.” For Swift, the days of embracing the “childless cat lady” label popularised by JD Vance, as she did in endorsing Kamala Harris, are well over,

Pre-Travis, Taylor was adamant not to be reduced to arm candy, singing that “he wanted a bride, I was making my own name” on 2022’s “Midnight Rain”. And yet Swift doesn’t mind when Kelce gives her pet names, as she explains in “Honey”, because “you give it a different meaning”.

“Wood” is a less subtle ode to her fiancee’s assets: “redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see.” The “new heights of manhood” she has found with the Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end are clearly different to life with her ex-boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, who helped her embrace political activism. His part in the Sally Rooney universe, playing the brooding male lead in Conversations with Friends, allowed them to rise to the rank of progressive royalty. In her 2020 album Midnights, she empathises with Alwyn’s hesitancy to enter into a traditional union: “I wouldn’t marry me either.”  But in “Eldest Daughter” on her new album, she admits that her previous distaste for marriage was a product of culture, not conviction: “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.”

In her first post-release interview, with BBC Radio 1’s Greg James, Swift gifted a loaf of blueberry and lemon sourdough bread to the presenter and invited him to her wedding. Maybe “The Life of a Showgirl” would be better if retitled “The Life of a Tradwife”.