Taylor Swift once quipped, "Anything I do is polarizing." But with her much-hyped 12th album, "The Life of a Showgirl," the global superstar is trying hard to be anything but.

Like a personification of the eternally people-pleasing "millennial boss" meme, Taylor Swift is taking fans' feedback to heart on "Showgirl." So much so that the key pillars of the album — the creative process, the length, the structure — seem deliberately developed in response to the critiques of its predecessor, 2024's "The Tortured Poets Department."

That album, despite its astonishing run atop the charts, quickly became one of the most divisive of Swift's two-decade career. Critics balked at the 31-song, two-hour runtime and Swift's wordy lyricism. She faced accusations of "quality-control issues" and a kind of

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