We’re a couple months removed from the release of Taylor Swift’s pop culture atomic bomb of an album, and I’ve been looking back on what could’ve been done differently. She reaches for so many great themes on this record only to fall flat with sloppy writing and bland production. But I’m here to guide you through some of my favorite female songwriters that take Swift’s ideas and expand them into fully formed musical worlds.

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl was claimed to be a glamorous record meant to be an ode to the titular life of a showgirl. But instead, the album is littered with millennial-cringe-inducing attempts at satirical relevance, fictional stories that abandon poetry for awkward narrative prose, and attempts to write about her real life that result in a flaming pile of bitterness and a series of thinly-veiled phallic innuendos.

In Feburary as part of my application to the School of The New York Times, I wrote a review of Taylor Swift's "Midnights." I got in.