Honey

For better or worse, “The Life of a Showgirl,” Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, is unlike anything the megastar has done before.

On the 12-track album, which dropped Friday to mixed critical reception, Swift is uncharacteristically risqué and, for possibly the first time, indulges her inner theater kid without reservation. In that sense, much of the pop record is daringly new.

Still, on each track are sonic echoes from the 14-time Grammy winner’s decades-spanning discography — from the verve of “Reputation” to the romantic whimsy of “Lover.”

Swifties are sure to be playing “The Life of a Showgirl” on repeat today. But if that gets a bit tiresome after the 13th time, here is a list of Swift sister songs to try instead, based on your favorite track from the new album.

(Some song pairings are based on sound, while others are based on shared themes.)

“The Fate of Ophelia”

“Showgirl’s” opening track has a sultry groove and low pulse that could easily be the soundtrack to a flirty nightcap or the series finale of a dark comedy.

Find the same alluring melody with an extra dash of spice in “I Can See You,” a vault track from 2023’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).” And for bonus points, head to the music video for a dose of the Swift-signature theatricality dripping from “The Life of a Showgirl.”

“Elizabeth Taylor”

This allusive track boasts the album’s most sweeping chorus, anchored by Swift’s mesmeric alto and a masterfully orchestrated rhythm that uses moments of quiet to its advantage.

“Reputation‘s” slow-burn hit “Don’t Blame Me” follows a similar playbook, using a killer choral backing to achieve the same hymnal quality that complex vocal layering creates on “Elizabeth Taylor.”

Plus, both songs share a secret weapon: Swift’s irresistible enunciation of the word “baby.”

“Opalite”

An immediate inductee into Swift’s “Glitter Gel Pen” song Hall of Fame, “Opalite” is for dancing around your kitchen with a glass of orange wine in hand.

Fuel that infectious joy with the most twirl-worthy — and arguably most underrated — track of Swift’s career, “Sweeter Than Fiction.” Swift released this shimmering tune in 2013 for the “One Chance” film soundtrack, and true to its title, it is sweet as a peach.

Honorary mention: If you prefer a tambourine to a synth, try “Lover” B-side “Paper Rings,” perhaps more suitable for kick-stepping than spinning but nonetheless another “Opalite” lookalike.

“Father Figure”

The natural choice here would be “The Man,” another song wherein Swift adopts a masculine persona to prove just what a boss she is.

But I have no more sage advice than to head to George Michael’s original “Father Figure” (1987), which recently got a streaming boost after being featured in the 2024 erotic thriller “Babygirl.” Swift used an interpolation of Michael’s song in her track of the same name — with a gleeful sign-off from the late singer’s estate.

“When we heard the track we had no hesitation in agreeing to this association between two great artists and we know George would have felt the same,” George Michael’s estate wrote Thursday on his official Instagram.

“Eldest Daughter”

It doesn’t feel entirely fair to compare these two — especially given one of them has Phoebe Bridgers and the other one has the line “I’m not a bad b—, and this isn’t savage” — but “Eldest Daughter” and “Nothing New (Taylor’s Version)” share the same grief for a younger self that a woman in her 20s knows best.

If you need a good cry, these two are here for you.

“Ruin the Friendship”

Speaking of debilitating nostalgia, this one might feel a bit out of place in this album’s universe, but it’s a heartrending gem nonetheless.

For a similar remorseful trip into the past, minus the boppy bass line, try “We Were Happy,” a vault track from “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” about young love lost.

“Actually Romantic”

While this alleged Charli XCX diss track may be more scathing than usual for Swift, the singer is no stranger to shade, as evidenced in “Reputation” B-side “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” — a perfect pairing for “Actually Romantic.”

In both songs, Swift is unapologetically petty, offering her foes a metaphorical bouquet of flowers thick with thorns.

These tracks aren’t everyone’s speed, but every misfit has its fans. And in the case of “Actually Romantic,” Nicki Minaj seems to be one of them.

“Wi$h Li$t”

Showcasing this album’s gentler side, “Wi$h Li$t,” which Swift said may be her personal favorite, is a tender tribute to her fiancé Travis Kelce, backed with ethereal synth sounds and soft vocalization from a clearly smitten showgirl.

“I just want you” is also the mission statement of “Glitch,” a short and sweet pop number from 2022’s “Midnights.” Turn this one on, and in no time you’ll find yourself swaying side to side, daydreaming about the love you never expected but can’t imagine letting go.

Honorary mention: For a more upbeat option, go for “Gorgeous,” a bubblegum–pop anthem just as swoonworthy as the aforementioned tracks.

“Wood”

This raunchy disco track had jaws dropping across the globe upon its release, and for good reason.

While not as high on shock factor, Swift’s “I Think He Knows,” a lesser-known track from “Lover,” is equally dancy and down bad. On top of that, it’s famously set at a perfect strutting pace. What more could you ask for?

“CANCELLED!”

This is the second song in Swift’s oeuvre featuring a title with an exclamation point (we’ll get to that later), and it’s not the best one.

But if you like the dark energy Swift has going on here, you can get plenty more of it in her live rock ’n’ roll version of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which she pulled out for the 1989 World Tour and hasn’t played since.

Here’s hoping the country crossover artist has another genre hop in her.

“Honey”

True to its title, “Honey” is a welcome salve for some of this album’s more sour numbers and shares striking sonic similarities with Swift’s best song adorned with an exclamation point, “‘Slut!’”

The “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” vault track, like “Honey,” uses a name-calling motif to paint a rosy portrait of her romantic partner. Neither is lyrically complex, but if “‘Slut!’” is any indication, “Honey” is sure to wind up a true fan favorite.

“The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter)”

Finding a song that sounds like “The Life of a Showgirl” is a tall order, if not an impossible one.

So for a theme-based pairing, try fellow album closer “Clara Bow,” which caps off the original edition of “The Tortured Poets Department” (2024) with a mournful commentary on the constant churn of young female stars.

As Swift and Carpenter say, “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe, and you’re never gonna wanna.”

Honorary mention: For another Swift track about the pitfalls of fame, try “The Lucky One,” off 2012’s “Red.”

“Honey Don’t!” is a smutty desert mystery in which the detective, Honey O’Donohue (Margaret Qualley), never gets around to solving the central crime. She’s too busy seducing women and swatting down randy men. I’d call the opening murder a red herring except it’s really more like a fish left to cook in the blinding Bakersfield sun.

The second film co-written by Ethan Coen and his collaborator and wife Tricia Cooke (the first was 2024’s “Drive-Away Dolls”), it’s less preoccupied by the challenge of who’s responsible for that corpse than by its own overarching question: Why not? Why not let Margaret Qualley prove she has the electricity to power an audience through any plot? Why not pivot from “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” to an announced trilogy of tatty lesbian exploitation pictures? Why not, when a couple has earned the industry clout to shoot the script they want with the cast they want, make exactly the movie they want, even if this pulpy B-picture isn’t very good? Who’s going to tell them, honey don’t?

To be clear, there’s enough to like in “Honey Don’t!” to get you through its 89-minute running time. I’d watch Qualley stride around barking at people for twice as long and her supporting cast, which includes Aubrey Plaza as Honey’s latest lover and Chris Evans as an oily pastor, is delivering at top level, i.e., Coen-worthy. (Newer talent Josh Pafchek pockets his scenes as a moronic Australian brute.) The script has several zingers that are so good you want to applaud right in your seat, particularly an insult Honey slings at her estranged daddy (Kale Browne). Even the extended intro credits have a witty energy that makes you forgive that they’re tap dancing to pad the length.

Still, as with the sillier “Dolls,” which also starred Qualley as a hot-to-trot queer queen, the film is so shaggy that it feels longer than it is. I finished both movies double-checking my watch in astonishment that they really were under an hour and a half.

Qualley’s Honey is a headstrong investigator who is so independent, she refuses to let her secretary (Gabby Beans) make her a cup of coffee. Frankly, she’s not that impressive as a private dick. Honey is only passingly curious why a client died before their first meeting and so predominately distracted by tangental side quests — her troubled teen niece (Talia Ryder), her dalliances with Plaza’s husky lady cop — that the resolution doesn’t involve much brilliant deduction. We know from the first scene that Honey needs to keep a close eye on a mysterious stranger named Cher (Lera Abova). Ultimately, the French femme fatale catches her attention for other reasons.

Across town, the corrupt Reverend Drew (Evans) is swaying his parishioners to sleep with him in the name of godly submission. “I want to see your bosoms jouncing during fellowship,” he commands a member of his flock. The preacher is one of the biggest sinners in Bakersfield, not merely because both he and Honey may as well be using the phone book as a checklist of conquests. A normal thriller would frame their dynamic as cat versus mouse. Here, it’s more like plague and vaccine. Honey is immune to his sales pitches for heterosexuality and holy salvation.

Honey is a brazenly preposterous creation: a 21st century woman who insists on using a Rolodex, something that was headed toward extinction before Qualley was even born. Striding through brush in seamed stockings and high heels — and changing wardrobe multiple times a day just because she can — she’s the only character who never breaks a sweat (except in the bedroom).

Qualley keeps her cool from head to toe: eyebrows stern, line deliveries cucumber-crisp. Like a brassy classic dame, she says exactly what she means. When the local homicide officer, Marty (Charlie Day), makes a pass at her, she bluntly replies, “I like girls.” The guy doesn’t listen — he just keeps pestering her — which makes their dynamic play like some sort of clunky runner about how men are dense.

Marty’s pursuit is that. But Honey’s retort is also how the real-life Cooke shot Coen down the first time her future husband asked her out on a date. More than anything, it’s evidence that “Honey Don’t!” primarily exists as the couple’s own affectionate in-joke. “Tricia’s queer and sweet and I’m straight and stupid,” Coen said last year in an interview with the Associated Press. Both describe their three-decades-plus marriage as “nontraditional.” Both also insist that they’re making these pulp flicks as a unit and don’t care who gets credit for what, claiming that Coen is cited as the director of “Honey Don’t!” simply because he’s the one in the DGA.

Coen is, of course, half of another twosome with his brother Joel that also enjoys defying labels. Their filmography zigzags between thrillers and comedies, lean exercises and awards heavyweights, never making the same movie twice. It’s as though their guiding compass is to stay ahead of audience expectations. The pair has been on a creative break since 2018’s “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and it’s been tempting to use their separate projects as an opportunity to examine who each sibling is as an individual. If you watched Joel Coen’s black-and-white “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in a double feature with “Honey Don’t!” you’d leave convinced that the elder Joel was the stylist and the younger Ethan the wit — that Joel wears a monocle and Ethan a grease-painted John Waters mustache.

But they might just be tricking us again. It’s just as valid to say the brains behind those two movies are William Shakespeare and Tricia Cooke, especially the latter as she seems to have had the stronger hand in shaping the two sexy Qualley capers we’ve seen thus far. (The third already has a title: “Go Beavers.”)

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that “Honey Don’t!” works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit. When a playboy (Christian Antidormi) swaggers up to a bar and orders a shot of cinnamon schnapps, the line clangs like it landed better on the page. A few scenes later, a low-level drug dealer goes home to his Bolivian grandmother (Gloria Sandoval) who is such a caricature — bowler hat, lap full of dried chili peppers — that you suspect the character was designed to get more of a laugh. I did giggle when Honey visited her sister, a worn-out hausfrau named Heidi (Kristen Connolly), and kids kept popping out of the corners of her home one after another like rabbits from a hat.

The majority of the townsfolk that Honey encounters are such incurious mouth-breathers that the humor can feel hostile. The film’s worldview is that most people are, as Coen describes himself, straight and stupid. That’s worked out well enough for him. He’s won four Oscars and, more importantly, the ability to do whatever he darned well pleases.

Amy Bloom’s exquisite “I’ll Be Right Here” is a slim volume spanning close to a century. While it’s tempting to label the novel a family epic, that description would fail to capture how Bloom reconstitutes “family” on the page, or how her chapters ricochet forward and backward from decade to decade or year to year, shifting perspective not only from character to character, but from first- to third-person point of view.

These transitions, while initially dizzying, coalesce into a rhythm that feels fresh and exciting. Together they suggest that memory conflates the past, present and future, until at the end, our lives can be viewed as a richly textured tapestry of experience and recollection, threaded together by the people we’ve loved.

The novel opens with a tableau: Siblings Alma and Anne tend to their longtime friend, who’s dying. They tenderly hold Gazala’s hands in a room that “smells like roses and orange peel.” Honey — once Anne’s sister-in-law and now her wife — massages Gazala’s thin feet with neroli oil. “Anne pulls up the shade. The day is beautiful. Gazala turns her face away from the light, and Alma pulls the shade back down.” Samir “presses his hand over his mouth so that he will not cry out at the sight of his dying sister.” Later in the novel, these five will come to be dubbed “the Greats” by their grandchildren.

The scene is a foreshadow, and signals that the novel will compress time, dwelling on certain details or events, while allotting mere lines to other pivotal moments, or allowing them to occur offstage, in passing. At first this is disorienting, but Bloom’s bold plot choices challenge and enrich.

In 1930 Paris, a young Gazala and her adopted older brother, Samir, await the return of their father from his job at a local patisserie, when they hope to sample “cinnamon montecaos, seeping oil into the twist of paper,” or perhaps a makroud he’s baked himself. In their cold, tiny apartment, Samir lays Gazala “on top of his legs to warm us both, and then, as the light fails, our father comes home.”

The Benamars are Algerians, “descended from superior Muslims and Christians both, and a rabbi,” their father, M., tells them. He delights in tall tales of a Barbary lion that has escaped Northern Africa and now roams the streets of Paris. Years elapse in the course of a few pages, and it’s 1942 in Nazi-occupied France. One night before bed, M. Benamar shreds the silk lining from a pair of worn gabardine pants to craft a belt for his daughter. Then,“he lies down on the big mattress he shares with Samir and turns his face to the wall.” He never awakens.

Now orphans — we don’t know exactly how old they are — the pair must conceal that they are on their own. Samir lines up a job where their father worked, while the owner’s wife finds Gazala a position as companion to a renowned writer, offering her “up to Mme. Colette like a canape.” Colette (yes, that one!) suffers from arthritis, and is mostly bedridden. She hides her Jewish husband upstairs, while entertaining guests below. Gazala observes that her benefactor’s “eyes are slanted under the folds of her brows, kohl-rimmed cat’s eyes in a dead-white face, powder in every fold and crack.”

Soon, the sister and brother’s paths diverge, and Gazala makes her way to New York City.

It’s 1947. Through Colette, Gazala has found work at a shop on Second Avenue, and sleeps in the storeroom above. Enter Anne and Alma Cohen, teenage sisters who take an instant liking to Gazala and her French accent; in short order, they’ve embraced her as a third sibling. Months later, there is a knock on the bakery door, and it’s Samir, returned from abroad, in search of Gazala. For the rest of their lives, the nonblood-related siblings will conceal that they are lovers.

Going forward, the plot zigs and zags, dipping in and out of each character’s life. It’s 2010 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Samir and Gazala have lived together in a rambling old house for decades, maintaining appearances by keeping separate bedrooms. They are old, and Samir “brushes her silver hair away from his lips.” She tells him she doesn’t mind that he smells of the shallots in their garden.

It’s 1968, and Anne, by now a wife, mother and lawyer, has fallen in love with her husband Richard’s sister, Honey. We glimpse their first sexual encounter after years of simmering emotions. Alma — who receives minimal attention from her author — marries a bighearted chicken farmer named Izzy, and later grieves the early loss of her husband, and the absence of children.

As they grow older, the circle consisting of Gazala, Samir, Anne, Alma and Honey will grow to include Lily, Anne’s daughter, and eventually Lily’s daughter, Harry. Gazala and Samir take in Bea, whose parents were killed in a car accident; she becomes the daughter they never had. This bespoke family will support each of its members through all that is to come.

It’s 2015 in Poughkeepsie, and Gazala’s gauzy figures float through her fading consciousness. Beneath the tree outside her window — ”huge and flaming gold” — sits her father, reading the paper. “Madame pours mint tea into the red glasses.” The other Greats are gathered round. One last memory, the most cherished of all: It’s 1984 and Gazala and Samir are in their 50s. He proposes a vacation in Oaxaca. “Let’s go as we are,” he whispers. At their hotel, “they sit beneath the arches, admiring the yellow sun, the blue sky, the green leaves on the trees, all as bright as a children’s drawing.” There, they freely express their love for each other.

As Bloom has demonstrated throughout her stellar literary career, which began in 1993 with the publication of her acclaimed story collection, “Come to Me,” she can train her eye on any person, place or object and render it sublime. Her prose is so finely wrought it shimmers. Again and again she has returned to love as her primary subject, each time finding new depth and dimension, requiring us to put aside our expectations and go where the pages take us. As readers, we’re in the most adept of hands.

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.