How much good music can one artist really produce?

Amid the flood of discourse around Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, one recurring sentiment jumped out: that the album – which many critics have declared a misstep in Swift’s otherwise consistently solid discography – felt hurried, hasty, rushed. “The Life of a Showgirl Is 40 Minutes of Elevator Music Rushed Out to Break a Beatles Record”, read the particularly savage headline of a piece on Collider. In the Guardian music desk’s excellent round table on the album, just about every panellist expressed a wish that Swift would take a break from the constant churn of releasing records, in order to recapture a lost spark.

And it has been quite the churn. Since 2019 Swift has on average released an album a year, and that’s not counting the Taylor’s Version re-records of her older albums. All of this managed alongside a certain billion-dollar-grossing, 20-month stadium tour, too. No wonder the word “burnout” is being thrown around liberally. The Guide will leave it to more knowledgable Swiftheads to decide whether that’s the case, but The Life of a Showgirl backlash does raise an interesting question: how much music is too much? How frequently should a band or artist be releasing albums?

You likely have an answer in your head already, and it’s probably two years or thereabouts. That sounds about right to me too: it gives the band/artist long enough to get the creative juices flowing, not to mention properly tour their last record, but it’s frequent enough to remind everyone they are still a going concern. That two-year cycle has not always been the norm: in the 1960s or 70s a year was the norm, the standard release schedule of everyone from the Beatles to Abba.

Streaming seemed to disrupt the model again: freed, to some degree, from the lengthy cycle of production and distribution around physical releases, artists were able to release as much music as they were able to churn out; the more the better to stay fresh in the algorithm and chase streaming services’ meagre royalty payments. So albums became longer and arrived more frequently: a 2015 Guardian article pondered whether more than one album a year was becoming the norm. If that hasn’t quite come to pass it might have something to do with streaming’s shift, over the past decade, towards older music. Rather than churn out new albums, established artists can rely on their back catalogue to rack up streaming numbers and power their tours (you suspect that had Oasis included any new music in the setlist of their reunion tour, it would have, if anything, served as a disincentive). And of course some artists have recognised that scarcity too has value, building anticipation for long-awaited releases.

For Swift though there are other considerations at play. She operates in the most competitive corner of the music industry, where massive new stars are minted at a rapid clip. With the generation below her, and perhaps even the generation below that too, nipping at her heels, perhaps she believes that sitting a year or two out is not an option. She simply must keep up with the Rodrigos. Moreover, would a period of absence suit her diaristic, overshare-y brand of pop? Some artists operate best by putting it all out there.

Clearly there are limits to that style of writing, as a glance at the lyrics to Wood will confirm. But, for all the brickbats being thrown in the direction of The Life of a Showgirl, its author can point to the staggering first week sales as evidence that her fans haven’t had too much of her just yet. And for anyone hoping that Taylor’s output might slow after this latest success, there’s bad news. As our resident Swift cryptologist Laura Snapes notes in the roundtable piece: “Next year is the 20th anniversary of her debut album, and her next record will be her 13th – her lucky number. There’s no way she won’t mark that.” See you this time next year, then.

This is a biggie: Terry Gilliam, Python turned visionary film-maker celebrates a trio of anniversaries this year (50 years since the release Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 40 years since Brazil and 30 years since 12 Monkeys), and what better way to mark them than with an evening at west London’s rather lovely Cadogan Hall.

Joined by host Andrew Pulver, Terry will be sharing specially selected clips from his career, and reflecting on his landmark works. Plus there might be the odd special guest in attendance too. Some in-person tickets for the event, which on Wednesday 29 October, are still available, with livestream tickets purchasable for those living a little further afield. More information is available here.

Each week we run down the five essential pieces of pop culture we’re watching, reading and listening to

Last week we asked for your worst on-screen accents. Here are some of the worst culprits:

“Has to be Karl Urban as Billy Butcher in The Boys – his accent can swing from a stereotypical ‘cockney geezer’ to Antipodean in the same sentence.” – Linda Isherwood

“The worst onscreen accent I’ve come across was the geordie suspect in an episode of the US crime drama Castle, played by American actor Greg Bryan, whom IMDb tells me actually studied in London, so should know better. A curious mix of maybe Scots, Irish, and Samwise Gamgee, delivered at breakneck speed and set to a soundtrack of fiddle music. To make matters worse, another English character is drafted in to translate during an interrogation scene, but feels the need to address him in the same bewildering accent.” – Tim Grey

“Australian actor Anthony LaPaglia’s execrable turn as Mancunian Daphne Moon’s brother in Frasier. His awkward cocktail of Mockney, Oirish, Deliverance-yokel and back yard Strine must’ve had (actual Briton) Jane Leeves in tears (of pain? hysterics? rage?). Hard to imagine it would have been difficult to find another (actual British) actor for this.” – Danielle Seitz

“The outright winner, by a mile, never to be surpassed, is Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (ridiculed decades later by the Simpsons). As a small child in London, we went on a family outing to see the film. I was struggling to make out what he was saying, so I asked my dad. He