In August, a billboard in Times Square directed passers-by to a Spotify playlist with a lengthy title — “And, baby, that’s show business for you ❤️????” — and a well-known curator: Taylor Swift.
The list featured 22 tracks from the singer and songwriter’s career, including “Shake It Off” and “Bad Blood.” Swifties knew the chosen songs had all been made with the help of Max Martin and Johan Schuster (known as Shellback), the Swedish producers and songwriters who’d worked on three of Swift’s hit albums from the 2010s: “Red,” “1989” and “Reputation.” That trio of LPs had yielded some of Swift’s most daring yet instantly accessible tracks, furthering her evolution from country act to pop superstar.
She soon revealed the real news: Her next album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” was a reunion with the duo.
Even listeners who pay little attention to liner-note credits are likely familiar with Martin and Shellback’s handiwork. Martin’s career as a hook wizard took off in the late 1990s, when he helped write and produce such evergreen earworms as Robyn’s “Show Me Love” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” In the years that followed, Martin established a reputation for songs that combined precise instrumentation with expansive, inescapable choruses, like Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 smash “Since U Been Gone.”
“He writes songs. He’s not an artist,” Robyn said in a 2008 interview with Pitchfork. “He doesn’t have the need for expressing his personal thoughts in a song. For him, it’s about the melody. It’s about cracking a code, being as efficient as possible.”
Martin, who is press shy (“I’d rather not do this,” he told Joe Coscarelli during a 2022 New York Times interview), was a onetime rock frontman who was mentored by the Swedish pop mastermind Denniz Pop, who was known for wedding irresistible beats to sweeping choruses. “Not growing up here,” he said, referring to the United States, “you hear music differently. There was a big part of my life where I didn’t even understand what they were saying, so phonetics are super important to me — how things sound.”
Martin began teaming with Shellback in the late 2000s. Together, the two wrote and produced hits for the likes of Britney Spears (“If U Seek Amy”) and Pink (“So What”).
By the time the duo began working with Swift in the 2010s, she was the biggest country-pop artist in the world. But the singer-songwriter was eager to “make the full leap into pop music,” Swift told Rolling Stone in 2021.
“Writing alone had become a comfort zone for me,” Swift told a reporter that year. “I wanted to work with new people who could teach me new things.”
That goal would eventually lead her to Martin and Shellback. The three met in person in early 2012, when Swift was working on her fourth studio album. Their initial session at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles hadn’t even gotten underway when an uninvited guest dropped by their space, claiming to be friends with the singer.
Martin, already nervous about working with Swift, reluctantly granted the visitor entry to the studio — a move he immediately regretted.
“He walks in, and it turns out he didn’t know her,” Martin recalled in 2016. “I was sweating. He started talking about some ex-boyfriend that he wanted her to call. It was really messy.”
After the interloper left, Martin apologized to Swift about the intrusion. She told the producer not to worry, and began venting about her ex. “I start telling them the story of break up, get back together, break up, get back together, just, ugh, the worst,” Swift later recounted to ABC News.
After Swift made a brazen prediction-slash-proclamation about her former boyfriend — “We are never, ever, ever getting back together” — Martin sprang into action.
“Max says, ‘This is what we’re writing. We’re writing this song,’” Swift told ABC, “and I picked up the guitar and just started singing, ‘We are never…’”
The resulting tune, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” sounded like nothing else in Swift’s catalog. The song opens with a recognizably twangy acoustic guitar lick — one that’s immediately warped and reversed. As it builds, “We Are Never” adds synthesizers, a chilly stomping beat and a panoramic, multi-layer chorus.
Released that summer, “We Are Never” quickly landed at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was one of several Martin-Shellback hits that would find Swift experimenting with new sounds and styles.
During another session for “Red,” the singer played part of a work-in-progress version of “I Knew You Were Trouble,” which she’d composed on a piano. “I want to make it sound as chaotic as that emotion felt,” the singer told Martin and Shellback, according to Time. With the duo’s help, the song was transformed into a skittering dance number, one that featured a wobbly dubstep break and culminated in a stabbing, meme-worthy scream.
The trio reunited for several songs on “1989,” the 2014 album that cemented Swift’s move into pop, including its lead single, “Shake It Off,” which opens with a cheer-section drumbeat created by Shellback, and expands to include layers of horns and a schoolyard-chant breakdown (the three would each win multiple Grammy Awards for their work on the LP).
And Martin and Shellback would later play a crucial role on tracks from Swift’s darker 2017 album “Reputation,” like the electro-pop ballad “Delicate,” featuring a tropical-pop beat and a vocoder-assisted vocal.
Years later, Swift would explain the trio’s creative dynamic. “Shellback and I were both in our early 20s when we started working together,” she said on the “New Heights” podcast. “We were the ingénues, and Max was the mentor.”
Swift, Martin and Shellback recorded more than 20 finished tracks in the 2010s, including several that would become staples of her Eras Tour set list: “22,” “Style,” “Don’t Blame Me.” The singer told Rolling Stone that working with Martin “taught me more about writing than anyone I can imagine ever meeting.”
But the producing duo was absent from Swift’s next five studio records, some of which sometimes found her again shifting sounds — this time from chaotic, emotional anthems to sparse folk and slow-burn bedroom pop.
“We were off doing different things,” Swift explained on “New Heights,” noting that she had been “making albums that were a little bit more esoteric, like ‘Folklore.’”
In May 2024, during the last night of a three-show Eras Tour stop in Stockholm, Swift praised Martin and Shellback from the stage as “two genius Swedes.” She then performed a “Max Martin medley” featuring some of their collaborations, including the first song they wrote together: the “Red” outtake “Message in a Bottle,” which wasn’t released until 2021.
At some point during her Sweden trip, according to “New Heights,” Swift met with Martin, and pitched him on getting back together. “The Life of a Showgirl” was written and recorded in the months that followed, even as Swift continued to perform across Europe and North America. “This was the time where it felt like all three of us in the room were carrying the same weight as creators,” she said of the reunion with Martin and Shellback.
Before work on the album began, during her conversation with Martin in Stockholm, Swift laid out her plans for “The Life of a Showgirl.” “I feel like we could just knock it out of the park if we went back in, and we did this all in Sweden, and it was just us three,” she told the producer, adding: “I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons.”
Martin’s response was understandably incredulous: ”Do you understand what kind of pressure that is?”