On Friday, Taylor Swift released “The Life of a Showgirl.” It is the singer’s 12th album, and as her fans are concerned, it is bejeweled with Easter eggs, coded messages and sly nods to very real people in the Swift-o-verse.

But what people? Which lines? Is the song “Wood” about her fiancé, the football player Travis Kelce?

You have questions. We have answers.

Well, we think we have answers. Ms. Swift, as always, plays it a bit coy with her lyrical references and syntactic shade.

Is ‘Actually Romantic’ about Charli XCX?

A lot of people sure think so! Let’s start with a history lesson.

Charli XCX, who opened for Ms. Swift during her Reputation tour in 2018, later told the music site Pitchfork that she was “grateful” for the experience but that it “felt like I was getting up onstage and waving to 5-year-olds.” She clarified on Twitter afterward that she had meant “no shade” and that things were all good between the two artists.

Still, during the lime-green reign of her album “Brat” last year, Charli XCX released the track “Sympathy Is a Knife,” which many listeners believed was written about Ms. Swift.

In the song, Charli XCX sings about feeling insecure around another woman. “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” she sings. “Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”

Charli XCX is married to George Daniel, the drummer for The 1975. Ms. Swift briefly dated Matty Healy, the frontman for The 1975, who some fans speculated was the inspiration for many of the lyrics on “The Tortured Poets Department.” (Charli XCX denied the song was about Ms. Swift in a New York magazine profile in 2024. “People are gonna think what they want to think,” she said.)

“I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Ms. Swift said in that same profile. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”

Fast forward to the present!

On Friday, Ms. Swift released a song called “Actually Romantic,” leading to fan speculation that the track takes a swing at Charli XCX with a titular nod to the British artist’s song “Everything Is Romantic,” another track off “Brat.”

In the opening salvo of “Actually Romantic,” Ms. Swift sings about a person who, under the influence of cocaine, calls her “boring Barbie” behind her back. (Charli XCX released a special edition vinyl of “Brat” filled with white powder.) “High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me,” Ms. Swift sings, a line some fans believe is about Mr. Healy.

In the chorus, Ms. Swift declares that the way she lives rent-free in this hypothetical person’s head is “sweet” and “actually romantic.”

Is she talking about Charli XCX? We will almost certainly never know for sure. In his review of the album for The Times, Jon Caramanica wondered about a potential connection to Charli XCX, while also hinting at another possibility: “‘Actually Romantic’ is perhaps a rejoinder to Charli XCX’s purported swipe at Swift on ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’ (or, if the crunch of the guitar is a tell, perhaps at Swift’s wayward daughter Olivia Rodrigo).”

What about Travis Kelce? Are there songs about him?

Ms. Swift announced her latest album on an episode of “New Heights,” the football and culture podcast hosted by Mr. Kelce and his brother, Jason.

“He pretends he doesn’t know what these words mean, but he knows what these words mean,” Ms. Swift said as she disclosed the 12 track names. “He knows all the words, and he knows what they mean. He may not have read ‘Hamlet,’ but I explained it to him.”

The first track, entitled “The Fate of Ophelia,” is full of references to the Shakespearean character from that particularly tragic play.

“I heard you calling on the megaphone / You want to see me all alone,” Ms. Swift sings. The megaphone could be a simple sports reference, but a deeper layer here could be referencing the couple’s meet-cute. Mr. Kelce has said that before they dated, he tried and failed to meet the singer at a stop on her Eras Tour and later publicly called her out on his podcast.

(Complicating matters is the fact that one of Ms. Swift’s ex-boyfriends, the actor Joe Alwyn, appeared in a recent film adaptation of “Hamlet” earlier this year. He’s also in the 2025 film “Hamnet,” which tells the real-life story of William Shakespeare and his wife losing a child that would ultimately inspire the playwright to pen “Hamlet.”)

“Keep it one hundrеd on the land, the sea, the sky,” Ms. Swift sings later in the song. “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.” Eagle-eyed Swifties connected this lyric to an Instagram post from Mr. Kelce in July in which he captioned several photos of the couple with the same numerical phrase, using a “100” emoji. And, with Ms. Swift’s fondness for numerology, the fact that 100 is the combined total of Mr. Kelce’s jersey number (87) and Ms. Swift’s favorite number (13) could play into things as well.

Some listeners think the song “Opalite” is also about Mr. Kelce. Born in October, his birthstone is an opal. (An opalite is a synthetic opalescent simulation of the real thing.) Mr. Kelce said this track was his favorite during the album announcement earlier this year. Other listeners believe “Wi$h Li$t,” in which Ms. Swift croons about wanting to “have a couple kids” and a house with a basketball hoop, is similarly about her fiancé.

And then there is “Wood,” perhaps the least subtle of the bunch. “New Heights of manhood / I ain’t gotta knock on wood,” Ms. Swift sings, referencing Mr. Kelce’s podcast by name, while working her way through a series of metaphors and references that leave little to the imagination.

“Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs,” Ms. Swift sings in the post-chorus.

What’s Elizabeth Taylor doing on this album?

Ms. Swift previously referenced Ms. Taylor, a 20th century Hollywood icon who shares her name, with a line in “ … Ready For It?” off her album “Reputation.”

“He could be my jailer / Burton to this Taylor,” she sang, referencing the infamous love story between Ms. Taylor and the actor Richard Burton. (An affair! Getting married and divorced twice!) Like Ms. Swift, Ms. Taylor was no stranger to headlines about her love life, which included eight marriages by the time of her death in 2011.

On the latest album, Ms. Taylor gets a track titled, quite literally, “Elizabeth Taylor.” Known for her elaborate jewelry collection, it’s not surprising that Ms. Swift mentions Cartier and gemstones on this track. “All my white diamonds and lovers are forever,” she sings, name-dropping Ms. Taylor’s popular perfume, “White Diamonds.”

What about ‘Father Figure’?

As the title suggests, this song interpolates a bit of George Michael’s hit “Father Figure,” which has been having a renaissance on social media in recent months.

There is debate, however, over who the song is about. Some fans think the lyrics point to Olivia Rodrigo, the singer whose track “Vampire” was interpreted by some as a diss track about Ms. Swift.

Other listeners think “Father Figure” is about Ms. Swift’s saga to reclaim the rights to her music and her very public beefs with music industry bigwigs like Scott Borchetta.

Mr. Borchetta, the chief executive of Big Machine Records, signed Ms. Swift as a teenager and worked with her on her first six albums, which he eventually sold, to Ms. Swift’s very vocal displeasure, to Scooter Braun.

Ms. Swift then began rerecording her old albums, affixing a “Taylor’s Version” label to each and urging fans not to listen to the original versions. It was a bold move that paid off. Earlier this year, Ms. Swift announced she had bought back the rights to those first six albums.