With just hours to go until the Thursday midnight release of Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, antsy Swifties are turning to their father for help: Swift herself.
Track 4 on the album is titled “Father Figure,” and, indeed, it shares more than just winking references to the George Michael track of the same name. The late singer is credited as a co-writer on the song, and Swift in fact interpolates his version in her new work, Billboard confirmed earlier this week. In contrast to a sample—which uses parts of the recording wholesale in the context of the song and requires permission from parties involved in both the songwriting and the recording teams—an interpolation involves a new recording or performance of the underlying composition, and is done in agreement with whoever holds the publishing rights to the song, in this case, Michael’s estate. (Michael died at 53 years old in December 2016.)
George Michael performs on stage during the Faith Tour in Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1988.By Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images.
And the estate didn’t just agree to the deal, they celebrated it. On Thursday, the eve of the album’s release, the estate shared a statement about the song on Instagram, using the orange and teal hues and slanted sans-serif font that have already emerged as visual signatures of Showgirl, thanking Swift for “including George in such a special moment.”
“We were delighted when Taylor Swift and her team approached us earlier this year about incorporating an interpolation of George Michael’s classic song ‘Father Figure’ into a brand new song of the same title to be featured on her forthcoming album,” the statement reads. “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 Entertainment wishes Taylor every success with The Life of a Showgirl and ‘Father Figure.’”
Though Swift’s new track has yet to be officially released, this is just the latest in a whole shelf full of daddy issues as the 1988 chart-topper has enjoyed a recent pop culture resurgence. Thanks to a scene from the 2024 Nicole Kidman-fronted movie Babygirl, in which a shirtless Harris Dickinson gyrates through a hotel room as the song plays, drink in hand, the track has become sonic shorthand for the most absolutely parched of thirst traps. Arid.
Search “Father Figure” on TikTok and prepare for thousands of torsos—210.5K posts using the most popular version of the sound—to crowd an endless scroll, the song’s chorus looping as the videos’ editors lust for their favorites—Reneé Rapp makes plenty of appearances alongside the trending audio, as does Megan Thee Stallion, Pedro “Daddy is a State of Mind” Pascal, and plenty of others. It’s frankly hypnotic.
In March, even Lady Gaga got in on the trend, shimmying and coyly looking over her shoulder to the strains of the national anthem of Thirstlandia as she made her way through the set of Saturday Night Live ahead of appearing on the show.
Though the original song’s lyrics seem to address a person vowing to take care of and protect a romantic partner, in the Faith: Legacy Edition album booklet, Michael discussed the production of the song and the transformative power of adding and subtracting different musical elements.
“It started off with a rhythm track with a snare, and when you play it like that it sounds a bit like Prince. I must have been listening to it without the snare and gone, ‘Oh my God, that totally changes the record!’ It suddenly becomes a gospel record,” he said of early versions of the song.
“A couple of things in my career have been a complete accident, where I stumbled upon the sound. I know when something resonates, and one of my saving graces is that I can hear something when I stumble upon it. I have the ability to stop and say: ‘No. Actually, that’s much better.’ It’s tiny little things like that that make a record, I think.”
To say that Swift has been heavily involved in the production and marketing of her own music is the understatement of the century. By nodding to Michael’s classic No. 1 hit, is she making a statement about power and musicality? Could the song be something of a spiritual sequel to “The Man,” in which she imagined how her actions would be viewed if she wasn’t a woman? Or, perhaps, the allusion is more to do with Babygirl director Halina Reijn’s interpretation of the song, as she explained to Indiewire. For her, the track is about the freedom that comes with an assurance of safety.
“We all, men, women, any human being, any person, has a young child inside of them that needs to be taken care of,” she said. “Whether we are 80 years old or 6 years old, it’s still there. And that is what it taps into for me.”
Whether Swift is positioning herself as the father or the fathered, her entry into the George Michael Extended Universe is sure to be a seismic one. Welcome to your Showgirl Era, Daddy.
Representatives for Swift did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
