Cleveland!
A jaunty, bell-heavy arrangement dresses up another round of Swift litigating her critics -- charming on first listen, thin on the fourth.
By Song Reviews · October 12, 2026
A jaunty, bell-heavy arrangement dresses up another round of Swift litigating her critics -- charming on first listen, thin on the fourth.
“Cleveland!” is the most immediately likable thing on “The Encore” – jaunty piano, sleigh-bell percussion, a title-shout hook that wants to be sung along to in an arena – and it’s also, lyrically, more of the same ground Swift has covered since at least “Mad Woman”: a point-by-point response to coverage of her she didn’t like. The exclamation point in the title is doing real work, selling enthusiasm the words underneath don’t quite back up once the sound dies down and the actual complaints are left standing on their own.
The city itself is mostly a prop. Nothing in the lyric is specifically about Cleveland beyond the title drop, which makes the song’s organizing idea feel bolted on after the fact rather than built from it – a title in search of a city, rather than a city that earned a song. That’s a smaller sin than the writing-about-critics loop, but it compounds the sense that this is a professionally assembled bonus track rather than a song with its own reason to exist. The arrangement’s energy is real and the hook works on contact; the problem is what’s left once the bells stop.
5.5/10 – fun enough as four minutes of noise, hollow as four minutes of content.
Hero image: Taylor Swift performing, 2019, by Glenn Francis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.