The promise of Taylor Swift is the same as that of any decent greeting card company—she’s got something for every occasion, including all of girlhood’s greatest hits: the first blush of love, insurmountable heartbreak, and any catty comments or catcalls that might come your way. She’s never claimed to be a highbrow poet; instead, she carefully curates an image of herself as the girl-next-door (despite her undeniable identity as a billionaire pop princess).Footnote ¹ She might make an esoteric reference or compel you to consult a dictionary, but at the end of the day, it’s her ability to tell interesting yet universal stories that has propelled her to the top of her field. While her singing voice has matured and improved in recent years, she’s always relied more heavily on her poetry than her musicianship—just visit her Instagram post announcing her engagement to Travis Kelce, wherein she describes herself as an English teacher who’s about to marry the gym teacher, as proof of her own perception of her art.

Her second-most-recent album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), was a dramatic shift to a moody and heartbroken Taylor, making it a difficult pill for some fans to swallow when it first dropped. The song “imgonnagetyouback” exemplifies the mood of the album with its shifting meaning—either the protagonist, ostensibly Taylor, is going to reunite romantically with a former lover or get revenge on him, and that energy pervades the album. The topics of these songs yo-yo between the poles of “But Daddy I Love Him” and “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of The Tortured Poets Department is its overwhelming amount of literary references, from Dickens’ Miss Havisham to Cassandra and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You’d be hard-pressed to find another pop sensation writing songs that evoke Great Expectations or Greek mythology, let alone using so many references on one album.

Taylor’s fans, the Swifties, can therefore be forgiven for their confusion regarding her new album, The Life of a Showgirl (2025). This pop-forward album has generally less complex lyrics and a significantly different sound stemming from her return to Max Martin and Shellback, the producers of 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017). It is, to be sure, a whiplash-inducing experience to hear these two newest albums back-to-back. The question at the core of this article is: What happens when the girl-next-door goes just a little crazy, and if she can be saved, does her return to sanity seem like madness to those listening?

The key to connecting The Tortured Poets Department to The Life of a Showgirl is right in the opening track and lead single of the latter, “The Fate of Ophelia.” In it, Taylor sings, “Late one night/ You dug me out of my grave and/ Saved my heart from the fate of/ Ophelia.”Footnote ² If we look through this lens, we see that The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor in the throes of Ophelia’s despair, tossing petals into the water and balancing on breaking branches. In this case, our Ophelia is rescued by the surprise of new love—and not only that, but it’s a love that gives instead of takes. With this in mind, how could The Life of a Showgirl not sound completely different? If Ophelia is resurrected, how could she continue to sing the same songs? I would argue that her return to a more pop sound and simplified lyrical style is, for her profession and chosen genre, a return to sanity—or at least a return to normalcy.

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a tragic figure whose madness and drowning (either accidental or suicidal, depending on the production) are effectively at the hands of her father, Hamlet, and King Claudius; whether she perishes from grief for her father’s death or double-grief for both her father’s demise and Hamlet’s exile is up to interpretation as well. The importance of Ophelia to the entire album concept is reflected in the album artwork for The Life of a Showgirl. Taylor has released an astounding number of variants, or special editions of the album with different poetry, vinyl colors, and photos, including cover art. Despite the overwhelming number of photos required for this many variants, all of the photos seem to come from the music video for “The Fate of Ophelia,” highlighting the lead single’s message as the theme of the entire album—you could say that Ophelia’s ghost pervades the album, no matter which way you look at it.

Ophelia is part of a long line of literary and operatic heroines who, when faced with an impossible reality, turn to madness and later pay the ultimate price. These women often speak most freely as part of their madness, breaking social, literary, and musical norms, which requires them to atone for their crimes by facing an untimely death. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is Lucia’s grisly murder of her new husband and subsequent own demise (for no apparent reason) in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, during which she not only loses her mind but also her music. In this mad scene aria, she constantly returns to the musical themes of her duet with her lover, whom she was forbidden to marry. She also refuses to follow a conventional aria structure, despite the orchestra’s best efforts. For further contextualizing reading on classical music and women’s madness, I encourage you to visit musicologist Susan McClary’s fantastic book Feminine Endings, especially Chapter 4, titled “Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen.”

Although she is not an operatic character, Ophelia’s madness interestingly includes her constantly speaking in both poetry and song, which serves to signal her departure from the norms of the play she lives in. One of the key questions of Hamlet is whether Ophelia’s madness is simply brought about by the death of her father or if her destruction is actually because his murder at Hamlet’s hand has cemented her inability to live happily ever after with Hamlet. With Taylor as Ophelia, we can argue that the same question is in play. Is it her romantic heartbreak that plagues her, or is it really the betrayal she experienced at the hands of Scott Borchetta?

The backstory, in case you missed it, is that Scott, who discovered and signed Taylor at the outset of her career and served as a professional father figure for her, sold her master recordings and, therefore, the music rights to Taylor’s enemy, Scooter Braun, without giving Taylor the opportunity to purchase them first. This kicked off the re-records and Taylor’s Versions of her previous albums, and it ended with Taylor using her profits from the Eras Tour to buy back her masters. She’s written numerous songs about this experience and has described Scott as a father figure who is now metaphorically dead to her. Interestingly, Jocelyn R. Neal argues that these re-records only enhanced Taylor’s direct connection with her fans by bypassing standard industry middlemen and encouraging fan loyalty to Taylor through her Taylor’s Versions, proving that Taylor has become bigger than her own father figure and has perhaps inverted that relationship entirely.Footnote ³

Songs like “Father Figure” from The Life of a Showgirl and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” from The Tortured Poets Department seem related to this story, with Taylor talking about making deals with the devil and being made feral by the circus she’s been forced to endure, resulting in one of the Swifties’ favorite lines, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”Footnote ⁴ This line only reinforces the idea of The Tortured Poets Department as essentially Taylor’s mad scene, if you will, where she’s pushing back against the system that built her up. This also begs the question of whether Taylor (or the character she inhabits in these albums) is truly mad, or if she’s reclaiming an accusation of madness and using it as armor—in Taylor’s own metaphorical words, building a castle out of the bricks thrown her way. In The Tortured Poets Department, she rages like a lion in a cage, but in The Life of a Showgirl, she has regained power by buying back the rights to her own music, and she is transformed into a cool and calculating mob boss figure, rather than levitating down streets and howling like a wolf at the moon, forever looking into people’s windows at what could have been.

Musically, this new Taylor era takes us back to a more innocent time in her professional life by using an astounding amount of acoustic guitar on The Life of a Showgirl. To be fair to fans who have trouble squaring the look of the album with its sound, it’s an acoustic environment she has not taken us to since 2012’s Red album, which was her transitional album from country to pop. Is the guitar on The Life of a Showgirl meant to hint that she’s still the same Taylor under all the glitz and glamor, or is she simply nodding to her country music roots? She’s been known to revisit her early acoustic sound in small-scale live shows from Nashville’s Bluebird Café to NPR’s Tiny Desk, which Christa Anne Bentley sees as a legitimizing force keeping our showgirl recognizable as the girl-next-door.Footnote ⁵ The Life of a Showgirl supports this idea of using a more acoustic sound to keep the girl-next-door image alive with “Wi$h Li$t” and its dreams of suburban life—its narrator yearns for kids that look like their father, the promise of privacy, and a driveway with a basketball hoop, not wealth or fame.

This musical effect is especially noticeable on “Eldest Daughter,” where a guitar enters just as Taylor describes laughing on a trampoline when she was a kid, and the strumming continues through the end of the song. “Ruin the Friendship” also sounds more like an early Taylor Swift tune and feels vaguely out of place on this album. Viewed through our lens of the saving of Ophelia, we have to wonder if resuscitating Ophelia has also healed her inner child, creating space for these more nostalgic tunes on the glitziest Taylor album. This idea is supported by the bridge of “Eldest Daughter”: “I thought that I’d never find that/ Beautiful, beautiful life that/ Shimmers that innocent light back/ Like when we were young.”Footnote ⁶ Somehow, our showgirl has found that both the stage and her personal life can be dazzling.

The same fans and critics who scolded Taylor for being too highbrow and literary in The Tortured Poets Department are now admonishing her for returning to a more upbeat, less poetic style, but a madwoman who stays mad forever has to be sacrificed, and Taylor the businesswoman would never let Taylor the poet be led to the guillotine. Literature and opera give us no guidebook for how to deal with a Lucia who gets her “Marry me, Juliet” moment in the end, which begs the question: Can a madwoman ever truly return to being perceived as sane? One thing is clear—our modern Ophelia is no longer drowning, whether we want her to stay underwater or not.