“Been number one, but I never had two, and I can’t have fun if I can’t have you.” – Taylor Swift, “Elizabeth Taylor”
Taylor Swift, the globally renowned superstar, released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, on October 3, 2025.
The first track and single of the album, “The Fate of Ophelia,” kicks off with an undeniably “danceable” song. The lyrics are poetic and complicated, and the production is interlaced with energetic beats, continuing throughout the album.
This track incorporates Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, as it references the character Ophelia, who drowned herself after the complex men in the play drove her to insanity. Swift uses this Shakespearean play to refer to her pessimistic view about love before meeting her current fiancé, Travis Kelce, who “saved her [Swift’s] heart from the fate of Ophelia.”
Swift incorporates the painting Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais into her album cover to symbolize how being a showgirl can drive someone to madness. The painting depicts Ophelia in water, drowned after Hamlet drove her to suicide. Swift’s cover portrays her submerged in a bathtub after finishing an exhausting concert.
Other tracks about Kelce include “Elizabeth Taylor”, “Opalite”, “Eldest Daughter”, “Wi$h Li$t”, “Wood”, and “Honey”. These songs are the most pop-like, featuring eclectic beats and dynamic productions, which makes it hard to resist swaying and grooving along.
Kelce is referenced as being healing and supportive to Swift, giving her dreams about a future with him. Swift is notorious for writing about her yearning for an undeniable love, but she has always left relationships feeling hopeless. In the eleventh track on the album, “Honey,” Swift writes about doubting adjectives of admiration, because they always felt back-handed, but that Kelce “redefined all of those blues,” and now these nicknames carry genuinity.
Taylor Swift’s latest works often include tracks that discuss the realities of the music industry, addressing its brutality in songs like “Father Figure,” “CANCELLED!,” and “The Life of a Showgirl (feat. Sabrina Carpenter).” She highlights the cruelty of the industry and how it can crush creativity, erode confidence, and destroy lives.
She mainly criticizes how women are treated, whether that be how easily they are ridiculed or how much harder they have to work to maintain their fame. Painfully stricken, she collaborates with Sabrina Carpenter– another fierce woman in the music industry–to show how “pain” is “hidden by the lipstick and lace” and that the inhumanity of it is temporary, but “sequins are forever.”
To most people, this Swift project is unlike anything she has ever released before. The energy throughout the album is unquestionably groovy, still carrying Swift’s distinct pop-oriented writing style. While it is not her best project, it remains a staple in her discography, showcasing her happiness, contentment, and joy during the best time of her life, marking this album as an important milestone in her career.
