Who’s Taylor Swift, anyway? In this article, the author will discuss her two most recent albums, The Tortured Poets Department (2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (2025), through the lens of women’s musical and literary madness. This article argues that The Tortured Poets Department was, in essence, a mad scene akin to that of Lucia or Ophelia, and The Life of a Showgirl is what happens when a heroine returns to sanity—if she can be allowed to return at all.

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, marks a pivotal shift in her branding and marketing from selling intimate relatability to selling spectacle. Once defined by her relatability and diaristic storytelling, Swift now embraces spectacle, excess, and self-mythologizing. For her most recent album, controversy over its marketing and content is polarizing, where some seeing her as unrelatable. On the album, Swift embraces strategies rooted in exclusivity, luxury, and provocative, explicit themes. Swift will not get any more relatable as she ascends to superstardom, and the question remains: Can an artist who rose to power by being relatable and intimate with fans still thrive when that very success makes them increasingly unreachable?

“The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track on Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl, includes an unsettling Shakespearean allusion. Ophelia was the jilted lover of the melancholy prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a woman whose life ends in suicide. Swift’s song says her fiancé, Travis Kelce, saved her from the fate of Ophelia, positioning her previous boyfriends as moody philosophers and the fun-loving jock Kelce as the anti-Hamlet. This song also recuperates Swift as a reader of Shakespeare after the startingly bad account of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story,” the song that started Swift’s career.

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl is littered with musical nostalgia, harkening back to previous musical eras. Songs such as “Opalite” reference these musical genres of the past with specific combinations of musical parameters such as chord progressions, unusual vocal and instrumental timbres, and subtle text cues. In this essay, I will explore several different ways in which music theorists and musicologists have theorized nostalgia, before demonstrating the musically nostalgic effectiveness of the song “Opalite.” I conclude by speculating on this musical nostalgia as a possible broader reflection of current American culture.

When announcing The Life of a Showgirl on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift called her 12th album “exuberant and electric and vibrant.” In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, fans wondered what this would mean for Swift’s notoriously vulnerable Track 5. How would we reconcile an “infectiously joyful” album with the admittedly somber concept of Track 5’s “Eldest Daughter”? One theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, specifically positioned as a Track 5 and following “Father Figure.” It maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the position, but does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. Thie vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain (or hope), which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain, a necessary step for healing and growth.

Taylor Swift has dreamt of two things: fame and success, and a quiet life with someone she loves. She dreams of making it and of escaping it. The problem is that these dreams seem to conflict. Achieving one can feel like giving up on the other. Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, finds both dreams well represented. She wants immortality and a basketball hoop in the driveway. She also has a new insight for reconciling them. Happiness can be made, she tells us. And if you make it with another person, you might be able to live two dreams that once felt impossible to fit together.