Originally released on October 3rd, 2025, on her album The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” is back in the spotlight with the release of a deluxe version of the album: The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore. Much of it is built on five-bar phrases, a rarity in pop, where four-bar phrases are the norm. The song was produced by Swift, Max Martin, and Shellback and pulls inspiration from the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ophelia dies by drowning in Hamlet, but it remains ambiguous whether her death was accidental or intentional. Swift takes on a reimagining of this fate.
In Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, Swift said, per Variety: “Ophelia drowned because Hamlet just messed with her head so much that she went crazy, and she couldn’t take it anymore, and all these men were just gaslighting her until she drowned. What if the hook is that you saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia? Like. Basically, you are the reason why I didn’t end up like this, tragic, poetic hero girl, who passed away in a fictional world?”
Rolling Stone placed “The Fate of Ophelia” at no. 8 in their “The 100 Best Songs of 2025” list and said:
“‘The Fate of Ophelia’ is Taylor’s biggest Swiftspearean drama since ‘Love Story,’ rewriting Hamlet the way her teenage self rewrote Romeo and Juliet. Just as she did in ‘Love Story,’ she goes back in time to rescue a tragic young heroine and give her a new story — except instead of country twang, she goes for thrillingly exuberant synth-pop. Your English teacher took this Bardcore romance to Number One for seven weeks (and counting) — that’s just her way of keeping it one hundred on the land, the sea, the sky.”
The vocal line echoes the retelling. Starting low, the voice paints a picture of being submerged, before being lifted up and saved in the chorus when Swift starts singing in a higher part of her register. The structure is interesting because it does not adhere to the 4-bar phrase that a lot of pop music adheres to.
As The Mix Review says: “There’s a particular sweetspot that this song hits with its structure, by creating a certain logic to the five-bar phrases by virtue of the alternating pattern of 5+5-bar verse, 4+5-bar prechorus, 5+5-bar chorus, and 4+5-bar chorus coda. It manages to somehow be regular enough to ingrain itself in your memory after a few listens, but nonetheless irregular enough to gently wrong-foot you repeatedly before that – especially when combined with a couple of more traditional ‘one-shot’ section extensions (at 1:24 after the first chorus and at 2:57 after the 5+4-bar middle-section) and a sly arrangement drop midway through the second verse at 1:36.”
With many other of Swift’s tracks trending, I wonder what other songs of hers we can look at to see the other ways she mixes up the genre.
