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Dear listeners,
When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her 12th original album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” one title piqued my interest: “The Fate of Ophelia.” I’m something of an Ophelia obsessive — so much so that when I was in college, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on representations of Ophelia in popular culture.
So when I saw that Swift had not only written a song referencing the doomed heroine of “Hamlet,” but that she also seemed to be referencing her — and John Everett Millais’s famous 1852 painting — on the album cover, I got to work on a playlist of other songs that reference Ophelia. And they say majoring in English doesn’t provide you with a practical skill set in the workplace!
One reason Ophelia has been such a reliable muse to songwriters is that her name itself sounds musical, given its vowel-y lilt. The Lumineers take advantage of it on their contribution to this playlist, adding an extra “oh” for some alliteration: “Oh, Ophelia / You’ve been on my mind, girl, since the flood.” But there’s also plenty of drama, romance and tragic poetry in her narrative arc, as an innocent young maiden who goes mad, starts speaking in riddles and distributing flowers to everyone she sees, and eventually ends up drowned — but beautifully so, Shakespeare and all who have portrayed her want to reassure — in a muddy brook. Her subsequent absence haunts the other characters in the play, and accordingly her name is sometimes associated with wistful disappearance. Robbie Robertson taps into that on a stutter-stepping 1975 single he wrote for the Band, in which he asks, “Ophelia, where have you gone?”
Elsewhere on this playlist, Ophelia’s name conjures a kind of aqueous melancholy (on a semi-recent song by PinkPantheress) and a sort of divine femininity (on the title track from a 1998 Natalie Merchant album). And then there’s Swift’s latest single, a surprisingly jubilant celebration of love that seems to be inspired by her recent engagement to a certain Kansas City Chiefs tight end and which makes the listener wonder, among other things, if Ophelia would have had a happier fate if Hamlet had just worked out all his existential angst on the football field.
Get thee to a nunnery,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Taylor Swift: “The Fate of Ophelia”
“You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” Taylor Swift tells a lover — who is she possibly singing about?! — on this already-ubiquitous opening track off her latest blockbuster, “The Life of a Showgirl.” While I find Swift’s fairy-tale version of Ophelia to be devoid of the sort of mystery and ambiguity that makes her such a compelling character, I am powerless to defend myself against that earworm of a chorus.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Natalie Merchant: “Ophelia”
The name Ophelia becomes a kind of portal through time on this title track from Natalie Merchant’s 1998 album. Each verse imagines Ophelia as a different woman in a different time and location — a nun during the Crusades, a suffragist at the turn of the 20th century, “a demi-goddess in prewar Babylon” — and the result is a poignant, poetic meditation on the resilience of the female spirit.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. The Lumineers: “Ophelia”
Initially, the Lumineers intended the title of this 2016 single to be a place holder — because they didn’t want to compete with the Band’s song of the same name. “I felt like it was a parking spot that was already taken,” the lead singer Wesley Schultz told Song Exploder. “But the more I started using other names, it just didn’t work. It wasn’t the right musicality to the word.” In the end, he “had no choice, but go with it.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. The Band: “Ophelia”
Speaking of that Band song: Here you go. Though Ophelia’s name will forever be associated with Shakespeare, Robbie Robertson has insisted that the title of this single from the 1975 alum “Northern Lights — Southern Cross” was actually inspired by the birth name of the country comedian Minnie Pearl: Sarah Ophelia Colley.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Grateful Dead: “Althea”
Several “Hamlet” references appear throughout this Grateful Dead live classic; its studio version appears on the 1980 album “Go to Heaven.” Might Swift have borrowed the phrase “the fate of Ophelia” from the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter? A fact presented without further comment: John Mayer has cited this song as the one that got him into the Dead back in 2011. Hmm!
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. PinkPantheress: “Ophelia”
On this track from her 2023 album “Heaven Knows,” the British pop artist PinkPantheress calls upon Ophelia imagery to dramatize a wrenching romance. “You can see me underwater,” she sings to her would-be Hamlet. “As I descend, I see my life flash again.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Indigo Girls: “Touch Me Fall”
The title of the Indigo Girls’ fifth album, “Swamp Ophelia,” released in 1994, was inspired by a plant that Emily Saliers once saw while walking through a nature preserve. “Swamp Ophelia, I’m torn down,” her bandmate Amy Ray sings on this smoldering slow-burner. “Let your waters let me drown.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Bob Dylan: “Desolation Row”
Ophelia is certainly not the only character in this densely populated Dylan classic (see also Einstein, Nero and Cinderella, among others), but she makes a memorable appearance: “And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow / She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“The Sound of ‘Ophelia’” track list
Track 1: Taylor Swift, “The Fate of Ophelia”
Track 2: Natalie Merchant, “Ophelia”
Track 3: The Lumineers, “Ophelia”
Track 4: The Band, “Ophelia”
Track 5: Grateful Dead, “Althea”
Track 6: PinkPantheress, “Ophelia”
Track 7: Indigo Girls, “Touch Me Fall”
Track 8: Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”
Bonus Tracks
Editor Caryn here! I won’t let you get away without reading a bit more about “The Life of a Showgirl,” like Jon Caramanica’s review, our round-table conversation about the album and Lindsay’s notebook about how Swift gave Ophelia a happy ending.
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
The post The Sound of ‘Ophelia’ appeared first on New York Times.
