Taylor Swift sounds like she’s having fun all over her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, even as her lyrics paint a picture of a star chasing the spotlight and trapped by it.

The whole picture is right there from the start. In the first few seconds of “The Fate of Ophelia,” track one on Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl , a commanding drum fill sets up a dreamy keyboard line, and then comes the bass: huge and buoyant, like one of those bouncing balls in old cartoons that follow a song’s lyrics and direct you to sing along. Swift takes a cue from that limber bottom and lets her voice dip and bend — she sounds smitten and a bit hungry as she recalls first contact with her now-forever lover, but also self-aware and playful, so sure of herself that she fills this

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