How to play The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift
This is the opening track on Taylor Swift’s 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl. The Fate of Ophelia is a good choice for guitar with it’s three-string intro chords, synth-bass verse and big rhythm energy chorus. Suitable for both acoustics and electric, we’ve charted The Fate of Ophelia to be played with a capo at the 3rd fret. Swifty guitar fans will love it!
Chords: G Bm D A Em
Do I need a capo? For this chart, yes. The Fate of Ophelia is actually in the key of B Flat. To avoid some tough bar-chords it’s best you use the capo at the 3rd fret and treat it as if in the key of G. If you would prefer to play it without the capo the chords you need are Bb Dm F C Gm
Pick or Fingers? Pick will work best on steel strings. Finger style will work okay on nylon- strings.
Acoustic or Electric? Definitely steel-strings on the recording but you can adapt it to nylon-strings.
Verse bass line for guitar : the chords are noted in this section but the first half of the verse is mostly synth bass, percussion and vocals. Playing the bass part creates good contrast between the verses and chorus.
How does the timing work? The strumming rhythms in The Fate of Ophelia are standard crotchet and quaver patterns. The bass riff is a syncopated pattern created by consecutive dotted crotchets followed by a plain crotchet. You can count this pattern as “One and two and three and four” (emphasize the bolded syllables).
Relevant pages in Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 : To learn more about the chords, rhythms and techniques needed for The Fate of Ophelia check out pages 5 8, 10, 14 - 15, 20 - 21, 34 and 36 - 37.
Need a bit of help?
Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 is the perfect companion for our song guides. It will teach you how to read the rhythm slash notation used in our charts (and in professional theatre and studio charts) and is specially designed to help beginners speed up their chord changes, master strumming patterns, and many other techniques.
