The first song on Taylor Swift's album "The Life of a Showgirl" (forthcoming on 3 October 2025) is "The Fate of Ophelia". That sounds like a quotation from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's song "Althea" (from the 1980 album "Go To Heaven"): "You may be the fate of Ophelia." Whether Swift's song echoes Garcia and Hunter's remains to be seen, but I was struck by this further connection: guitarist John Mayer, one of Swift's ex-boyfriends, first met the Dead's Bob Weir when they played "Althea" together on "The Late Late Show" in 2015, a performance that inspired Weir to ask Mayer to join the newly formed Dead and Company that fall. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 August 2025)